Politics2 |
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Created: 2019-12-03
- Liberals view political conflict as oppressed vs. oppressor
- Conservatives view political conflict as civilization vs. barbarism
- Libertarians view political conflict as freedom vs. coercion
There are two power blocs driving politics today. First, there’s the proletariat. These are the working-class voters who go to Trump rallies in the U.S. and powered Brexit and Boris Johnson’s campaign in the U.K. They see their best world receding and they want a tough guy to bring it back.
Second, there is the precariat. These are the young and educated voters caught in the gig economy, who see no career security ahead. They want leaders like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn who will promise enveloping policies — free college, free internet, free child care — to give them some sense of safety.
two groups are different in some ways. When the proletarians attack their enemies, they do so from a position of perceived social inferiority, so their attacks are resentful and brutal. When the precariat attacks, it does so from a position of perceived moral superiority, so its attacks are filled with ridicule, mockery and scorn.
But the movements do have parallels. Both are driven by a fear of the future, and of each other. Both have a tendency to embrace catastrophic, apocalyptic visions of the ruin around us. Dystopia has become the opiate of the activist class.
Haunted by economic insecurity, they will tolerate any sin in their leader — racism, anti-Semitism, dishonesty — so long as that person is willing to fight and be on their side. They both support massive, unrealistic policy proposals, because they reject the idea that politics is simply the muddled way we settle differences with people we disagree with.
Conservatives - also from David Brooks
Fear of Big Tech
The most basic encapsulation is that $FB and $GOOG threaten to disrupt the business model of allocating and distributing political power.
Ideas or concepts
since the Second World War.
- representative democracy,
- religious tolerance,
- independent judiciaries,
- free press and speech,
- economic integration,
- international institutions, the
- trans-Atlantic alliance
Use of AI
If you build machines that are constantly dividing voters into smaller and smaller microdemographic entities in order to target messages to those voters, you end up undermining a sense of the public good, even if that’s not your intention
What Separates Us
Americans today are divided about social issues like gay rights and abortion as well as about economic issues like inequality, taxes, wages, and trade.
How things have changed
How everything became a culture war
Transforming difficult analytical questions into knee-jerk emotional battlegrounds will dramatically increase the danger that thoughtless short-term choices will throw off our long-term national trajectory
Conservative Utopias
[T]here is no evidence that in the post-Reagan era there has ever any popular demand for the three utopian projects of libertarian economic policy, neoconservative foreign policy or “theoconservative” moral restoration. The first two were elite projects, at odds with the popularity of Social Security and Medicare among working-class Republican voters—and at odds as well with the unpopularity of neocon wars of regime change and nation-building, in countries which are not immediate threats to the United States. The “moral majority” was always a moral minority, even among white working-class Republicans. The success of Trump in winning the support of many evangelical voters shows that even those voters care about issues other than sex and school prayer.
beliefs that underpinned the Republican Party. Lower taxes, limited government, less federal spending: — low taxes, small government, free markets —
but now its
Fighting the right villains — the “Marxist” left, medical experts, woke corporations —
Lying
Brexit has also institutionalised lying in British politics, as the dishonesty of Brexiteer promises segued into the pretence that they are being fulfilled.