There are many different ways of looking at politics, and I have a friend who just looks at oppression, taking away freedom, right and left. You can be a left wing libertarian, allegedly, like Noam Chomsky.
Somehow I'm stuck in right as conservative, left as progressive. One side wants to keep government to a minimum. Government has exploded, my grandparents were conservatives, they voted for Reagan. They grew up during the depression, went to war. They were the great generation. I can see how they would be against the explosion of the government.
Young people are against all the rules these days, the rules set up to protect other people, they're hemmed in by all these rules. Trump represents breaking free from all the strictures.
Trump is picking the exact opposite of the kind of people who should be running things, he's set on destruction and destroying.
His administration picks are just a mockery of government, and that's a kind of destruction of government. That is why conservatives got behind what American liberals consider a gross travesty. I'm not sure if they're fully comfortable with everything he's doing. And maybe they can see some of the horror he's going to be unleashing, that the left will see more clearly and in detail.
The political bias is about ignoring as much as it is about seeing. Conservatives have an idea about their personality motivation. Liberals have an idea about how their personality feels about trying to help others through federal government. I'm not so balanced I can see the unintended consequences and downside to the left. My libertarian friend claims he can see the problems both sides make.
From my leftist perspective, I see conservatives want to just wreck up government to show that it's not good. They have to distract with culture wars because the people united will do things to ameliorate the excesses of capitalism. Conservatives hate communism, collectivism, spreading money out, the believe in winners and losers, and the suffering of other is brought on not by systems but by personal failures. Maybe it's a character to highlight points. I've noticed in life that people just describe things how it fits for them, and make it work.
It's like spirituality, I can make every contradiction work out in Buddhism, because I'm fully invested in this spiritual tradition and I'm not superficial about it. That's why I dislike telling Christians they're not following the teachings by being a conservative Christian. Jesus seems to say take care of the poor, spread the wealth around, he seems to be a socialist, but some Christians want to do that personally, not at the federal level. I think Jesus would want to do it everywhere, but he's not my guy, my guy is the Buddha. The Buddha was trying to get the kings to be nicer and not war so much, he seemed to be pragmatic with who the kings really were in front of him, and reserved his real advice for the people who wanted to move towards enlightenment. But that is contentious, there is a Theravada book that suggests the Buddha wasn't interested at all in politics. There are conservative Buddhists, Sangharakshita voted for Thatcher, I could name some others.
I really feel that my perspective is true, and that there are other perspectives and democracy is a dance between conservative and progressive instincts.
Maddow called trump a tin can autocrat, and I think that's accurate, most people don't think he's going to go dictator, he's has hyperbolic rhetoric for a bargaining position. He's the head of a family and his father was an asshole too, his grandfather was an asshole too. He doesn't hug and kiss his daughter on stage if he doesn't feel it. He's incredibly undisciplined, and just wants to do what he wants to do, and what he can get away with. I'm grateful that he doesn't have the military. I'm not feeling the commitment to democracy from Trump, but I also feel like he could have done more for the insurrection, but he wanted to be handed the dictatorship, like Caesar.
Hate him or love him, he tapped into what it took to win, honestly it's a slim margin, and there are questions about purged voter rolls, and bomb threats to polling places from Russia, no election is pure, that's why I think it should be just total votes, I don't like the electoral college, created to appease slave owners.
Some quotes from Blue Sky which got over a million people yesterday.
"Maybe it’s just me, but it’s pretty terrifying that corrupt uninformed non-elected tech billionaire Elon Musk violated the Logan Act by having a meeting with Iran’s ambassador to discuss tensions between the US and Iran and absolutely no one will do anything about it." Ricky Divila
Zach Williams: And reactionary anti-institutionalism leads to Elon Musk negotiating with Iran. Swell.
I get the feeling that people who voted for Trump are going to tune out to his methods or they will see it as disrupting the status quo, which in reality is just ignoring all the rules and customs that have grown up over the centuries.
My friend thinks institutions are robust enough to save us. I'm not so sure. I hardly think greater access by the oligarchs is avoiding the status quo. He's just called in a hatchet man who fires people and loses value. Conservatives might like that, not see a problem with it. If it leads to lower taxes, great. Ignore the negative consequences.
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