Yeah. What's weird to me now is how many right-wingers (or relatively right-wing... maybe) I've seen and talked to lately who absolutely distrust megacorps, want monopolies broken up, want corporate welfare ended, want the wars ended, and want religion out of politics. I feel like we may be living through another party flip. That, or (maybe more likely) both parties are about to crash and burn.
The far left and the far right have often had similar desired results, but their ideologies and underlying methods are usually very different, depending on rugged individualism or state-run laws and programs to get there.
It says something about us that we believe unfettered capitalism and heavily regulated capitalism can somehow make it to the same ends.
Well, the people I've been reading and talking to aren't far right. I'm not hanging out at Infowars :P. (I've also had it with the current loudest parts of the "left", because between the "punch-anyone-we-call-a-Nazi" crowd and the "Hillary is a god-empress" crowd, I can't deal.)
The right-wingish people I've been talking with often used to call themselves conservative but don't any more because of how what they used to think of as their party was co-opted by an unholy alliance of corporations and Evangelicals. They might have different ideas than the left about how to deal with sexism and racism, but they are not themselves sexist or racist. They give a damn about poverty. They are truly pro-small business and don't like the power corporations have in our society. They just tend to blame government more squarely for this power than people more to the left do, and therefore think giving government more power to regulate will only give them more power to crush small businesses and consumers and help corporations.
And they have a point. The number of regulations written explicitly to be onerous to small businesses, but that corporations can deal with without issue, is kind of staggering. This is particularly apparent in the food industry, with such things as calorie counts on menus and massive regulation of raw milk. Or the small farmers I've talked to down here who had to give up farming because their property taxes were jacked sky-high.
What's the solution? Hell if I know. But this kind of thing is what's discussed constantly in what's called the center, but is really the sidelines. Among people who see both parties as nothing but corporate tools. A lot of leftists are starting to reach out to people who call themselves "small-c conservative," or libertarian but not Randian, and they're happy to discuss things with us. There are a lot of disagreements, but civil ones. Because the underlying major issues are the same: We're sick of corporate power and war, and we care about personal freedom.
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It says something about us that we believe unfettered capitalism and heavily regulated capitalism can somehow make it to the same ends.
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The right-wingish people I've been talking with often used to call themselves conservative but don't any more because of how what they used to think of as their party was co-opted by an unholy alliance of corporations and Evangelicals. They might have different ideas than the left about how to deal with sexism and racism, but they are not themselves sexist or racist. They give a damn about poverty. They are truly pro-small business and don't like the power corporations have in our society. They just tend to blame government more squarely for this power than people more to the left do, and therefore think giving government more power to regulate will only give them more power to crush small businesses and consumers and help corporations.
And they have a point. The number of regulations written explicitly to be onerous to small businesses, but that corporations can deal with without issue, is kind of staggering. This is particularly apparent in the food industry, with such things as calorie counts on menus and massive regulation of raw milk. Or the small farmers I've talked to down here who had to give up farming because their property taxes were jacked sky-high.
What's the solution? Hell if I know. But this kind of thing is what's discussed constantly in what's called the center, but is really the sidelines. Among people who see both parties as nothing but corporate tools. A lot of leftists are starting to reach out to people who call themselves "small-c conservative," or libertarian but not Randian, and they're happy to discuss things with us. There are a lot of disagreements, but civil ones. Because the underlying major issues are the same: We're sick of corporate power and war, and we care about personal freedom.