It is the assumption that, since I’m now conservative, I should be devoted to Reagan and Bush that gets to me. I despise those fuckers. People keep bringing them up to me like it’s 2002. I wasn’t for them then, and I’m not for them now. I’m for the nation-state.
Political realignment happens all the time. In the 1990s, every left-wing party of every developed country embraced neoliberalism. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the Left went far into neoliberal direction, economically and in every other way. As a result, part of the Right pivoted and started walking away from neoliberalism. Part, not whole. I’m the Right that wants to leave neoliberalism. We are still finding our way to our freshly non-neoliberal position. We fumble and make mistakes. But at least we are trying. Everybody else is still free-marketeering and choicing their way into the neoliberal future of lonely godlike selves with detachable body parts and endless freedom to discard every attachment.
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I haven’t, honestly, heard anybody under 50 mention Reagan or Bush in years.
The current “right” is definitely not the y2k right.
People need to update.
-ethyl
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The Left thinks we get together and swoon over how much we love Reagan.
As they say, the problem is that the Right understands the Left a lot better than the Left understands the Right. They honestly have no idea what we actually believe.
“No, I most definitely don’t wish for a return to slavery. No, I am extremely opposed to genociding gay people. No, I am not into whatever the show Handmaid’s Tale depicts.”
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People need to update.
I suppose your’re right, but how can they update when so many people on the Left and on the Right still think in terms of WW2 stereotypes: Reagan was a fascist and Bush is a Nazi and Marx is God and Stalin is a hero? Not joking, a well-known Italian intellectual – a famed mathematician who did his PhD at Moscow State University in the early 1980s – recently said that. How can people still consider Tony Blair a leftist or Bush rightwing!? They went to war together in Iraq, for pete’s sake
It’s bewildering that people are still trapped in the warped logic of Right/Left discourse which started with the French Revolution but was already on the wane by the late 1970s.
Why are people so blind?
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That’s exactly what I mean. People make assumptions about my beliefs based on the era when I was a toddler. We need to move on and observe the surrounding reality. An Afghan migrant knifed a British guy out walking his dog in his neighborhood. No reason. Just went out and murdered this Brit, in the country the Brit’s ancestors built. In 1982, the Right was not solving these problems. It was collaborating in creating them. That Right is most definitely not my Right. Why is this complicated?
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I’m continually amazed by how many people I meet who still think “the right” is the Billy Graham, James Dobson Moral-Majority subculture from the 80s.
Yah, no. Pretty sure if Mr. Dobson were still alive, he would not recognize the current right.
Of course, anybody born after 1990 knows the difference, but… older lefties seem to have some kind of programming glitch where they shut down and memory-wipe every time an update comes in. They’re out of warranty, so there’s probably no fixing it.
-ethyl
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And it’s the same Left that went from at least pretending to care about the working class to openly heaping opprobrium on workers and expressing class-based contempt.
AOC said yesterday that Riley Gaines, who has a newborn baby, should get a job. She calls herself a socialist bit real Socialists in the USSR instituted a 3-year maternity leave. They did not believe that mothers of infants or toddlers should be in the workforce. Socialism clearly changed to mean “fads of spoiled rich brats.” Why couldn’t conservatism change, as well?
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They are never gonna figure out where all their old voters went, or why.
Or perhaps they know, but they don’t care because the purity spiral thing means they’d rather lose than have to associate with the working class (shrugs).
It kind of sucks, because at this point the left is so repulsive to anybody with a wage-class job and kids, that the Republicans don’t have to actually DO anything major for us, like, say, address the housing affordability crisis or the total dysfunction of schools, or OMG healthcare, or inflation, or crime or anything. All they have to do is just *not* actively seek our annihiliation, ship out a few thousand migrants, do a few high-profile prosecutions. That’s it. It’s such a low bar.
Maybe we’d have more clout if anybody had to compete for our vote. We appreciate the deportations, the drug boat strikes, etc. but it hasn’t made a huge difference on the ground yet. We still can’t afford a house or dental work, and it’s still not safe to walk the mile to church because fent zombies.
-ethyl
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The economy has been so messed up that it will take a long time and much more serious effort to turn around.
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It’s a boogeyman game. The Dems scare you guys with trans kids, and the Republicans scare the other guys with crosses and uncouthness, and they both rob all of you blind while drinking at the same parties.
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Uncouthness is much less of a problem that sterilisation of children. I wouldn’t put them in the same bucket.
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Agreed. I’m just saying that it’s all used for the same purposes. That’s why it seems to both you and the Dem audience that none of your guys are playing to win.
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Billy Graham was huge in SA. This was a big problem for the Christian Nationalists when he called apartheid a sin.
https://www.billygraham.ca/stories/billy-graham-nelson-mandela-united-by-apartheid-opposition/
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It is complicated because the West has established multicultural hellholes created by voters that use emotion rather than logic. But occasionally the truth leaks out, charges against the little Scottish girl using the axe and knife to protect her sister and herself have been dropped. And the Dundee police have finally charged the Romanian rape gang with attacks on 10 girls. But long past time for some harsh measuring as in pour encourager les autres:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/10/27/romanian-grooming-gang-jailed-for-raping-ten-women/
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I read an article yesterday about underage prostitutes in LA. The idea that this is happening so openly in our own country is killing me. The article explains all the laws adopted in California to make apprehending pimps of child prostitutes nearly impossible.
Of course, most of the child prostitutes are Hispanic, dragged here as a result of open borders.
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“underage prostitutes in LA”
Well wasn’t it you who said one of the reasons for pushing the idea of ‘trans children’ was to legitimize the idea of minors being able to consent to sex?
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