Quote: (06-25-2017 08:06 PM)Peekay Wrote:
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It appears to me that the right is less capable of cooperating to fight the common threat.
This is just my opinion, but it seems like anyone falling into the right spectrum of politics should agree that socialism is the ultimate threat and work together to defeat that first before settling doctrinal differences. For instance, where I live I see all the different right wing groups showing just as much scorn for other right wing groups as they do for towards the commies and anarchist. Anyway, I don't really understand this so maybe I am questioning if this is indeed what is happening?
I think this is actually the wrong way to go, and has proven to be wrong for many decades now. Socialism on some level has been a major factor in American life since FDR's new deal and as such the Republicans wailing about socialism tend to look like idiots because socialism has been around for many decades and the sky hasn't fallen. On the contrary many republican supporters are tied to socialism either directly through welfare or through government contracts and the econonmic runoff that flows in their fetid wake.
In fact, I guarantee you that a great number of lower and lower-middle class republicans feel a strong degree of nausea when they hear some fat, rich republican senator frothing at the mouth about socialism while hoovering up his huge salary and getting thousand dollar lunches or million dollar stock options from lobbyists while Joe Roughneck is relying on his dreaded socialist food stamps just to keep his kids fed each week.
"Uniting against socialism" is a lost cause, for reasons not the least of which is that the mechanisation of industry and the pursuant job losses mean that without some level of socialism you would be facing a social crisis of epic proportions. You would be trying essentially trying to unite people in the effort to slash their own wrists, which is why it's been a dead-end rallying call ever since Regan left the Whitehouse.
If you want to rally people around an idea then it has to be something that they feel negatively impacts their day to day life and furthermore something they feel they have a moral high ground on. That's why people are uniting around resisting government tyranny over their words and their actions, or in other cases uniting around resisting the degradation of their regions through the forced influx of hostile foreigners that don't share their cultural values. Or in short, the main issues that made a Trump election possible.
If Trump had campaigned on "stopping socialism" then Hillary would have won, flat out. If you want people to rally to a cause you can't
tell them what that cause is going to be. You have to sense a underlying urgency in the crowd and tap into it.
Freedom from tyranny and a safe nation absent hostile foreigners. That's not a hard line to push, and though the alt-right might be far more the latter and less the former (while the alt-light is far more the former and far less the latter) they are just different expressions of that same widespread political yearning.
Freedom from tyranny and a safe nation absent hostile foreigners.