
Why America is moving left - imarg
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/why-america-is-moving-left/419112/?single_page=true
======
CM30
In the sense of support for gay marriage and trying to fix problems with
inequality, it's moving left. But in terms of censorship and moral guardian
attitudes, I'd say America is clearly going right. A lot of the thoughts about
freedom of speech and 'offending' people are basically the views of the old
school religious right, except with identity politics replacing the Bible or
other religious aspect.

On another note, it's interesting how at the same time, a lot of Europe seems
to be getting more right wing politically. Okay, not in the sense of certain
social attitudes (support for equality hasn't changed), but definitely in the
sense of euroscepticism, thoughts on immigration, etc.

~~~
justin66
> But in terms of censorship and moral guardian attitudes, I'd say America is
> clearly going right.

Not really. Seriously, not at all. It's just that whenever a group is attacked
by another group for something they've said or done, they tend to accuse the
other of censorship. It's a frequently misused term.

The most striking recent example I can think of is when a fairly large number
of people boycotted Chic-fil-A because the company's ownership was using its
money to lobby for far-right social causes. People on the right accused the
left of censorship, purely because they don't understand the meaning of the
word but they understand that it's a nasty accusation.

If you look at actual instances of censorship, it's really going down. It is a
little amazing what you can print and what you can say, compared to a few
decades ago. Small towns occasionally do book bans, and the FCC occasionally
scolds someone for something they say on-air, but if you look at the content
of what's published and put on the air, things are trending closer and closer
to anything goes.

~~~
CM30
Then how about the examples where people have been banned from sites like
Twitter because they offended people, and one of the offended individuals had
'friends' at the company? Or when people nearly got blacklisted from
industries because a couple of people hated their political views? Or perhaps
a certain portion of the media's attempt to sweep under the rug any bad
behaviour by groups they consider 'disadvantaged'. Or a willingness for
certain social media sites to ban people and delete content for mentioning
those negative issues.

A lot of this isn't boycotting. It's trying to kick someone off a large
portion of the internet because they said something you don't like by pulling
strings or falsely reporting their work as 'illegal'. It's trying to remove
'wrongthink' because your political narrative crumbles the minute it's put
under any scrutiny.

There's definitely an interest in censorship there. Double so on college
campuses and some other such areas.

~~~
justin66
> people have been banned from sites like Twitter because they offended people

If that falls under your definition of censorship, we've got a pretty
fundamental disagreement.

~~~
CountSessine
Why? A generation ago, a lot of people on the left felt that there was a
conspiracy in what was then called the 'mainstream media' to frame political
discussion by not covering certain issues, like East Timor.

If Twitter is now part of the mainstream, how is banning unpopular opinions on
the platform not censorship? Perhaps this is ultimately self-correcting and
these unpopular opinions will find other outlets for expression, but I don't
understand how you can not consider this a form of censorship? Is it only
censorship when its perpetrated by the government?

~~~
CM30
Yeah, pretty much this. Remember, censorship isn't only when the government
bans something. Yes, that's an example of censorship, but individuals and
other private parties can censor stuff as well, and when literally all the
places you can gain an audience are private property... then anything they
don't like is de facto censored.

Which to be fair, is a problem with the internet and much of the modern day
world. So much that people depend on is privately owned that freedom in the
'from government' sense is basically meaningless.

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BuckRogers
Things are _changing_ , which makes it seem like we're going left. It appears
that way because by its nature conservatism resists change. But I don't think
there's any genuine move to the left. It's rhetoric from both sides.

I see little to no evidence that this country has moved left over the past 30
years other than GWB's expansion of Medicare and Reagan's Emergency Medical
Treatment and Active Labor Act.

~~~
api
Socially it has. Economically it really hasn't though I think that may change
unless the decline of the American interior reverses on its own.

~~~
angersock
Socially it has _in certain places_.

Don't assume the battle is won because you've captured a couple of cities and
papers. The fact remains that the majority, at least in America, seem to be
somewhat socially conservative.

EDIT: It'd be nice if we were more liberal. The biggest obstacle to that is
the haughtiness and premature victory behavior that is endemic to the
progressives right now.

Houston lost an important proposition for equality recently _because_ all the
progressives assumed the battle was won...and then they lost when the
biblethumpers got their congregations to the polls.

~~~
mjn
Getting to be a bit of a tangent, but living in Houston, I think that one was
partly progressives being somewhat unprepared for how the campaign turned out.
Progressives were ready for a gay-rights fight, and confident they could win
it (probably rightly so). But they weren't ready for a trans-rights fight, in
part because very little of the educational groundwork for that one has been
laid (not that many people have a real idea what trans rights _are_ , and
haven't gotten used to how to think about them). Since LGBT nondiscrimination
in general was included in the bill, conservatives decided to (probably
wisely) ignore the gay-rights part entirely, and make it a single-issue
campaign focused around the slogan "no men in women's bathrooms". (The
ordinance didn't actually say anything about bathrooms, but they argued it was
a slippery slope.)

What also didn't help is that this vote was attached to an off-year municipal
election, in which the median voter age was 70.

~~~
BuckRogers
>make it a single-issue campaign focused around the slogan "no men in women's
bathrooms".

I don't have all the background knowledge on this and I'm admittedly not an
expert on LGBT, but that's actually pretty brilliant. I have no particular
feelings on LGBT stuff, but I certainly wouldn't want anyone that still has
male genitalia in the same bathroom as anyone's wife or daughters.

Not because I think those exact people would be harmful or aggressive, and
this is more than likely going to be met with accusations of me being a bad
man- but I don't know who else out there is going to pretend they're trans to
creep/spy/abuse women.

If they've gone far enough to do the operation and use the other facilities
then I see no problem. That shows more commitment to the issue than I'd ever
be able to muster.

There's also a lot of Hispanics in Houston (I'm Anglo but my wife is a native-
born Mexican; mother in law is Mexican in Mexico and has a 2nd home in The
Woodlands; my cousin's family are Chicanos and own a non-profit publishing
company in Houston; and my wife's aunt is a semi-famous LGBT Chicana
author/professor, enough for a Wikipedia page, at the University of
California). In my experience (probably extensive compared to the average HNer
as I've lived in Zapopan, Jalisco; speak Spanish and married to a Mexican)-
Latin Americans born there tend to be socially conservative and economically
liberal, while Chicanos are just average Americans with some hispanic cultural
background when you get down to it. Similar to how some folks run around
saying they're Italian-American, they're just American but it makes people
feel special (the real Italians, just like the Latin Americans disagree those
Americans have anything in common with them).

~~~
jtmcmc
Wow you wouldn't want anyone with a penis inside a women's bathroom regardless
of what their gender is? Why is that?

~~~
jerf
Why don't you go ask your local university's diversity office and see what
they say about it?

"The left" as a whole can't have one part banging on about how all men are
rapists if not confined by filled-out consent paperwork, but on the other hand
they all have the right to go into women's bathrooms if they say certain magic
words, which, by the way, it is transphobic to ask any questions about so
don't make any silly claims about how this can't be fraudulently used because
any attempt to prevent fraud is _ipso facto_ transphobia. "The left" as a
whole is going to have to pick one or the other; there is no way to convince
the public of both.

------
jqm
I wish the whole left-right paradigm would fade away. Personally I feel it's a
bit of an artificial dichotomy.

I'm all for governance by good sense with an eye toward improving society in
general.

~~~
CountSessine
The political left-right paradigm is an abstraction around the deeper tension
between shame and fear. As long as someone wants you to be afraid of
something, right-wing politics will exist. As long as someone wants you to
feel ashamed of something, left-wing politics will exist.

Complete rejection of both fear and shame and anyone who wants you to feel
them is the only way to escape the left-wing/right-wing dichotomy.

------
bobby_9x
America isn't really moving left. The loudest people in the room aren't the
majority.

~~~
finid
But that's the problem. The majority does not necessarily determine how the
country will lean, only the loudest, the most vociferous, the most passionate,
the most eh..., "patriotic".

The Nazis were not the majority, but they had a plan, and were loud and
uncompromising about it.

McCarthy and Co were not the majority, but see how they managed to shaped the
laws of the land. The majority didn't care enough to resist.

Presently, the right wing of the Republican party are not the majority in the
party, but see how they are helping to define who gets elected to represent
their party. By being the loudest, they've marginalized the "moderates" within
their party.

In the waning days of an empire, which kicks in long before the empire loses
complete grip on its sphere of influence, the empire tends to veer right. And
that's because those who consider themselves the most "patriotic", who believe
they know how to "make the empire great again", tend to be the loudest.

And they tend to be in the right wing of the political spectrum.

~~~
gozur88
>The Nazis were not the majority, but they had a plan, and were loud and
uncompromising about it.

Yes, but the Nazis didn't have to contend with the American system, which
would have kept them out of power unless they were able to get 50% + 1
electoral votes.

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finid
I don't think we're moving left. According to the latest Gallup poll, veering
right seems more like it.

[http://www.gallup.com/poll/188969/red-states-outnumber-
blue-...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/188969/red-states-outnumber-blue-first-
time-gallup-tracking.aspx?g_source=Politics&g_medium=lead&g_campaign=tiles)

~~~
justin66
To measure the validity of the article's claim you'd want to look at how many
people are moving one way or the other, not how many states are moving one way
or the other.

~~~
finid
So how do you determine in what direction states are moving, isn't it with
people?

Is not as if states are independent of people.

~~~
justin66
> So how do you determine in what direction states are moving

Who cares?

> Is not as if states are independent of people.

But people are independent of states. Or to bring the conversation to a less
retarded level: plenty of states are very, very sparsely populated and they
tend strongly to one party. Measuring their redness or blueness is not
interesting because their population is a rounding error. The number of red
states vs. blue states does not tell you the direction of the country, it's a
predictor of very little except governorship and the U.S. Senate.

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gozur88
Heh. Wishful thinking. The Democrats lost both houses of Congress and (more)
state houses because they pushed the government further to the left than the
people were willing to go. If Ted Cruz is elected we'll have the most
conservative president since Reagan.

~~~
diego_moita
Clearly, you didn't read the article and are answering to the title.

~~~
gozur88
Or I did read it, and I think it's wrong. This kind of triple bank shot
wishful thinking on the part of leftists is kind of amusing, where every
defeat is _actually_ a victory, because something something Republican
something.

The reality is the country is quite a bit more conservative than Peter Beinart
wishes it was. This:

>But it is louder than it is strong. Instead of turning right, the country as
a whole is still moving to the left.

is simply wrong. Barack Obama did _not_ change the American political
trajectory. The only thing he did that will last beyond January is the ACA.
And even that won't last in its present form.

This is the sort of article people of all political persuasions like to read
as they're getting a good ass kicking. "I'm not losing. Look, his knuckles are
getting a bit bruised."

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bluejekyll
It's a good article and definitely supports its claims on social movement to
the left. I think this is generally true. More and more people are taking the
attitude that people should be allowed to do with themselves what they want.

What it doesn't do a good job is movement to the left on financial issues.
Equality etc., beyond some reference to socialism. The idea of upward mobility
is so strongly ingrained as part of US's dogma, even pushing it a little to
the left is always going to be hard.

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ende
What is left and right? These are completely meaningless concepts, especially
in an American context where the political nomenclature makes no sense at all.

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ksec
From an non-american, outsider prospective; America looks very messy. I wonder
do american think of the same, or is it the case loudest people trying to make
claims?

~~~
maxerickson
Can you expand very messy out to a couple of sentences or paragraphs?

Speaking as an American, lots of things that a person does day to day aren't
messy at all, but there are other things that are incredibly frustrating to
have to deal with. So it really depends on what you mean.

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GnwbZHiU
I think America is already in the left, and now is moving a bit to the right,
although still in the left of the centre.

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theseanstewart
Every 4 years older people (and their ideologies) die off, and they're
replaced by the younger generation that organically leans left. The current
version of the GOP is going to continue facing an uphill battle unless they
lighten their stance on social issues and move close to the middle.

~~~
douche
The question there is whether the incoming new voters are enough to counter
the predilection of existing voters to shift towards the center and right as
they age.

Idealism burns out as it contends with the friction of reality and becomes
jaded. Priorities also shift, as save the world becomes save my job becomes
save my family.

