Why do right-wingers bother?

[courts]

Just finished having an argument with another poster. To me, it seems so obvious that "the right" regardless of what faction you're talking about always loses out. Or at best, wins maybe 1 out of 10 times. Cultural issues are just considered a waiting game for "progressives," assuming we even have anyone to represent us. Not even this forum would dispute that. Economically the US government just continues to spend and subsidize and regulate more. Every western government until recently has just continued to increase spending more in some capacity, at most just slowing down the rate of the spending. Nobody has any imaginative tactics or solutions. I just don't see where left wingers are coming from when they talk about this right-ward drift, to me it seems a tad bizarre.

[tpfkaw]

The reason is, to paraphrase Buckley, to stand athwart history yelling "stop!"

(And yes, of course government always grows.  Even "extreme budget cutter" Margaret Thatcher increased inflation-adjusted non-military spending).

Also, the mindset of leftists on this matter isn't in quite the same sort of terms we libertarians/"small government" types think - their real issue is in what people say.  Essentially their primary goal isn't so much political/legal as to get everyone to agree with them.  This is why they get apoplectic at Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh or whatever, why they will bemoan the loss of past "moderate" Republicans - or liberal Democrats - even if said moderate Republicans or liberal Democrats governed to the right of their modern counterparts by objective measures (they dislike the shift in rhetoric and are mostly indifferent to policy).  It's also why Marokai was unwilling to discuss shifts in actual first-world countries' policies (almost invariably leftward except on some tariffs) in your discussion and why he kept coming back to the rhetorical shifts of leftist parties since the collapse of Marxism.

[Yelnoc]

President Obama touched on the right-ward drift today in his speech.  He outlined how his positions on healthcare (the individual mandate), the budget (returning to Clinton era revenues), and climate change (cap and trade) were all Republican ideas.  Now, the far-right is mainstream right-wing and centrist ideas are demonized as socialism.  

I believe that Glen Beck's book The Overton Window was a self-aware jest at his own movement.  The book is about how in a dystopian American the political center was slowly shifted left and left and left, until the entire country is some imaginatively "socialist" hellhole.  It's fairly obvious that certain forces within American political discourse are attempting to drive that exact same process in the opposite direction.

[I'm JewCon in name only.]

You're right Ghost White, Right wingers should just all endorse Obama and march with him towards the sunset together!


/end sarcasm

[Хahar 🤔]

The problem is the assumption here that "more spending" = "left".

[courts]

President Obama touched on the right-ward drift today in his speech.  He outlined how his positions on healthcare (the individual mandate), the budget (returning to Clinton era revenues), and climate change (cap and trade) were all Republican ideas.  Now, the far-right is mainstream right-wing and centrist ideas are demonized as socialism.  

Republican /=/ right wing, as I've said before. But you're missing my point. What social issues have conservatives had major victories on the last 30 years, other than maybe 'law and order'? Banning abortion, gay marriage (not even a conceivable serious issue 20 years ago now taken as a given for everywhere at some point in the future), immigration reduction/balancing (never mind amnesty), affirmative action, etc. The hard-left direction is pretty obvious. Economics, to the extent you can even separate them, aren't really much different either. Just look at "moderate" Bob Dole, who advocated abolishing whole departments, and compare him to Mitt Romney who is supposedly running "to the right."

It's also why Marokai was unwilling to discuss shifts in actual first-world countries' policies (almost invariably leftward except on some tariffs) in your discussion and why he kept coming back to the rhetorical shifts of leftist parties since the collapse of Marxism.

Tariffs can be reflective of a nationalistic (i.e. anti-egalitarian/universalist) world view and hence right-wing. Though that's contextual.

[Yelnoc]

President Obama touched on the right-ward drift today in his speech.  He outlined how his positions on healthcare (the individual mandate), the budget (returning to Clinton era revenues), and climate change (cap and trade) were all Republican ideas.  Now, the far-right is mainstream right-wing and centrist ideas are demonized as socialism.  

Republican /=/ right wing, as I've said before. But you're missing my point. What social issues have conservatives had major victories on the last 30 years, other than maybe 'law and order'? Banning abortion, gay marriage (not even a conceivable serious issue 20 years ago now taken as a given for everywhere at some point in the future), immigration reduction/balancing (never mind amnesty), affirmative action, etc. The hard-left direction is pretty obvious. Economics, to the extent you can even separate them, aren't really much different either. Just look at "moderate" Bob Dole, who advocated abolishing whole departments, and compare him to Mitt Romney who is supposedly running "to the right."

Republican does equal right-wing in modern political discourse, by and large.  You're correct, social conservatism is a losing position by its very definition.  But I interpreted your OP as speaking to a wider range of issues than "social" ones.

[TJ in Oregon]

Ghost_white, you are right about this for the most part and I find it rather depressing. It's something I discovered long ago and have spent too many days worrying about it. It's also infuriating to see stupid conservatives bandy on and on about how great we're going without stopping to look beyond the propaganda they've been reading and see the world for how it actually is instead of what they'd like it to be.

That being said, for why bother, I bother because I do believe that I by holding a consistent view that most would describe as socially conservative and expressing it to the best of my ability I can perhaps make it respectable and build a slight bit more goodwill towards my views than I build hatred of them. I doubt much of anything I do will be very successful in this regard, but I do hope that it's better than nothing at all. I continue to follow the trajectory of our nation's policies because that's part of being a good citizen. I cannot cut myself off from the larger community that is our nation because I still care about it. I hate losing but there's nothing I can really do to stop it from happening. If all the social conservatives in the country stopped caring it would only embolden the liberals to push further faster in their hunger along the arc they call progress. It's a losing battle but the causes that are popular aren't the ones that need people fighting for them anyway.

[greenforest32]

It's too bad right-wingers are dedicating all this time and effort to an agenda that will help a small, powerful minority (chiefly corporations and the rich) at the expense of the vast majority.

Looking back over decades, what will you pride yourself on? What will you have built or achieved besides selling off the commons/public services for profit and destroying people's trust in government?

[dead0man]

What will you have built or achieved besides selling off the commons/public services for profit and destroying people's trust in government?

Indeed, left-wingers are doing a fine job of that all by themselves.

[Marokai Backbeat]

The problem is the assumption here that "more spending" = "left".

15 minutes and someone's cracked it.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Are you kidding ? The Right has almost entirely triumphed on every economic aspect since the 1980s. The world we live in is the world they shaped.

[Gustaf]

Think Hegel, guys.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This is an extraordinarily stupid thread.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

What Xahar said.

Also, gun control.

[Lambsbread]

The problem is the assumption here that "more spending" = "left".

^^^^^^

[courts]

The problem is the assumption here that "more spending" = "left".

^^^^^^

Non-military spending has increased beyond rate of inflation. That seems like a fairly good metric, particularly given that this spending is primarily in things like entitlements or education. And it's not just the US where that's held true either, although we're a particularly glaring example. What else would you go by? What have "small government" conservatives succeeded at other than some token cuts/reforms to programs like ADFC in the 1990s which accounts for fairly little of the budget compared to all the other expenditures?

[Lambsbread]

The problem is the assumption here that "more spending" = "left".

^^^^^^

Non-military spending has increased beyond rate of inflation. That seems like a fairly good metric, particularly given that this spending is primarily in things like entitlements or education. And it's not just the US where that's held true either, although we're a particularly glaring example. What else would you go by? What have "small government" conservatives succeeded at other than some token cuts/reforms to programs like ADFC in the 1990s which accounts for fairly little of the budget compared to all the other expenditures?

And I agree with you on this. The modern day "conservative" likely favours as much or maybe even more spending increases than liberals.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Once again what about gun control? In that supposedly conservative golden age of the 50s, some polls showed support for allowing private ownership of non-hunting firearms to be in the 20s. Today it's not a mainstream position in any way and won't be touched by politicians even in the most Democratic districts.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

This thread is a joke, right?

[LastVoter]

The government spending is growing not because of more services provided by the government, but because of the demographic shift to people becoming older, and the right-wing trade policies that result in more people to rely on the government("free"-trade). The working class is dying the death of a thousand austerities from since 1970's, and government grows in it's attempts to fulfill it's part of the social contract, and in some European countries and many states of US, right-wingers are able to pass additional austerity measures on the working class, and they will soon enter the national discourse(probably tea fueled congress will force Obama to compromise(pass austerity) in his second term on major programs like social security, medicare, and medicaid), or it will become a part of the platform for Rethuglicans by 2016.

tl; dr: right-wingers won, in form of neo-liberalism, everyone else has to die a death of a thousand austerity cuts.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

It's pretty important to remember than Mint isn't your average conservative and views things like free trade, globalization and neo-liberal reforms as negative so I guess I can see his point. The only political group that has lost more over the last few decades than the traditional left have been paleo-conservatives.

[tpfkaw]

This thread basically confirms my point (leftists ignore changes in policy - almost entirely, with extremely rare and generally-temporary exceptions that only partially reverse earlier leftist policies, in their favor - and go nuts over changes in opinion, which is more variable).

[courts]

It's pretty important to remember than Mint isn't your average conservative and views things like free trade, globalization and neo-liberal reforms as negative

That's not exactly a minority view among self-IDing conservatives. The open borders, cosmopolitan mentality of the WSJ/Economist crowd seems pretty self evidently hostile to traditionalism and nationalism anyway.

[opebo]

This is an extraordinarily stupid thread.

Not at all!  It is always enjoyable to read the fevered fears of the victors - fascinating stuff.   And actually it is quite useful to know - it isn't as if they are happy that most working people are poor, living at a subsistence level, or have inadequate access to health care, in fact they are tortured that anyone from said class has anything at all!