Is America moving to the Left or Right?

[minionofmidas]

Thread question: No.
Poll question: Left/Depends.

[minionofmidas]

IIRC from geography lessons, North America is moving neither Right nor Left but is actually contracting.

[minionofmidas]

IIRC from geography lessons, North America is moving neither Right nor Left but is actually contracting.

It's (well the American plate) is moving west at a rate of a few centimetres a year

...in the North Atlantic, yes. But isn't it also moving away from the Pacific plate at the same time, creating the San Andreas Fault?

[minionofmidas]

So America is moving to the left and downwards, then.

[minionofmidas]

So America is moving to the left and downwards, then.

North America is moving West and either south or north (I forget which. Mind you no one knows where the North American plate's westernmost bit is. Either Central Alaska or Siberia IIRC)

It is South. It came back to me reading your post how parts of Coastal California are going to end up next to B.C. somewhere in the distant future.

[minionofmidas]

The country is moving right socially, in part because of a rise in religiosity among younger people.  The young are more pro-life than previous generations, for example.  They are not as pro-gay marriage as it is often claimed.  Only about 50% of those in their 20s support gay marriage, which hardly makes it inevitable, and the number is actually lower among those in the teens, which refutes the suggestion that there is a consistent and inexorable trend leftward.  Race will be less important as interracial marriage gets more common.

Economically, the country is moving nowhere.  We have adopted a center right position that neither the Republicans (for reasons of ideology) or Democrats (for reasons of backbone) are willing to challenge.  Until someone challenges the order in a serious way, it will remain as is.

The one flaw I see on some people's approach top the question is their conception of right and left.  The liberals keep implying that anything that is left behind us is "right" and everything that is newly created is "left".  There was one poster who claimed that slavery is a conservative position, for example.  Defending slavery may be conservative in the sense that it is a defense of conserving a social institution, but it hardly connects to our current conception of right and left.  The right is defined by a value system of economic liberty based on classical ecnomics and social policy dominated by Christian religious ethics.  The left is defined by a value system based on social permissiveness and semi-socialist economics.  Todiscern who is winning,we should not look at history and see that we are different than we used to be and conclude that the left is always winning.  We should see which value system has advanced itself the greatest distance over time and which way the wind is blowing right now.

A very American viewpoint, btw.

[minionofmidas]

The last paragraph, with its disregard of history (putting it negatively).

[minionofmidas]

What do you mean by that?

If any change is "liberal," you'd have to say the Reagan Revolution was a liberal movement, as well as the conservative movement in general.

No, that's got nothing to do with what I was referring to do. Nothing whatsoever.

[minionofmidas]

So why don't you just post what you're talking about instead of making us guess?

Your brain can take a little exercise. Just follow John's argument from "defending slavery" to the end.