I see a lot of evidence on the right but not much on the left. E.g. The people saying they support gays but are against gay marriage are the same ones helping African governments pass laws enacting the death penalty for homosexuality. But I don't really see any evidence that, say, what the folks lobbying for high speed trains really want is to put Christians to death or whatever.
I'm curious what this alleged political process actually looks like -- are people writing checks to re-elect Robert Mugabe? -- and the extent to which "people saying they support gays [etc]" here in America actually are participate in that sort of process. When I hear those words, I think of some of the people behind SB 296 in Utah, the antidiscrimination legislation which has received praise from both the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Also, way to go easy on the left. "High speed trains" is the worst you could do? Ha! You could at least apply the "help African governments" standard and start digging through their support of various leftist / Marxist regimes for convenient atrocities, I'm sure there's something :P
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-peron/whos-helping-finan...
> Also, way to go easy on the left.
I mean if you actually read DailyKos or whatever it's clear that a lot of the people there are batshit crazy. But as far as I can tell it's one level of crazy, I'm sure there are exceptions but for the vast majority of people I don't think it goes 10 levels deep. Whereas on the right it seems to be the rule that when people are fighting against the public option for healthcare what really want is to genocide minorities, rather than the exception.
Whereas when people on the left have historically supported genocidal regimes, as far as I can tell it's been because they (perhaps naively) did so unknowingly rather than because supporting genocide was their intended outcome.
I think you've been reading too much Daily Kos if you think it's an exceptional right-winger who doesn't want to genocide minorities.
(a) Miscellaneous fundamentalist elements of the Christian right who clearly don't support gays have been doing miscellaneous agitation through their missionary arms; African churches have been lobbied (in the passive voice) "to drop ties with mainstream Christian groups." I'm not sure who these shadowy figures are, but it sounds like they're not mainstream.
(b) Everyone is helping support the death penalty for gay people because the Obama administration gave the Museveni regime cash and military aid.
This situation seems problematic. However, notably absent is commentary about people who "say they support gays but are against gay marriage" lending any form of material support through their actions. Is it possible you have conflated several of your political enemies? It's an easy mistake to make, we pretty much all do it from time to time...
I don't think comparing crazy blog commentators is a fair standard for either side. I'm going to come up with something I think is a bit more fair: compare the intellectual component of each side.
* Left intellectuals (ie: writers at the Guardian, Jacobin, etc.): tendency towards hero-villain thinking in domestic policy/class struggle, a tendency to apologize for violent regimes that purported to be engaged in class struggle. Occasional cultural silliness, and fairly commonly prone to apologia for anything a perceived "underdog" does whatsoever. Otherwise, generally quite cogent and able to come up with extensive critiques of the status quo and platforms of action.
* Right intellectuals (ie: the National Interest, The Economist): tendency towards hero-villain thinking in foreign policy, leading to support for violent regimes purporting to "keep the damn dirty Leftists out". Large amounts of cultural silliness, especially prone to believing that hierarchies of authority just are morality, especially prone to tribalism and a bizarre fixation on people's recreational proclivities, especially sexual ones. Often cogent, but not actually consistent in platforms and critiques: usually more focused on rationalizing the existence and actions of some power-hierarchy to which the intellectual is loyal than with establishing any universal moral principle at all (other than hierarchy itself).
It's pretty damn clear which side I'm on, but I also can't think of any facts I've neglected at the moment. Worldwide, the separation between Left and Right seems to really be about principles versus hierarchy.
Who, in my opinion, are simply trying to recover from the political damage cause by the California prop 8 fiasco.
And how is it that we've got the most hegemonically capitalist system the world has ever seen, with self-professed right-wing nationalists or cultural conservatives running most of the planet's governments, and I hear that what we really need to worry about is college students being dirty hippies? After all, college students have always been dirty hippies, and the world has yet to die of it -- unlike, say, global warming.
Tempest in a teapot </crotchety>!
But seriously, I don't agree with the choice to label our recent history a "leftward" movement. I would call it a gradual, and thus far successful evolution. It often includes progressive ideas spreading through society, but as the author correctly points out, many progressive ideas are never accepted (see eugenics).
I think the best way to explain it is to say that while the "conservative" side of our culture tends to favor stagnation, the "liberal" side of our culture tends to favor unchecked growth. On the one hand, it would be very unfortunate if our society stagnated for centuries like some have, but on the other hand unchecked growth is what cancer does, and that's not healthy either.
As a matter of fact, in the '60s and '70s they were trying to blow things up, burn things, and kill people.
