The problem is that when one set of people get weaponized by folks who are legitimately nefarious and or criminally stupid and mentally ill, there is not no moral stance which is effectively 'I don't like some people on one side so I will let the demonstrably dangerous people take the power and do what they want'.
Do you have a solution to this? Because otherwise giving 'both sides are just as bad' speech is borderline negligent.
But if I don't have any alternatives, I'd much rather have the "you can't burn wood in your fireplace" people in charge than the "force people to live as the gender assigned at birth" people.
One of those people is pushing policy that ultimately saves the human race from making the planet uninhabitable, while the other is imposing their small-minded religious worldview on people who have nothing to do with them.
And this is the thing that bothers me so much with the "both sides are just as bad" argument. Yes, agreed, they are, when it comes to listening to each other with empathy. I totally get that frustration, and I'm sick of the left/right culture war; both sides are to blame for perpetuating it.
Further, I think it's unfair to say that these two groups have more in common with each other than people who can listen with empathy; you're just comparing two unrelated axes of commonality.
I was straining to think of a good example of the 'left-wing authoritarian' but I have definitely experienced it, and apart the location of birth they are the same exact people who are just as intolerant on right.
On aggregate all humans operate pretty much the same everywhere in the way they think and operate -- the only difference is experiences and culture. That was the the point I was making -- we are never going to be rid of the people responsible for throwing wrenches in the political works.
Tangent: I think the only way this gets fixed is by putting a benevolent AI in charge of everything.
The problem, of course, is that none of them were actually left-wing. They were all just bog-standard dictatorships, using left-wing-ism as their excuse to maintain power, but not actually doing left-wing-ism.
Besides, the Democrat party isn't left.
What rights do these people not have that others do? Rights belong to all individuals.
> and inflation would be slightly lower as most capitalists aren't as brazen as Trump when he publicly threatened to fire the Fed chair if interest rates didn't come down. If Trump won in 2020 most of the bad political things happening in Florida would be happening to the whole country.
It's hard to say. Tump loved to sirens, and I am no fan of that, but inflation has been coming since Clinton left office. I find it unlikely that Hilary would have reduced the deficit, especially given the unconstitutional business closure orders that many states enacted, which PPP and enhanced unemployment sought to make condition via addressing 5A, but which utterly failed at doing so imo.
Tribalism being what it is, people can mistake the forest for the trees and think that the convenient shorthand we have for a correlated set of values is more strongly defined (more “real”) than it actually is.
The American right and left are very different when it comes to policy platform, and electing one or the other actually does have a measurable difference on what ends up happening to people in the country. This is especially true when we consider minority groups.
I agree that both sides are mainly interested in consolidating power and increasing the scope of government's oversight of people's lives. But even if I use your terminology, the "left wing tyrants" and "right wing tyrants", if one or the other were given complete control of the country... well, the country would look very different after some time, depending on which side were given control.
Well this is actually demonstrably false. Biden currently has the house and the senate, Trump has the house, the senate and the Supreme Court, Obama had the house and the senate… The rhetoric between these two sides is substantially different, but the governments they produce are very similar. They implement some token fraction of the policy platform they were elected on, and otherwise just plow through the same old policy agenda every time. Who’s opposing this Tory Online Safety bill in the UK? Technically Labour is, but only because they think it doesn’t go far enough…
No he doesn't, the Republicans hold the House. And while a bare majority is sufficient to pass legislation in the House, the Senate has this quasi-official filibuster nonsense which means it's hard to get a lot of things done without a supermajority. Additionally, any legislative change is typically immediately dragged into court which can slow down implementation for several years.