The older I get the more I despise Nazis and the political right. I thought I was supposed to become more conservative as I got older, but now I’m a hippie (almost against my choice) and the only thing I can’t stand the kids doing is bigotry in their dumbass social media.
You’re only “supposed to get more conservative as you get older” cause that was the Boomer experience and Boomers can’t imagine anyone else experiencing life differently, so they railed their experiences into everyone’s heads as “fact” when it wasnt.
Boomers became conservative when they started making money
“Conservative” means… to conserve. You (and everyone) gets more conservative as they age because you kinda want to conserve the status quo you, personally are used to.
Here’s the thing: with social progress, what you want to conserve is different from what the generation before the progress wants to preserve.
You are a conservative, as in conserving, of the progress that we have achieved. The “conservatives” you refer to, the “political right”, are not conservative. They are regressives, the opposite of progressives (though they might not like the connotation of that label, and will denounce it). These people would like to regress society to a time when these members of society had more consolidation of power (feudalism, fascism, racist/sexist segregation). Nothing “conservative” about that in terms of a human lifetime. In fact none of those people were around to experience what feudalism, fascism, segregation etc. was actually like. Many of these people may have been sold a lie by the 1% for the exclusive benefit of the 1%.
Conservatives have changed, they are way more extreme now and don’t hide their prejudices.
I’m a conservative, but I’m getting disillusioned by the movement. Barely any of them seem to care about actually limiting the scope of the government, which is one of my biggest political values, and many seem to be either dumb or grifters. Even worse, we’ve got alt-right Christian nationalists calling for a theocratic fascist state. This isn’t how either Christians nor conservatives are supposed to behave, but I don’t think there’s a political home for me anywhere else. I’d be more at home with the centrists if I wasn’t still right wing to some degree.
If your main value is small government, have you looked into classical anarchism?
I support small government, but not no government. I respect anarchism and libertarianism, but I don’t think that type of society would work well enough for my liking.
Anarchism isn’t chaos, or no government. It’s not even strictly for “smaller” government. But flatter government. Anarchist organization and government aren’t oxymorons.
The anarchist movement has a massive messaging issue / needs to decide what it actually is. I think this problem is itself caused by the movement being made of anarchists, who do not as easily fall into a decision-making structure.
They are not anymore confused or vague than economic liberalism. Many like to pretend they’re libertarian. And others differ/clash over social and bigotry issues. Like Republicans and Democrats. Despite being similar economically.
If you’ve ever heard the phrase “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”. That is the kernel behind anarchism. Power should be kept as granular, diluted, and as flat as possible. As an effort to control and reduce corruption. Large complex hierarchies quickly go beyond being simply efficient mechanisms of administration. Into being structures to concentrate and abstract power. The only real debate or disagreement happens around where that divisor is. Antisocial ones who argue that even a neighborhood town Council are to authoritarian and dictatorial. All the way to the ones who are reasonably down for a permissive National Council of some sort.
It’s a nonsense framework anyway. I have conservative leanings in 2A aspects and hard left leanings in such social aspects as gender and sexuality. Everyone just has to find their best fit, and the American duopoly I live under is a godawful system for that. Proportional representation would be better, but only to a degree.
ive got great news for you. compare the US left to the political right in most of the world and youll fit right in with the Democrats.
limiting the scope of the government, which is one of my biggest political values
Why?
Smaller government = bigger corporations. And corporate control = everything goes to shit. We’ve reached maximum shareholder primacy.
And it’s not like we can “vote with our dollar” anymore, with how consolidated everything is. For example, consider the attempts at boycotting Nestle…
Big government usually has more power to do more harm than big government, as the state has a monopoly on violence to a degree.
I wonder if that’s even true. Sure, corporations aren’t black-bagging people in the night (yet), and the VOC genociding entire islands was many many years ago, but who put lead in gasoline and lied about its safety? Who covered up decades of climate change research? Why are we inhaling a credit card of microplastics every week? How are property management companies colluding on rents to create price floors and evict families?
Or here’s something forward-looking:
If Albertsons and Kroger are allowed to merge, do you think that’d be a good thing for American food security? If the government was not powerful enough to stop the merger, what should the citizenry do?
Get in loser, we’re fighting Nazis again
Germany my friends, the world beat your asses twice already, are you sure you want to go for round three?
America’s got its own far-right problem that it’s refusing to address in any meaningful way, not to mention what’s happening in the UK and France.
I’m not so sure it would be as easy as it was previously.
I mean the UK, America, and France had their own fascist problems in the 30s, see Oswald Mosley and the 1939 nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, and Vichy France’s government didn’t fall out of a coconut tree (nor were nearly enough of them strung up after the war).
Sadly we won’t be able to rely on the USSR this time.
The kids even had Nazi summer camps across the US. And honestly, if it wasn’t for Pearl Harbor we probably would have sat the war out.
If it wasn’t for FDR we would have sided with the Nazis and never embargoed Japan for the invasion of China. Even then FDR supported the existence of the American apartheid policies.
And in Canada with Alberta looking to replace the hospital management with a corrupt Catholic theoligical institution that bans abortion, contraceptives, assisted end of life, care for LGBTQ community etc. https://www.thetyee.ca/Opinion/2024/08/30/Smith-Radical-Plan-Privatize-Hospitals/
All good things come in threes. /s
Oof
Lol
Disclaimer: Having most of the votes does not automatically mean being part of the government. You need 50% of the seats and they are alone and won’t get them.
I figured that’s why the headline wasn’t “The AfD Takes Over Germany!”
I mean it’s a state election. Even if they gained 100% control of that state’s government they wouldn’t have taken over Germany.
True, but AfD support is still growing in Germany.
