Guest post: But in the meantime
Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Desk job.
It does put us Democrats in a quandary the way that the party has embraced gender ideology. I see on Twitter how many Democrats plan to vote Republican even though they’ve always been Democrats; over gender and the roles that men like Richard Levine and the guy here in Minnesota who said that detransitioners should be dismissed because they are very low in number, Leigh Finke. But in the meantime:
1. The Republicans voted to oust their leader in the House because he refused to let the government shutdown, after previously refusing to let the country default on its loans.
2. The Republicans cut heating assistance for those unable to pay for high gas and oil costs in the winter.
3. The Republicans are looking for ways to cut Social Security and Medicare even though they are not funded by the general fund.
4. The Republicans are trying to keep us beholden to carbon-based sources of energy.
5. The Republicans are going to nominate for President a man who is under indictment for several crimes, including interfering with election officials, and has stated that he will initiate a purge of Deep State Operatives in the Executive department (meaning anyone who is not a true-redTrump-loyal conservative.) He is a man who has stated that the punishment for shoplifting should be death, just shot on sight. Never mind the Constitution!
Should I go on?
Yes, many liberals will leave the Democratic party for their stance on gender, but not enough for the Democrats to get the message of why, so they will go on with it. Some of us will try to find allies within the party as gender skeptics to try to turn this leaky ship around because the alternative is far worse.
In all the years I have been an active member and apparatchik on the volunteer side of Democratic politics, I have found many things I don’t like about the party. Now that I own property, I can see why many people get sick of their mortgage escrow being raised every year by Democrats and property taxes. I’ve also seen many people get fed up with the failures of the party to see reason on a particular issue and go to the other party, and we really are stuck with just the two.
So, I see what you are saying on this, but if some women have been trying to get their fellow liberals to see sense and get met with charges of bigotry and hatred rather than be heard, and find an outlet for their issues in a conservative framework whose only issue of agreement is on the issue of how transgender ideology is bad for women, I can hardly blame someone for using Fox News or whatever outlet that will actually put them on the air. And the intransigence of many liberals on the gender issue is going to turn some women conservative, no doubt. But if you place yourself in their shoes, can you fully blame them? The trans capture has fucked things up, royally. But one thing that it demonstrates is that our idea of what’s left and what’s right is based on the fallacy that people can be pinned down to one of two ideologies. Left and right blurred long ago, when you saw people jump from Sanders to Trump in 2016 it was just an example.
So, I don’t think it’s justified to say “they were never principled leftists/progressives/liberals.” Banging your head into a wall can do many things, among those changing one’s perspective.
In the future, everyone will be principled for 15 minutes.
One huge problem is that the Democrats have too large a tent; trying to fit everyone under their umbrella means there are a lot of conflicting interests, and they tend to listen to whoever shouts the loudest, or whoever can convince them they are the most important.
They have a history (admittedly, not a long history) of supporting LGB issues. When T tacked itself on to LGB, many people assumed it was the same thing, and they needed to support it. Those people have made an ass of u and me.
As for property taxes, I don’t like them either, but…in some states (Nebraska is an example) school funding is tied to property taxes. Legislatures are willing to cut property taxes, but do not add any funds for schools. I am a huge believer in the public schools, and I pay my property taxes with a grimace and a grin at the same time.
The reason property taxes are so unpopular is that they are taxing those with wealth more than those without wealth. The preferred taxes of many legislatures, taxing consumption, taxes those without money harder than those with. That just doesn’t make sense.
The real problem with the Democrats on issues like that is they don’t explain all that. Look, you’re paying property taxes, yes, but the schools are open and running. We can hire better teachers, train our kids for better jobs, etc etc etc.
Meanwhile, social causes are eating the faces of the Democratic party because they aren’t good at balancing conflicting rights. They want to be for rights for every group that identifies as marginalized (yes, the wording was very deliberate). If that means removing rights for women, all they have to do is convince themselves that said marginalized group really are women. I imagine it provides a lot of cognitive dissonance for a lot of people, but they get through it and work on behalf of the T, while sacrificing LGB and W to the cause without noticing.
And too many progressives think the best idea in the world is to break the government. Trump promises to break the government. Neither the hard right nor the hard left has anything coherent to take the place of all the functions performed by the government (most of them performed well), but since so few people realize government functions touch their lives, they are more than happy to break it. Let business handle it. What could possibly go wrong?
All good points, and one of my frustrations with a two-party system. Businesses running prisons has turned into a golden opportunity for grift and corruption at the cost of people’s “pursuit of happiness,” since there has been incentive for imprisoning more people for profit and judges have been caught taking kickbacks for jail sentences of people who would otherwise be given alternative sentencing options.
I fully support the schools and in Minnesota we have a unique system where we receive property tax refunds (based on income) from the state. So, while my escrow was more than $2800 last year for city and county taxes, I received nearly $1300 in return. Renters, who people forget also pay taxes through their landlords, also qualify but many are not aware and don’t apply. St. Paul is largely a Democratically run city, and while they do hold community forums to discuss taxes, are still not that great about talking about the services they provide in ways that convince people they are getting pretty good bang for their buck. It was especially so this last winter when weirding weather thanks to global warming made street maintenance especially difficult and streets were often coated with ice or buckling with potholes.
The real problem with property taxes is that they’re spent locally, so wealthy communities can use them to create elite public schools (among other amenities) while poor communities have to scuffle, or hope for state and federal funding. We really ought to be investing far more in the poorer areas so that they can have the kind of state-of-the-art facilities, dedicated and talented educators, and enrichment activities that the wealthy take for granted, regardless of the preferred system of taxation.
WaM, I agree totally. By a sheer chance of where my father happened to be born, I ended up going to school in one of those wealthy communities, and as a poor kid, benefited from the good school system (though it can be hell to be wearing the dress your classmate’s mother took to the thrift store last week).
That community has never voted down a school bond issue, or protested the taxes that pay for the schools. It’s the only city in Oklahoma where the wealthy put their kids in the public schools. So, the good public schools can benefit poor kids; the problem is, poor kids rarely have access. We lived outside of town on a farm once owned by my great-grandfather, who moved there long before it was a wealthy town, so we ended up having access to the best school system in Oklahoma, just by sheer chance of birth.
The problem is persuading people to pay for schools other people’s kids go to. A guy I knew at one job in Oklahoma City voted against every single school bond issue because he didn’t have any kids in school, and wasn’t going to pay for someone else’s brats. Oklahoma City rarely passed a school bond issue.
So how do we persuade people to quite being selfish assholes and try to lift all boats, instead of letting their rising tide drown everyone else?
iknklast,
Ayup. For some reason we’ve bought into the idea that education must be entirely under local control. While there are things that are best decided locally (teaching of local history, for one thing), most things that need to be taught are universal. One plus one equals two whether you’re in Kansas or Maine, after all.
Of course we have some de facto national standards thanks to federal funding and civil rights rulings (and a good thing too, or I’d have to find an honest job), but it’s telling that the Common Core only covered math and language arts, and even then it was controversial.
I’d change a lot of things about our education system if I had the power (such as the conveyor belt model in secondary education), but I’ll save that for when I’m made Secretary of Education.
One of the reasons that Arizona has such a problem gaining support to fund their schools is that retirees move there, to places like Glendale, and Scottsdale, &c, deciding that they want low property taxes because they already put their kids through school. Nevermind that they should want all those people providing services to their aging selves to be well-educated. Tech companies have a hard time recruiting employees with families because the schools are so poorly funded and they want their kids to have good educations.
There was an initiative passed shortly before I moved there to increase the funding from the states, but the legislature decided to ignore it and not enact it. Republicans insist on painting targets on their shoes.
I had a friend who lived in a different small town in Massachusetts than I did. He was complaining about people with small children, or planning to have children, who moved to town to take advantage of the excellent school system, then left town after their kids were grown. Such people voted at Town meeting in favor of things that benefited the schools, and raised taxes generally. He thought this was unfair. I didn’t see anything wrong with it. Of course his kids were grown and he didn’t feel like supporting the schools so much anymore.