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Okay so we had eight years of a conservative President who pretty much ran on the charitable self-definition of conservative you have there, i.e. so-called "com
by deciplex 10y ago
Okay so we had eight years of a conservative President who pretty much ran on the charitable self-definition of conservative you have there, i.e. so-called "compassionate conservative". Especially in the 2000 election that was the message and it was largely successful and that was how he was able to present himself nationally.
And that President was a disaster.
On the other hand for the past eight years we've had a President who has, more-or-less, defined himself as a centrist, but who has been successfully painted as the less-charitable definition of liberal from your post, in national media and especially in social media
For all his faults, he has not been a disaster on anywhere near that scale.
Now it might be that you're right and that everyone should take a deep breath and a step back and tone down the rhetoric. But when this article brings up the Daily Show and Rachel Maddow and John Oliver and so on, it forgets what all that stuff is in response to, which is a largely conservative national media and a successful framing of pretty much every single national issue of import, by the right from 1990 or so right up to the present day.
And, furthermore, if I look at my Facebook feed, or on Reddit, and try to figure out where the most obnoxious posts are coming from, e.g. pictures of Obama being flushed down a toilet, or "proof" in the form of gruesome pictures that Hillary Clinton and Obama just lounged around and laughed their asses off while folks who worked for them died in Benghazi, for literally no other conceivable logical reason than they are just evil, evil shits, etc etc...
...I mean, maybe some of the stuff you hear about the Koch brothers or whatever, or the Kansas state government, isn't fair either, but it doesn't seem to be anything like on that level.
So on balance, an article that specifically calls out liberals, for poisoning the well and arguing in bad faith, being condescending, etc. - while maybe not technically wrong in each and every aspect, seems misplaced, you know? Like, seems like the concern for it is a little off-balance compared to what it should be if you really wanted to address the broader issue.
And so, this article is trash.
e: I guess TL;DR what I'm saying is: where is the article suggesting that conservatives maybe should stop accusing liberals and the people they vote into office of literally wanting to destroy America because they just hate it so much? Where is this article, and are any conservatives reading it?
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoI think you kind of missed the point of the article. The point is not that liberals look at conservatives that way. The point is that liberals look at the lower class that way. Liberals have become more of an "in crowd" that thinks the right things and feels better than others because they think the right things. But the people that they claim to be trying to help don't think those things, so the liberals look down on them - look at the people they claim to be trying to help in a very condescending way. That makes it hard to really help them, because there's no genuine empathy. Conservatives, on the other hand, claim that those people are big enough to help themselves if the system would just get out of their way. That may not be empathy, and it may not work in the real world, but it's looking at people as competent grown-ups rather than ignorant or stupid people who need "the knowing ones" to tell them what to think and do.
- pjlegato 10y agoConservatives certainly have many faults. They are not at all relevant, though, to the question of the faults of liberalism -- this is the "tu quoque fallacy". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque