Hey! I’m way left of Democrats, so I really don’t understand Republican talking points… Could you give an example of ones you would say are valid? It would do me some good to know they aren’t just out to cause suffering.
The only ones I can think of off the top of my head are:
that borders do actually matter to the sovereignty of a country and that control over who and what crosses that border is a necessity,
countries need some kind of balanced budget to prevent hyperinflation and inevitable austerity,
the constitution should be protected and enforced equally for all amendments unless and until they are further amended or repealed, and
the Federal government should exist to provide for the defense of the country, protection of interstate and international commerce, and protection of the common good.
I happen to personally think that the best implementation for these points would be:
an overhaul of immigration policy is needed to increase legal immigration and decrease the time spent in that process to months or at least under 1-2 years with a pathway that allows current illegal immigrants to get in the back of that (actually useful and reasonably short) line,
countries cannot balance a budget like a household balances a checkbook because it doesn’t work like that and anyone who says otherwise is either economic-illiterate or a con artist,
First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth amendments especially all need to be equally enforced and double especially on the police and the State (looking at you Civil Asset Forfiture, and your partner in crime Cash Bail), and
all of these functions would be best served with Universal Healthcare, Universal Education to an undergrad (Associates) level, Universal Basic Income replacing the existing welfare framework with no hoops or requirements or means testing, some form of Georgist land tax integration to help ensure the wealthy at least start to pay their fair share, and a heavy dose of monopoly busting and anti-trust enforcement to prevent billionaires from becoming a thing in the first place and prevent regulatory capture by capital at the very least.
Also religion has no business in government and fuck off with race/orientation/religious/etc discrimination. It is all class warfare from the elite and Reagan deregulation caused the death of the economy and the middle class.
This is why I consider myself a centrist, because the Right would have a conniption fit at most of those beliefs. The Left would have the same conniption fit that I also think that current border policies, the existence of sanctuary cities/states providing incentive, and worst of all the companies and people hiring and exploiting illegal labor due to insufficient availability, use, and enforcement of tools like e-verify (AKA the current status quo) is a shit show and the “left” shows too much weakness on this topic, I think the “open borders/a person cannot be illegal” crowd are dangerously misguided utopiasts, I support the personal right to keep and bear arms interpretation of 2A, support (not limited but also limited) Sates rights as useful ways to experiment with policy along with the original intention of the Senate and Electoral College, and think a decent amount of Left/Democrat ideology is unrealistic, counterproductive, or worse.
Really, it’s not so much the current taking points that make sense - although there are underlying truths and values that are being denied, that show up in current taking points.
And honestly, although things will be okay, I don’t have anything you’ll like to hear about the current situation.
In general, the biggest issue with the Republican Party is that it depends on good leadership. Like a monarchy, that’s great when you have a reasonable leader, and really shitty when you don’t.
Currently, the Republican corpus is having to come to terms with the failure of it’s leadership, and the loss of it’s underlying moral fortitude. A very large part of this is because the party has been effectively hacked, and has become a Straussian cult. The Democratic party is not immune to the spread of the underlying ideology, nor of the cult itself, but is impacted in less obvious (but no less problematic) ways.
While Strauss himself may have had some reasonable ideals, the consequences of the intersection of his methodology of teaching and his ideologies, by nature, create a kind of “you get it or you don’t” state of affairs, where much is implicit. He intentionally did this, because he wanted people to be capable of reading between the lines, and to be able to stand for true and valuable things that you can’t fully justify or comprehend analytically. Although some things must be implicit and be stood for even if they cannot be articulated, the consequences of intentionally creating a scenario where much is left to subtext in an environment (politics) where power is a main focus creates a problematic circumstance that is malignant and difficult to pin down in real-world conflict.
Not only is this complex of interactions difficult to pin down in real-world interactions, it is difficult to pin down internally, once you’ve genuinely been impacted by it. And so it can spread. And it has spread, in the Republican leadership. And they spread the discordant mixture of implicit behaviors to their constituents.
All of this is to say:
Republicans depend on good leadership, and their leadership is fucked right now. But that doesn’t mean the corpus of Republicans in general is actually fucky. They are being fucked too, and their fuckyness will right itself when a mentality comes about that is:
A: communicable implicitly and explicitly
B: capable if seeing through the morass of the Straussian cult.
Meanwhile, many of the things that the Republican corpus actually cares about manifest in problematic ways, because their needs are no longer met by their leadership.
So if you’re looking to feel good about Republicans, don’t look at their leadership, or the maga asshats. Look at the very large body of people who has lost representation, and never has been good at having a public voice. Look at the fundamental Republican philosophies, which are, by and large, good. When they act out, tie it back to those philosophies and beliefs, and try to understand how it led to this, now.
One of the primary things the Republican party doesn’t do is look away from the fundamental necessity for power. This isn’t (generally) out of a desire for power, though that may be what manifests. Instead, it’s from a willingness to deal honestly in realities other people find distasteful. This is why they consider the Democratic corpus “weak” at times. But currently, that’s kinda fucking them, because they also can’t see an answer to the Straussian cult situation. They know, on some level, that something fundamentally important is being left out, but can’t find a way to get back to the moral foundation they had - the power has them. Their leadership knows how to point that unease at the wrong things.
The good thing is - getting to know your local Republican, and sorting through the emotions it brings up in you can help, because the fundamental issue is deeply psychological.
The bad thing is, nobody wants to do that, because it’s lots easier to just say “those guys suck” and “we’ll best them at the polls”. But unless the underlying issue is addressed, you’ll lose again. And then time will pass, and you’ll win, maybe, and then lose again. And each time, it will be shocking, and each time, a worse leader, and each time, the mentality and it’s supporting antithetical mentalities spread.
But, once people realize they can’t escape a thing, and it needs to be faced, they face it.
You could say this whole thing is a battle between (or a lack of capacity for mutual understanding by) the explicit and the implicit motivators.
The MAGA movement is a christo-fascist death cult. Conservative think tanks which may have been influenced by Strauss as much as Schmitt have influenced the MAGA movement with Project 2025 at the very least. However, it would be giving the MAGA movement and Strauss to much credit to say that the MAGA cult is exclusively a Straussian cult. Fascists movements share general attributes with each other, but cannot be accurately described as exclusively the embodiment of one philosopher’s views.
Regardless, a no would have been sufficient to the asked question.
The good thing is - getting to know your local Republican, and sorting through the emotions it brings up in you can help, because the fundamental issue is deeply psychological.
The bad thing is, nobody wants to do that, because it’s lots easier to just say “those guys suck” and “we’ll best them at the polls”.
But, once people realize they can’t escape a thing, and it needs to be faced, they face it.
Climate change is the existential threat to life as we know it on the planet Earth. Republicans are the ones who need to learn to face this fact. No matter how much political victory they achieve the problem will remain unless we take action to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.
In the absence of Republicans accepting the body of research that has been done on climate science, it is up to the rest of us to out vote them. This is true of most positions that Republicans advocate for. They aren’t based on evidence or on a desire to benefit the majority of the population. Republican positions are designed to benefit themselves and the owner class at the expense of everyone else.
Garnering the political will to out vote an over-represented minority every two years is neither easy nor based on emotion. It is a strategic decision based on evidence to prevent the destruction of the planet and our way of life. It is useful to out vote Republicans because preventing our destruction is a necessary step to improving our society.
As part of that, it is important to dismantle flawed arguments in favor of the Republicans. Such as a misattribution to psychological factors. Which at best is an unfounded attempt to vaguely refer to a reader’s insecurities.
Republicans and many other people, regardless of their political leanings, have a tendency to moral reasoning. They attempt to reach a goal by following steps that are justified by subjective morality. Moral positions may inherently feel correct, but aren’t inherently supported by any measurable metric. Despite this philosophers assert that morality should be used to dictate the actions of people. While this position may feel intuitively correct, it has a consistent issue.
People can state goals and then can designate a subjective moral position to those goals. However choosing actions to achieve those goals based on reasoning derived from the same subjective moral position is not guaranteed to achieve that stated goal. A way to resolve this is to evaluate actions based on their utility. Does a given action advance the stated goal? If so then it is a course of action worth considering. Rather than asking do the ends justify the means, we should ask do the means accomplish the ends. Thinking about actions in terms of their utility enable us to act in our self-interest. Moral reasoning denies us this as moral ideals demand an inhuman level of dedication to achieve. We are best able to pursue our ideals when we can do so in a way that is useful to that pursuit.
Fascism has taken hold of the Republican Party. Attempting to meet fascists in the middle does nothing to stop climate change. The fascists believe climate change does not exist and that no action is required. No matter how close to the fascists’ position on climate change a person gets, that person will be unable to leverage the support of fascists. So while comprising may be a moral position that feels good and has been useful in certain cases such as infrastructure funding, using it is as a strategy is insufficient to accomplish the stated goal of preventing climate change. The position between systemic change and doing nothing will not make use of the limited time window we have to advert key tipping points in the planet’s ecosystem.
Climate change seemed the most appropriate example given the statement in your argument of needing to face something that is inescapable. As Republicans are unwilling to act based on evidence on the majority of topics their support cannot be leveraged in a meaningful way for any of those topics. So in general, if a person wants to forward their political goals it is not useful to comprise on issues with a party whose only interest is ruling and not leading.
But unless the underlying issue is addressed, you’ll lose again. And then time will pass, and you’ll win, maybe, and then lose again.
Also, once the fascists take power we will lose our democracy. As our democracy is our most powerful tool to enact systemic change and wealth redistribution we have a vested interest in protecting our democracy from fascist takeovers. edit: typo
Hey! I’m way left of Democrats, so I really don’t understand Republican talking points… Could you give an example of ones you would say are valid? It would do me some good to know they aren’t just out to cause suffering.
The only ones I can think of off the top of my head are:
that borders do actually matter to the sovereignty of a country and that control over who and what crosses that border is a necessity,
countries need some kind of balanced budget to prevent hyperinflation and inevitable austerity,
the constitution should be protected and enforced equally for all amendments unless and until they are further amended or repealed, and
the Federal government should exist to provide for the defense of the country, protection of interstate and international commerce, and protection of the common good.
I happen to personally think that the best implementation for these points would be:
an overhaul of immigration policy is needed to increase legal immigration and decrease the time spent in that process to months or at least under 1-2 years with a pathway that allows current illegal immigrants to get in the back of that (actually useful and reasonably short) line,
countries cannot balance a budget like a household balances a checkbook because it doesn’t work like that and anyone who says otherwise is either economic-illiterate or a con artist,
First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth amendments especially all need to be equally enforced and double especially on the police and the State (looking at you Civil Asset Forfiture, and your partner in crime Cash Bail), and
all of these functions would be best served with Universal Healthcare, Universal Education to an undergrad (Associates) level, Universal Basic Income replacing the existing welfare framework with no hoops or requirements or means testing, some form of Georgist land tax integration to help ensure the wealthy at least start to pay their fair share, and a heavy dose of monopoly busting and anti-trust enforcement to prevent billionaires from becoming a thing in the first place and prevent regulatory capture by capital at the very least.
Also religion has no business in government and fuck off with race/orientation/religious/etc discrimination. It is all class warfare from the elite and Reagan deregulation caused the death of the economy and the middle class.
This is why I consider myself a centrist, because the Right would have a conniption fit at most of those beliefs. The Left would have the same conniption fit that I also think that current border policies, the existence of sanctuary cities/states providing incentive, and worst of all the companies and people hiring and exploiting illegal labor due to insufficient availability, use, and enforcement of tools like e-verify (AKA the current status quo) is a shit show and the “left” shows too much weakness on this topic, I think the “open borders/a person cannot be illegal” crowd are dangerously misguided utopiasts, I support the personal right to keep and bear arms interpretation of 2A, support (not limited but also limited) Sates rights as useful ways to experiment with policy along with the original intention of the Senate and Electoral College, and think a decent amount of Left/Democrat ideology is unrealistic, counterproductive, or worse.
Huh, you really are an honest to goodness centrist, though a left leaning one, from what you’ve said.
Really, it’s not so much the current taking points that make sense - although there are underlying truths and values that are being denied, that show up in current taking points.
And honestly, although things will be okay, I don’t have anything you’ll like to hear about the current situation.
In general, the biggest issue with the Republican Party is that it depends on good leadership. Like a monarchy, that’s great when you have a reasonable leader, and really shitty when you don’t.
Currently, the Republican corpus is having to come to terms with the failure of it’s leadership, and the loss of it’s underlying moral fortitude. A very large part of this is because the party has been effectively hacked, and has become a Straussian cult. The Democratic party is not immune to the spread of the underlying ideology, nor of the cult itself, but is impacted in less obvious (but no less problematic) ways.
While Strauss himself may have had some reasonable ideals, the consequences of the intersection of his methodology of teaching and his ideologies, by nature, create a kind of “you get it or you don’t” state of affairs, where much is implicit. He intentionally did this, because he wanted people to be capable of reading between the lines, and to be able to stand for true and valuable things that you can’t fully justify or comprehend analytically. Although some things must be implicit and be stood for even if they cannot be articulated, the consequences of intentionally creating a scenario where much is left to subtext in an environment (politics) where power is a main focus creates a problematic circumstance that is malignant and difficult to pin down in real-world conflict.
Not only is this complex of interactions difficult to pin down in real-world interactions, it is difficult to pin down internally, once you’ve genuinely been impacted by it. And so it can spread. And it has spread, in the Republican leadership. And they spread the discordant mixture of implicit behaviors to their constituents.
All of this is to say:
Republicans depend on good leadership, and their leadership is fucked right now. But that doesn’t mean the corpus of Republicans in general is actually fucky. They are being fucked too, and their fuckyness will right itself when a mentality comes about that is:
A: communicable implicitly and explicitly B: capable if seeing through the morass of the Straussian cult.
Meanwhile, many of the things that the Republican corpus actually cares about manifest in problematic ways, because their needs are no longer met by their leadership.
So if you’re looking to feel good about Republicans, don’t look at their leadership, or the maga asshats. Look at the very large body of people who has lost representation, and never has been good at having a public voice. Look at the fundamental Republican philosophies, which are, by and large, good. When they act out, tie it back to those philosophies and beliefs, and try to understand how it led to this, now.
One of the primary things the Republican party doesn’t do is look away from the fundamental necessity for power. This isn’t (generally) out of a desire for power, though that may be what manifests. Instead, it’s from a willingness to deal honestly in realities other people find distasteful. This is why they consider the Democratic corpus “weak” at times. But currently, that’s kinda fucking them, because they also can’t see an answer to the Straussian cult situation. They know, on some level, that something fundamentally important is being left out, but can’t find a way to get back to the moral foundation they had - the power has them. Their leadership knows how to point that unease at the wrong things.
The good thing is - getting to know your local Republican, and sorting through the emotions it brings up in you can help, because the fundamental issue is deeply psychological.
The bad thing is, nobody wants to do that, because it’s lots easier to just say “those guys suck” and “we’ll best them at the polls”. But unless the underlying issue is addressed, you’ll lose again. And then time will pass, and you’ll win, maybe, and then lose again. And each time, it will be shocking, and each time, a worse leader, and each time, the mentality and it’s supporting antithetical mentalities spread.
But, once people realize they can’t escape a thing, and it needs to be faced, they face it.
You could say this whole thing is a battle between (or a lack of capacity for mutual understanding by) the explicit and the implicit motivators.
The MAGA movement is a christo-fascist death cult. Conservative think tanks which may have been influenced by Strauss as much as Schmitt have influenced the MAGA movement with Project 2025 at the very least. However, it would be giving the MAGA movement and Strauss to much credit to say that the MAGA cult is exclusively a Straussian cult. Fascists movements share general attributes with each other, but cannot be accurately described as exclusively the embodiment of one philosopher’s views.
Regardless, a no would have been sufficient to the asked question.
Climate change is the existential threat to life as we know it on the planet Earth. Republicans are the ones who need to learn to face this fact. No matter how much political victory they achieve the problem will remain unless we take action to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.
In the absence of Republicans accepting the body of research that has been done on climate science, it is up to the rest of us to out vote them. This is true of most positions that Republicans advocate for. They aren’t based on evidence or on a desire to benefit the majority of the population. Republican positions are designed to benefit themselves and the owner class at the expense of everyone else.
Garnering the political will to out vote an over-represented minority every two years is neither easy nor based on emotion. It is a strategic decision based on evidence to prevent the destruction of the planet and our way of life. It is useful to out vote Republicans because preventing our destruction is a necessary step to improving our society.
As part of that, it is important to dismantle flawed arguments in favor of the Republicans. Such as a misattribution to psychological factors. Which at best is an unfounded attempt to vaguely refer to a reader’s insecurities.
Republicans and many other people, regardless of their political leanings, have a tendency to moral reasoning. They attempt to reach a goal by following steps that are justified by subjective morality. Moral positions may inherently feel correct, but aren’t inherently supported by any measurable metric. Despite this philosophers assert that morality should be used to dictate the actions of people. While this position may feel intuitively correct, it has a consistent issue.
People can state goals and then can designate a subjective moral position to those goals. However choosing actions to achieve those goals based on reasoning derived from the same subjective moral position is not guaranteed to achieve that stated goal. A way to resolve this is to evaluate actions based on their utility. Does a given action advance the stated goal? If so then it is a course of action worth considering. Rather than asking do the ends justify the means, we should ask do the means accomplish the ends. Thinking about actions in terms of their utility enable us to act in our self-interest. Moral reasoning denies us this as moral ideals demand an inhuman level of dedication to achieve. We are best able to pursue our ideals when we can do so in a way that is useful to that pursuit.
Fascism has taken hold of the Republican Party. Attempting to meet fascists in the middle does nothing to stop climate change. The fascists believe climate change does not exist and that no action is required. No matter how close to the fascists’ position on climate change a person gets, that person will be unable to leverage the support of fascists. So while comprising may be a moral position that feels good and has been useful in certain cases such as infrastructure funding, using it is as a strategy is insufficient to accomplish the stated goal of preventing climate change. The position between systemic change and doing nothing will not make use of the limited time window we have to advert key tipping points in the planet’s ecosystem.
Climate change seemed the most appropriate example given the statement in your argument of needing to face something that is inescapable. As Republicans are unwilling to act based on evidence on the majority of topics their support cannot be leveraged in a meaningful way for any of those topics. So in general, if a person wants to forward their political goals it is not useful to comprise on issues with a party whose only interest is ruling and not leading.
Also, once the fascists take power we will lose our democracy. As our democracy is our most powerful tool to enact systemic change and wealth redistribution we have a vested interest in protecting our democracy from fascist takeovers. edit: typo