DColeKC wrote: ↑Fri Jul 01, 2022 12:07 pm
And you honestly don't think the left subjugates entire populations of people? They literally want more government control vs a republican platform that while very flawed, has long been for smaller government and more states rights. Democrats often want to simply toss out the constitution and pretend we don't even have any basic founding principals.
I've got beef with both sides but the bottom line is Democrats have done just as much, if not more harm to this country than Republicans.
This is mostly just meaningless gobbledygook. Neither party's goals are about "more" or "less" government control. Government is just a tool that people use to shape the society that they live in. It isn't the only way to create a society, but it's the one we're using. All of the (usually right-wing) rants about what specific policy areas are or are not properly within the scope of "the role of government" miss this point. So the tension between "big government" Democrats and "small government" Republicans is not actually about the size of the government at all, it's about how the government is used (or not) to create the society each side wants. The GOP establishment has long claimed that small government is necessary for "freedom" to flourish, but whose freedom? Our society is organized mainly along two axes: the political axis and the economic axis. Economically, your individual power in society directly correlates with the amount of economic resources you control. The more money and property you have, the more authority you have to dominate (or escape the domination of) others. Politically, your individual power is supposed to correlate with your vote, and everyone is allocated only one of those so that we are (on paper) equal. Democrats often (not always, it depends on what their specific interests are in the matter in question) seek to strengthen the political axis ("more government"), thereby enhancing democratic control of society. Republicans have historically often (again, not always) sought to weaken the political axis ("small government"/"states rights"), which has the effect of enhancing the economic axis and making people with economic power more powerful overall. But Republicans have not hesitated to toss out "states rights" or "small government" when it has suited them (most recently, Michael Steele just announced that Republicans would pursue a federal abortion ban, yanking this issue back away from the states again and meddling directly in the medical affairs of individuals, just as one particularly salient case; the Moore case that I keep harping on also represents a usurpation by the federal SCOTUS of the state government's role in running its own elections, though it will not be framed that way). Going forward, Trumpier Republicans also don't seem to be nearly as concerned with "small government" as their establishment predecessors, so even the vacuous "more government" vs "less government" imaginary dichotomy is probably going to break down (Dems might even become the "states rights" party once they're locked out of federal power).
I don't think "the left" is at all synonymous with "Democrats," so you should probably decouple those terms in your mind. Leftist politics are, definitionally, concerned with egalitarianism, so the actual left doesn't subjugate anybody (though, sure, lots of political movements have subjugated people under cover of claims to leftist ideals -- but just as nobody believes the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" is actually democratic or a republic, what people
do is more significant than what they call themselves). The US government, regardless of which party has controlled it (including Democrats), has done a lot of harm to a lot of people both within and without the country. So if your argument is "the Democrats have subjugated people," then sure, they have. But I think you would be hard pressed to name a population the Democrats (referring more generally to the political movement the modern Democrats represent, not "the people who at any given moment in history belonged to the Democratic Party") have sought to subjugate that the Republicans (again, referring to the political movement modern Republicans represent) didn't also want to subjugate (reducing the power of the wealthy is not "subjugation"). There has long been a bipartisan consensus in this country about subjugating lots of people. But again, "Democrats" are not "the left."
Nobody wants to "toss out" the constitution (well, I do, but within the mainstream political parties, nobody does, to our general misfortune). The right likes to claim that the constitution objectively says some specific thing, but it doesn't. It is the shortest national constitution in the world -- its provisions are generally somewhat vague and open-ended, and various parts of it arguably contradict each other (most significantly, clauses that support a strong federal government -- the Commerce Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, the Supremacy Clause, etc -- vs. the Tenth Amendment). It is a document designed to allow people with very different views to project onto it what they want it to be, and that's how they were able to adopt it in the first place. "Originalism" is an intellectually bankrupt philosophy. The idea that "the framers" were some kind of hive mind who were of one opinion about the government they would design is ludicrous. The constitution we ended up with was the product of grueling negotiations among people representing conflicting interests. It's very easy to use Originalism to defend right wing ideology by absurdly projecting aspects of the modern world back into the past to draw conclusions about what "the framers" thought about things they clearly couldn't have even contemplated, which is why it is so popular with Republicans now. But Originalism isn't the only way to read the constitution, and Democrats are not "tossing out" the constitution when they toss out Originalism, they're just reading it differently, which the text itself is pretty amenable to. And in their defense, to the extent that the country had "basic founding principles," one of them -- right up there alongside "indigenous people should be exterminated" and "Africans and their descendents are property, not people" -- must have been the necessity of a strong federal government. After all, that's the reason that we're talking about the constituion right now instead of the Articles of Confederation.