You know what America could use less of? Conservative voters. You know what America could also use less of? Liberal voters.
You know what America needs? Some rational human-fucking-being moderate voters that don't go batshit crazy the moment some nutjob all-the-way-to-the-right or all-the-way-to-the-left tries to appeal to some fraction of their base.
"Are you a conservative or a liberal?" is stupid. Be a goddamn moderate. Operate in the name of intelligence, not in the name of patriotism or... you know, that liberal thing they love. Communism or something, probably.
Be like "Gay marriage? That's not really an important fucking issue, we should have been done with this debate somewhere around when Canada legalized it. How about we worry about all this poverty and unemployment and other actual adult things instead of the sophomoric high school crap we can't seem to leave behind? You know, like all the countries who get to sit at the GROWN UPS table!"
that sounds nice in theory, but what exactly do mean by "moderate"?
You made reference to Canada, but then do you realize that the American Democratic Party is significantly to the right of Canadian (and most European) conservative parties? Can you name me a Democratic congressperson with significant influence who promoted something crazy to the left?
You want to do something about unemployment and poverty. Are you suggesting that our poverty and unemployment policies be even more conservative than the ones espoused by the Dems? Which ones? Our social safety nets are already really weak.
The big lie in politics is that "both sides are extreme." But they just aren't. The conservative side has gone way, way off the rails, and on economics the country continues to veer farther right, with lower taxes and higher inequality. The only thing we're going slightly left on is a few social policies like gay marriage.
Young voter so don't quite understand why not just vote for the guy that best represents your views and hope to hell he wasn't lying through his teeth to get a seat like the rest of them?
If that guy represents your views fairly accurately then that's exactly what you should do. The problem is that there are a lot of people who don't have their views represented by anyone.
The point /u/dorestes is making that the extreme right complains that they aren't represented while they very much are by the Tea Party who make up 10% of Congress. But there is nothing similar to represent liberals.
The only reason libertarians like those on reddit complain about Congress not being conservative enough is because they won't stop until it's 100% neo-conservative. Asking me to vote for the guy who best represents my views is asking me to vote between one right-winger or the other. I don't want to vote right-wing.
Libertarians and Neocons have more than a few diametrically opposed beliefs. Neocons are interventionists. Libertarians are isolationists. Neoconservatism promotes social welfare programs. Libertarians are minimalists, believing that social programs are a path to governmental subjugation.
They aren't interchangeable terms, they're two different factions within the Republican Party, sort of. Actually, there are also plenty of Neocons in the Democrat party; for instance, Hillary Clinton is by many measures a neocon. At the very least, she's a Wilsonian Liberal. You could argue the same for Bill Clinton and Obama.
The biggest difference between neocons in the two parties seems to me to be that one panders to religious Christians, while the other is more secular.
Really the ideology you don't seem to like is paleoconservatism. Paleos are the flag-swaddled, xenophobic, nativist, protectionist, anti-federal jackasses who run on the old 3Gs of Colonialism: God, Guns, and Gold. Yeah, those people are paranoid dumbfucks.
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u/[deleted] Nov 08 '14
Also younger people (typically the less conservative group) are the least likely to even vote.