Quote (Goomshill @ 12 Oct 2024 21:09)
Yeah I don't think the dust has settled. We can't even neatly explain it away as 'liberal' vs 'conservative' since they are such mushy terms. And adding fiscal vs social vs geopolitical alignment makes it a multidimensional clusterfuck, which is where we are now its just hard to visualize.
Its clear that Democrats have fully embraced the authoritarian side and the Trump mainstream of Republicans taken the mantle of libertarianism, while neocons have become democrats. It gets muddier on the other categories. Democrats are interventionalists and Republicans isolationists now, but that was flipped only a couple decades ago and Democrats have to stomach cognitive dissonance to be hawks cheerleading a forever war- and yet the are. I feel the parties could flip on a dime on geopolitics. Trump could be beating the war drum against Iran while Tehran Jane poses with the Ayatollah
A few years ago I was a diehard Wellstone democrat, looking to the interests of blue collar workers, reforming services and protecting individual liberties and holding a deep disdain for jingoist warmongers and utter opposition to infringements on our civil rights. Today I am exactly the same. And now that makes me a republican. When unions are supporting the republican the world is upside down, I mean fuck I'm drinking cub water right now
I'm kinda in the same boat, used to root for my country's social democrats into the 2000s, until they sold out to corporate interests. Things became even worse since they started embracing identity politcs at some point during the 2010s. Even with regard to US politics (which I admittedly didn't follow quite as closely before the early 2010s), I was rooting against GWB and in favor of Obama. Even today, I would probably still support a candidate credibly running on Obama's 08 platform...
The funny thing about Trump is that he has very evident authoritarian instincts, but in practice governs like a moderate. He truly is the second coming of Nixon, isn't he?
Assessing political positioning on a one-dimensional axis imho just doesn't work, we need at least two dimensions. What the ongoing realignment imho boils down to is that the first (sic) axis, the economic left-right scale, has to be replaced by an open-closed or a nationalist-globalist axis. The authoritarian-libertarian dimension can be kept.
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