This has become a growing issue in American politics. As much as a love progressive politics myself. I can't deny the important of strong political opposition and the importance of conservative view points in opposition to progress.
Progressive politics has become ignorant to the people, and as a result the people have turned a dead ear towards it. Instead of trying to convince them of their new ideas and why they're better than the old ones. Progressives have adopted an assumption of, "the other side is evil and is deliberately holding us back".
It should be hard to cause political change. Most new ideas in politics are truly awful and failures at that level affect society gravely. Disagreement over how to move forward is fundamental to a functioning democracy and the emergence of good ideas. Yet modern politics seems to treat any amount of disagreement as a solemn oath of obstinance. Yes, changing minds politically is challenging, and yes it should be.
Part of the problem is that the left has erased all evidence of the failures of progressive politics (and in many cases the right has let them do so). When you just hear about the civil rights movement and marriage equality, it’s easy to assume that conservatives are just there to hold everyone back.
I’d offer three examples. First, “socialism.” Socialism failed dismally. One of the most colossal failures of a political idea in modern history. So progressives endeavored to replace “socialism” with “social democracy.” But “social democracy” as practiced in Europe approaches the problem from the complete opposite end. It abandons the socialist economic model and builds on a capitalist one. Put differently, it’s not “socialism with more democracy” it’s “capitalism with more democracy.” So progressives have turned social democracy—which is more than anything an affirmation of the success of capitalism, and an utter retreat from what progressives were pushing before—into a win for progressivism.
The second is the sexual revolution. At least in the United States, we have retrenched significantly on that front. Millennials start having sex later, and have fewer partners. “Affirmative consent” has replaced “free love.” The boundary-pushing on things like age have been pulled back hard. The #MeToo movement reaffirmed conservative truths: men cannot be trusted and society has a role to play helping women stave off unwanted and inappropriate advances. (Andrea Dworkin addresses this at length in Right Wing Women, though obviously long before #MeToo. In explaining why many women continue to support patriarchal systems, she notes that the sexual revolution stripped women of a lot of protections that those systems used to provide, with nothing to replace them. While Dworkin was obviously no conservative, she astutely recognized that the progressive tendency to throw out rules can easily end up overreaching. Many have lamented that the #MeToo movement is a return to a more Puritanical approach. There is a lot of truth to that.)
Third, eugenics. The history of support for eugenics in this country has been pretty much erased, even though the evils of Jim Crow get plenty of attention. That’s likely because many progressives backed eugenics. Woodrow Wilson, progressive champion, was a former New Jersey Governor and eugenicist who segregated the federal work force for the first time. He fired existing black federal employees (proving he wasn’t just a product of his time). Meanwhile, one of the strongest opponents of eugenics was the Catholic Church. In 1930, the Pope released an encyclical in which he condemned birth control, abortion, and eugenics as all being incompatible with the traditional Christian view of reproduction.
1. Could you point to things to back up socialism failed dismally?
2. At what point is affirmative consent anything similar to free love. Free love should still be consensual.
3. Eugenics is definitely a stain on progressivism, however I disagree that that has been erased. There's plenty of evidence of the US being swept up in the eugenics fervor.
Literally every country built in socialist economic principles, I.e. collective ownership of capital.
> 2. At what point is affirmative consent anything similar to free love. Free love should still be consensual.
That’s an attempt to reformulate “free love” to fit modern sensibilities. Read Dworkin’s contemporaneous take on the sexual revolution, starting at p. 89: https://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010...
> In the sexual-liberation movement of the sixties, its ideology and practice, neither force nor the subordinate status of women was an issue. It was assumed that — unrepressed — everyone wanted intercourse all the time
Affirmative consent is more than just “consent” (which too often turns into “the woman didn’t physically resist”). Combined with #metoo, it narrows the scope of sex to something shared between individuals under specific circumstances under specific terms and conditions, and demarcates vast swaths of human experience (like the work place) where discussing or propositioning sexual activity is inappropriate. That’s a huge retrenchment from “free love.”
On the other hand, if both parties stopped behaving like the other is an enema of the state and actually attempted to collaborate for the good of the American public, that would be great.
I think allowing other parties would be useful, the problem is even though other parties totally can be voted in, most people don't bother because you could lose your vote altogether if the party you disagree the most with wins. To put the example more bluntly I heard it said that Obama said a vote that isn't for Hillary is a vote to Trump, as in, if you vote third party, you may regret it.
Personally, I don't think two single political parties can represent all the hopes and dreams of all 300 million citizens. I know this may sound controversial to some, but it is starting to prove itself to be a problem.
I would agree with this. The problem with the article though is that assumes that changing the structure of the political parties is the best way to solve that problem. An alternate solution is to solve fewer problems politically, since the best person to advance one's hopes and dreams is one's self, and political solutions (whatever the arrangement of parties) necessarily are about enforcing conformity.
was it intentional or not? ;)
I think that's a great example of how not all problems need to be politicized - sometimes we as a society can make things better without involving the government.
I don't want to run down a rabbit hole of blame here. Rather, I wanted to suggest that it's not just symmetrical, and it's not as simple as "if only we on the left tried harder we could solve the problem unilaterally" -- because I don't think I've ever heard any similar accommodation from the right. I think we've tried that, and need to try something different.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansa...
I don't think it's a simple case that the Overton Window has moved to the right. When one reads for example the Democratic party platform of the 1990's, many of the proposals are more similar to what some Republicans argue for today.
In any case, my point is: maybe conservatives are to blame. Conservatives are roughly half the country. If the author wants to make some change, he'll half to convince at least some of that half. Speaking only to the favored half won't change anything.
I was waiting for a paragraph that started "On the other hand, many on the right believe the problem is the Democratic party," or something to that effect. The author says the problem is the two party system. I think this article shows that the problem is that half the country pretends the other half doesn't exist, and doesn't even bother addressing them, let alone convincing them to change their minds.