US Politics |OT|

[EricHiggin]

sc94597 said:

Whether or not Donald Trump is a Republican is an observable fact, unless you mean Republican in the loose sense that he votes for Republicans overwhelmingly. He is registered and holds status as a high level Republican. This was not true in the 90's and early 00's.

As for the rest, we can make observations of what he says and does, from a variety of sources. The media isn't a unified behemoth. If different independent sources observe a thing, then that thing is more likely to be true. 

The idea that society is a "product" is a weird take, but no you can't really "go backwards." Everything inherits from what came before it. I don't necessarily believe in progressive historiology (that things always get better over time), but I do believe that you can't suddenly reinvent a modern society to become a medieval one. Likewise with a post-modern one with a modern one. The error in palingenetic accounting is that it suggests things were overall better in some golden age, and it is only a matter of returning to it by eliminating the "fifth column" that made society fall, but that golden age never really existed as it is accounted to have and there is no "fifth column."  

In the U.S both the mainstream right and left are further polarized than they were in say the New Deal, post-war era. Eisenhower, for example, wouldn't have said something like "the Civil Rights Act was a mistake" and Johnson likely wouldn't be pro-LGBT. The center has overall shifted rightward on economics and leftward on cultural issues though. 

National Socialism (outside of suppressed forms of it like Strasserism) was a right-wing ideology. Right-wing ideologies describe those ideologies which are oriented toward the preservation and naturalization of social hierarchies. Left-wing ideologies are those which are oriented toward deconstructing social hierarchies and which argue they are largely constructed by society. Nazis believed strongly not just in racial and ethnic hierarchies, but also in class hierarchies (people of different classes should know their place and collaborate.) The exception of course we're the strasserites who believed class hierarchies (within the Germanic "race") should be eliminated/reduced/abolished. But at best you can say their ideology  was syncretic, as they still believed in racial and ethnic hierarchies.

This isn't to say there weren't totalitarian leftist movements, but it is to say that in so much as they were left wing they weren't Nazi movements. 

Plenty didn't and still don't see DJT as Republican or on the right, they just see him as part of that affiliation since that's what he ran under. Are they wrong? Did DJT run as a Republican because that's what he is, or are there other more important reasons? Can we trust what he said or did back then? Can we trust what he says or does now? If everyone was jumping off a bridge, does that most likely mean it's the right thing to do? Do entities ever work together to accomplish a goal? Are those goals always for the better? Better for everyone?

I didn't mean a product when I said 'product', and didn't mean sale when I said 'selling'. That should've been obvious as you realize it doesn't make any sense. Much like you should have realized what my questions are all about and what your answers have been proving about them. Suggesting that things were never better in the past makes no sense. Things don't only ever get better, and at times, things are so bad, they need to be reverted before progress can actually be made, like with poorly updated broken products, for example. It has nothing to do with society being 'perfect' at some point in the past, since that's not a thing.

Relativity, not ideology. The center politically has shifted towards the right because pretty much everything has drifted and expanded so far left.

Well said CK, well said.