pjwestin @ pjwestin @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

OK, first off:

Both sides are NOT the same.

LITERALLY NO ONE SAID THAT. EVEN THE MEME SHOWS THAT THEY ARE DIFFERENT. IT'S NOT THAT THEY ARE THE SAME, IT'S THAT ONE IS SHIFTING RIGHT WHILE THE OTHER ONE IS NOT SHIFTING BACK.

OK, now that that's out of the way...you think Biden was great for the environment because he limited (not banned, limited) Arctic drilling? Then why did oil production go up under him?

American oil production has reached its largest volume in recorded history—more than 13.2 million barrels per day in October, official figures show—outpacing its highest point under Donald Trump's presidency, 13 million barrels daily in November 2019.

Environmentalists say that the levels of oil production seen at present in the U.S. are not necessary to facilitate the transition to renewable energy, and that it is within the president's power to curtail it.

While domestic oil production has soared to new heights under Biden, figures produced by the Bureau of Land Management suggest his administration has not significantly reduced the number of drilling permits on public lands, despite the president saying in February 2020: "No more drilling on federal lands, period." Newsweek

There's tons more I could say; the BEACH Act is good, but it's just amends the Clean Air Act to add testing for recreational waters. H.W. Bush did the same thing with the Clean Air Act Amendment in 1990, which effectively eliminated Acid Rain. Reagan and Bush were still both shit compared to their predecessors, but Clinton wasn't significantly different.

You can see it in almost every issue. Crime? Biden championed the crime bill in the 80s that led to mass incarceration. The Clinton's were even more zealous on incarceration (remember Hillary's Super Predators?). Obama did speak out against mass incarceration, but he did little to curb it, and he started giving the police surplus military equipment. The economy? Carter was the one that started distancing Democrats from the New Deal, while Clinton deregulated Wall Street and paved the way for the 2008 crash; Obama response to that was basically the exact same bank bailouts that Bush had been doing, plus some weak regulation that was nothing compared to what Clinton repealed.

I could keep going, but I just don't have the time to keep going over nine administrations worth of legislation, only for you to say, "nuh-uh, here's a single piece of legislation a Democrat passed once." I don't know what to tell you. Look up Overton window, I guess.

Holy shit, I don't know when I started misspelling Reagan's name, but now I feel like I need to go through thousands of replies and figure it out, because this has definitely been going on for months.

It really isn't that right-wing, especially economically, but there's a lot of factors that make it seem that way. First is that it did go through a large, neoliberal shift in the 80s during the Regan years. When the economy crashed in the early 90s, the Democrats decided that, instead of returning to their New Deal roots, they would also run on neoliberal policies. The Republicans moved further right because of that, especially on social issues, and then the Rachet Effect described in the meme really started to ramp up.

Couple this with a lot of political illiteracy among the public in general, and you get a lot of people who actually don't know what they believe and default to partisanship. If you poll people if they support gun control, you will get a very negative response, but if you break gun control into individual measures (longer waiting periods, mandatory background checks, magazine capacity limits, etc.) you get much more support. It's the same on almost every issue; people don't support a, "big government takeover," of the healthcare system, but they broadly support Medicare for all. There's a somewhat famous picture of a guy holding a sign that says something like, "Get Your Government Hands Off My Social Security," that I think sums up this ignorance pretty well.

This attitude isn't limited to the right, either. If you asked a Democrat "Who deregulated Wall Street?" they'd probably tell you Regan, Bush, or the other Bush. In actuality, the most significant deregulation, which lead directly to the 2008 financial collapse, was Clinton's repeal of Glass-Steagal. Liberals think that Obama made significant progress on regulating Wall Street, but what he put in place was nothing compared to the deregulation that proceeded it.

Citizens United and the rise of mega donors also plays a pretty significant role in moving the parties away from policies that the general population want and towards the goals of a few oligarchs, but this reply is already way too long, so TL;DR: the country got pretty right-wing under Regan, both parties became more right-wing as a result, the population has become much more left-leaning since income inequality/cost of living went way up, but the parties are still both right-wing and most people are too ignorant to understand that.

If it’s a straight line from Nixon to Trump as you say, then why claim Republicans are environmentalists with Nixon as your example?

I'm not claiming Republicans are environmentalists, but if you want to know why they got so much worse on the environment, the answer is the Ratchet Effect. The thing you misinterpreted as, "both sides bad," explains exactly how we got here. In Nixon's era, environmental issues weren't considered particularly partisan. Nixon, Ford, and Carter all had generally the same outlook on using the federal government to regulate corporations on the environment.

Then comes Regan with a lurch to the right. He tries to de-fang the EPA and hundreds of employees resign en mass. But he's not all bad; he is instrumental in passing the Montreal Protocols, which effectively fixed the hole in the ozone layer, but he's much worse than his predecessors. H.W. Bush was a little worse than that. He continued Regan's deregulation campaign, and while he held several climate summits, he made no substantial moves on the climate.

With Clinton, we can see how the Democrats stopped the Party from moving back to the left on environmental issues. Clinton was, economically, very similar to Regan and Bush, and placed the corporate profits above the environment. He tried to make some progress with the Kyoto Protocols, but it was mostly ineffective, relying on cap-and-trade policies that did little to reduce emissions. Then it was the next Bush, who pulled us back out of Kyoto and was generally worse on all fronts for the environment. Next came Obama, who certainly has a mixed history on the environment. He put us in the Paris climate accords, but also went heavy on coal and fracking, plus approved the Keystone Pipeline. Finally we get Trump, who is a climate change denier and Captain Planet villain, which was interrupted by a brief interlude from Biden, who put us back in the Paris accords for a few years but also expanded American oil production.

Do you see how, over time, the Republicans move farther and farther to the right on the environment? Do you see how the Democrats fail to bring us back to the left when the retake power? That's the Ratchet Effect. Democrats aren't nice environmentalists that just want to fight the evil Republican polluters, they're constantly shifting right with the Republicans. This is true for immigration, the economy, crime, and if guys like Gavin Newsom get their way, it will soon be LGBTQ rights as well. Your binary, black-and-white view on these issues just doesn't reflect history or reality.

Well, there are a couple of differences there. First, Trump is an excellent media manipulator. Every moment that pundits thought would be a campaign-ending gaffe became free publicity. He got the equivalent of $2 billion in free media coverage from CNN alone.

Second, Trump didn't actually say or do anything that would upset the donor class like progressives do. He was more vulgar and crass, and the RNC was certain he would cost them the election, but he wasn't an existential threat to billionaires the way Bernie was.

However, if you want an example of how the RNC behaves when someone like that is running, look at the 2012 Republican Primary. Mitt Romney was the frontrunner, but the base was unenthusiastic about him and looking for someone different. Ron Paul polled in second place literally the entire campaign cycle, but the pundit class gave him no coverage. They wrote endlessly about Chirs Christie, Rick Santorum, and even Herman Caine, all of whom had brief moments as the frontrunner, but they completely ignored Ron Paul. His staunch libertarian beliefs threatened the defense industry and Wall Street, so the media and the party just pretended he didn't exist. (For the record, Ron Paul was a wack-job and I'm glad he never became president, but the Bernie parallels are strong).

...except the centrists and neoliberals went to Trump. Hillary and Harris both spent their campaigns courting them, and they both lost. Biden, for all his faults, had Bernie help him craft a progressive policy agenda and won. The Democrats undermine the progressive wing of their own ostensibly left-leaning party in primaries and other intraparty conflicts, then get to the general elections and get wrecked because neoliberals would rather vote for the Republicans than pseudo-Republicans.

Democrats didn't flip on gay rights until Obama

And Obama didn't flip on gay marriage until the end of his first term. Biden came out in favor of it, which forced Obama's hand, but it wound up being the right move; it energized the base when enthusiasm was starting to wane. Then, under Obama's leadership, they continued to do nothing to establish gay marriage at the federal level.

No, dude...just...no. You tried to claim that saying, "a Republican founded the EPA," and, "Republicans ended slavery," were the same, even though there was a century of history between those events. More importantly, Nixon is exactly the person you don't want to make that argument about, since Nixon is the very person who pivoted the party towards its modern strategy of using the politics of racial aggrievement to get working-class whites to vote against their self-interests. Going back to the Civil War, or even the early Civil Rights era, things get ideologically murky, but you can draw a straight line between Trump and Nixon.

First reply: "Giving Nixon credit for the EPA means you support Republicans and therefore Trump."

Second reply: "NIxon was so long ago he doesn't count."

You can't have it both ways. You can't claim pointing out a good thing Nixon did means I support modern Republicans while also claiming Nixon happened so long ago that he's not connected to modern Republicans.

It's also just factually wrong to say, "it was so long ago, its like saying they're the anti-slavery party." Nixon represents the turning point for the Republican party, where they abandoned their support for Civil Rights and embraced the Southern Strategy. He's basically the turning point for where the Republicans became the party we know today. He's the reason it's bullshit to point out Republicans are the party of Lincoln.

If you're talking about the Respect for Marriage Act, that was passed a decade after the Supreme Court established gay marriage as the law of the land. The overturning of Roe made Democrats decide that they should codify gay marriage, since they saw how badly failing to codify abortion rights turned out. It also reopens the door for Civil Unions and passed with large Republican support, so I wouldn't exactly call it a huge win for Democrats.

As for the EPA, I'm not sure what you're talking about, but you are absolutely incorrect. Nixon proposed the EPA and NOAA through executive order, and it was later ratified by Congress. It's possible you're referencing some sort of dispute Nixon had with Congress on how they intended to create the EPA, but he absolutely supported it; it was his idea.

Eh, I saw a lot of the same shit on Reddit. I think you'd have to go back at least 7 or 8 years to find a version of Reddit that wasn't trash.

That is absolutely not what I'm saying. I'm correcting objectively false claims you're making; environmental laws were not all Democrats, the Democrats did not do anything at the federal level to pass, "full gay rights with marriage," and the meme and OP did not say, "both sides bad." Those points are a statement of fact, not an argument.

That is absolutely not what I'm saying. I'm correcting objectively false statements you're making; environmental laws were not all Democrats, the Democrats did not do anything at the federal level to pass, "full gay rights with marriage," and the meme and OP did not say, "both sides bad." Those points are a statement of fact, not an argument.

Well, .world has a lot of users who understand this, but the loudest voices (who are often times moderators) are definitely Democrat apologists. Then again, some of the other instances, like .ml, have the opposite problem, and are full-blown tankie/authoritarian apologists, so it's kind of a, "pick your poison, damned if you do, damned if you don't," situation.

Democrats took America from gays are illegal, to full gay rights with marriage.

Gay marriage was legalized at the federal level by a conservative-leaning Supreme Court. The only time a Democrat acted on same-sex marriage nationally was when Bill Clinton banned it by signing DOMA in 1996.

Environmental laws have been all Democrats.

Nixon created the EPA.

If Democrats did nothing, Trump wouldn't have signed 76 executive orders reversing Biden orders on his very first day.

If Democrats passed legislation, Biden's achievements couldn't be undone through executive order.

The parties are not the same, especially now that one of them is openly fascist, but you're giving Democrats credit for things they did not do. Also, the meme doesn't say they're the same, it describes the rachet effect, which is an accurate representation of how Democrats behaved on multiple issues. Look at how their economic policies have changed over the last 30 years, or how their views on immigration policies have changed since Trump was elected.

Reducing the proposed capital gains tax from 44% to 28% and abandoning Medicare for All for medical debt easement are objective metrics that show the Democrats becoming less progressive in 2024. If you want to delude yourself into thinking the opposite is true, i can't stop you, but I'm bored of proving you wrong.

Her capital gains tax proposal was 28%, much lower than Biden's proposed 44%; abortion rights and legal Marijuana are comfortable center-left territory in 2024; easing medical debt instead of abolishing it is the definition of a centrist solution, and she doesn't get credit for supporting Medicare for All when she abandoned that position in the middle of the 2019/2020 primary.

She absolutely did not have the same things. Biden's BBB had Medicare expansions, universal Pre-K, and the expansion of the child tax credit. Harris ran on small business loans and first-time homebuyer's credits. Biden ran a working class platform that Sanders helped write, while Harris ran a middle-class campaign with Mark Cuban.

That's the cool thing about denial; no matter how much information I give you, you just say, "Actually, that progressive thing is centrism," and continue your delusion.

Yeah, if you say it enough times, maybe it'll become true. ¯(ツ)/¯