DocWatts

Just thought I'd highlight this video from Second Thought as a useful resource worth a recommendation. It does an excellent job of articulating what socialism is in easy to understand language, and why socialism is relevant to an average person's day to day concerns. Considering how misinformed most people are about Socialism, having a basic understanding of the essentials will at least allow someone to evaluate this ideology from a more informed perspective (if they're willing to listen that is).

There are salient criticisms that can be made of Socialism, but in order to criticize an idea one needs to put some actual effort into understanding the thing they're criticizing. Knee-jerk ideological responses of this sort may fly on other areas of the Internet, but on this Forum we expect people to contribute to discussions in a more productive and informed way. As a demonstration of this, Leo's talked plenty on the limitations of socialism, and he does so without just calling it Evil in a really reductive way that conflates all of Socialism with Stalin-esque style Communism.

If I knew the answer to how Democrats could win back the South, I'd have a career in politics rather than as a software developer. My gut tells me that focusing like a laser beam on issues that have a direct and easily articulable relevance to people's day to day lives would be the answer. A Green New Deal that directly ties expanded economic opportunities to building the infrastructure we'll need to address Climate Change on a scale comparable to the industrial mobilization for World War 2 would be a smart way of doing this. But unfortunately, the deck is so stacked against Democrats for structural reasons that I don't see a realistic way of that actually happening in a timescale measured in anything less than decades. Either through demographic and generational drift, or from things getting so catastrophically bad under a potential right wing authoritarian regime that the Republican Party becomes discredited for the vast majority of Americans in a similiar way to Nazism being discredited in Germany after WW 2. As far as younger generations, I'm hopeful that on the whole a far smaller proportion of millennials and Zoomers will end up being indoctrinated into right wing ideologies than older generations. I'm less hopeful that younger people who do end up getting indoctrinated are any less radicalized than thier Boomer parents. The alt-right, 4-chan, and incel culture are onboarding tools for younger people that are just as bad if not worse than Fox News.

Socialism is not necessary synonymous with central planning (if I'm understanding you correctly). What most contemporary socialists are advocating for is a form of market socialism, where markets are still used to allocate a large portion of goods and services, but workplaces are arranged much more democraticly than under Capitalism. The 'personal property' that Marx was talking about specifically referred to forms of property that are used to exploit other human beings. Namely things like rent seeking (ie becoming a landlord), and businesses being set up in a way that excludes the vast bulk of the population from owning the means of production. What 'personal property' wasn't referring to was the ability for an ordinary person to own a computer or a car, which is a common misunderstanding of Marxism.

Camus is great. Not only does he confront notions of the absurd in a surprisingly life affirming way, he was an existentialist with a social conscious (which is more than can be said for some his contemporaries, like Sartre).

I think both of these points are quite perceptive, as the stagflation of the 70s provided a good opportunity for free market ideologues to spin what was essentially an oil shock made possible by the US's lack of energy independence, into a narrative that Social Democratic policies (policies that the US middle class was built on) were the culprit. And unfortunately, it worked. Right Wing think tanks went to extraordinary efforts to couple the free market economic reforms they wanted with lingering white resentment towards the Civil Rights movement. Which is where the myth of black welfare queens supposedly living the high life came from, which took off in the 1980s. You can see this playing out even to this day, with hysteria over things like trans rights and critical race theory.

Think of it this way. In a social democracy, there's still a place for wealthy industrialists and business owners, they're just not given free reign to do whatever the hell they want anymore. In an imagined socialist scenario, the Capitalist owner class is likely to be abolished (which is what happened in the Soviet Union). Faced with the threat of something like that happening in the States, much of the Capitalist owner class was willing to begrudgingly accept some amount of wealth redistribution to fund social welfare programs under the New Deal and Great Society. The New Deal and Great Society were designed to provide stability to capitalism, and to nip in the bud the potential for socialism to grow to the point where it had a chance to seriously challenge Capitalism as the predominant ideology in America. Just my own theory, but I think a large part of it is complacency of future generations that didn't live through the Great Depression, and didn't experience firsthand just how awful unregulated Capitalism is to live under. The living standards generated by Social Democratic policies such as the New Deal came to be taken for granted, and corporations had an easier time convincing people that it was Capitalism alone that generated prosperity, rather than a highly regulated form of Capitalism built upon social democratic policies. Add to that the collapse of the Soviet Union removing Capitalism's only major real ideological competitor, and the situation becomes analogous to an Internet Service Provider like Comcast gaining a monopoly once it's competition goes out of business. Then add to all that the diverging incentives structures between democracy and capitalism, and in absense of external constraints (such as a large and active Labor movement, or credible competition from another economic ideology such as Communism) Capitalism eventually eats democracy by capturing political institutions and concentrating wealth along a small group of elites.

It would be more accurate to say that organized labor activism advocating for socialism was able to extract policy concessions from Capitalism. Labor advocacy wasn't trying to save capitalism, it's members were largely concerned with trying to improve things that had a direct impact on ordinary Americans, such as pay and working conditions for laborers, the Right to form a Union, etc. Not to mention avoiding homeless and starvation during the Great Depression. Forward thinking liberals such as Roosevelt and LBJ understood that the alternative to the Social Democratic policies they proposed was growing social unrest that could grow to challenge the stability of the entire system. Keep in mind that at this time Capitalism was competing with Communist ideologies for 'customers' so to speak, and if conditions got bad enough in Capitalist counties there was a competing ideology that people could turn to. This actually served to moderate Capitalism because it didn't yet have an ideological monopoly, so it had to compete with more egalitarian systems.

It's because the New Deal and Great Society were concessions from Capitalism in the face of growing social unrest channeled by an organized and active Leftist movement in America. So rather than the New Deal and Great Society being drafted in spite of fears of Socialism, they were drafted precisely because of the threat that Socialist movements would continue to gain traction in America and potentially challenge the legitimacy of the State. Every Right that you enjoy was bought by people using the threat of force to challenge power structures. Note that force is not synonymous with violence, as general strikes and boycotts are non-violent ways that force can be projected. Governments don't tend to give people Rights out of the kindness of their hearts, they are usually coerced in to doing so by a portion of the population using force the enact policy concessions. This was as true for the Bill of Rights that was only made possible after a Revolutionary War, as it was for expansions of Civil Rights being drafted amidst race riots occuring in cities all across America in the 60s.

Grandpa could begin by pointing out that time and space are high level abstractions that we use to make sense of our experience. He could also explain that paradoxes are the borne out of the way that we use high level abstractions to frame problems that we come across In this case by thinking of an arrow as a discreet object with fixed boundaries, and by thinking that discreet objects occupy a position in something called space that's continuous (non-atomistic). And while we have good reasons for thinking this way in our day to day lives, science has shown that on a fundamental level what we think of as matter doesn't behave in the way we would expect from our interactions with macroscopic objects in our day to day lives. Particles are closer to possibility clouds with no definitive boundaries or position, then they are to billiard balls or anything else you can relate to in your normal life. Because our minds conceive of these two things (objects and space) as having different axiomatic assumptions, we run in to paradox. ...then grandson nods non-comprehensively, and Grandpa remembers that he's talking to a ten year old who doesn't have a frame of reference for Construct awareness

I'm reading a book on the Process Relational Philosophy of Alfred North Whithead right now. Which, by the way if you're a fan of Ken Wilber, I'd highly recommend Whitehead as a much of Wilber's Four Quadrants Theory is built upon Whitehead'a dialectical process philosophy. But I digress... I happened to come across a concise and illuminating analysis on both the utility and limitations of a 'Theory if Everything', that I thought I might share: "The true activity of understanding consists in a voyage to abstraction which is in fact a voyage to the system in which the fact is enmeshed. When a given systematic context is taken as fact, it demands a voyage to a still wider context for its comprehension. Thus there is a dialectical movement in understanding, a movement encompassing the exploration and explication of wider and wider contexts, each step of which further enriches the knowledge of the original fact. The task of philosophical understanding is to criticize these contexts in the sense of constructing a conceptual macro-system capable of elucidating their interrelationships. However, no philosophical system can completely formulate the ultimate context, because it is still abstract. Therefore the philosophical voyage can never reach it's destination; the perfect system is unattainable. The object of trying is not stability but progress. Not is philosohic enterprise an end in itself. Rather it is to render human life and the experienced world meaningful. A philosophy is successful when it expresses the general nature of the world as disclosed to human interests."

Richard Wolff has a number of books on socialism that are far more accessible and directly relevant to contemporary conditions.

True, but I don't think handing someone who's curious about socialism a very long and difficult that's text full of anachronistic 19th century references, as helpful for the vast majority of people. Similiar to how it wouldn't be helpful for someone who wants to learn the basics of Idealist philosophy to have Hegel's Phenomenology of Sprit dropped in their lap. Someone like Richard Wolff would be a better recommendation, as he does a good job of updating the insights of Marx for the modern world we actually live in. And in a way that's far more accessible and immediately relevant to contemporary conditions.

For what it's worth, my problem with anti-abortion as an ethical position isn't due to someone having a personal belief that abortion is wrong. Reasonable people can disagree on at what stage in an embryo's development we should consider offering it the status and protections of personhood. The problem is that as far as anti-abortion advocacy is tied to conservatism, it's an incoherent position where its regard for the supposed sanctity of life ends once a person is born. The unborn are an easy group to advocate for; they don't demand anything, aren't complex, and can't disagree with you. This incoherent stance is further compounded by the heartless and cruel way that not an iota of compassion is given for the actual struggles of families, let alone the difficulties that people forced to bring a child into this world against their wishes endure. If the majority of anti-abortion advocacy was closer to how something like Veganism is typically practiced, as a personal choice not to participate in something they view as immoral, I would have a far easier time respecting someone who holds that position.

I think that the bulk of the political alienation that you're alluding to stems specifically from the failures of neoliberalism, which emerged as the predominant political paradigm from the 1980s onward. Neoliberalism is the paradigm that emerged out of the Democratic party largely abandoning the interests of the working class in order to more successfully compete with the GOP after 12 years of Reagan/Bush, in a context where a legalized form of bribery (ie lobbying) has a huge impact on who wins elections. The result of which is that both political party's interests became more concerned with advancing the interests of Capitalism at the expense of the living standards of ordinary people (with the Democrats and Republicans being the 'soft' and 'hard' versions of this, respectively). No coincidence that this period inward coincided with a decline in living standards for ordinary Americans, and a feeling that politics is theatre without substantial impact on a person's day to day lives. Trump was able to cynically exploit the deep seated resentment against this paradigm (along with a burgeoning white nationalist movement) to propel himself to the White House in 2016, while Hilary Clinton was (correctly) identified as a poster child for neoliberalism.

No, I meant liberals; while there's some overlap between the two, Liberalism and Progressivism are distinct ideological poles. Think of the difference between Barrack Obama and Bernie Sanders as a good demonstration of this, then compare and contrast their differing perspectives on an issue like healthcare (a more regulated private market vs getting rid of private insurance in favor of Universal Health Care). They're both lumped together in the Democratic Party because of the peculiarities of the American two party system, but they're distinct enough that in a parliamentary system they would probably be different political parties. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to have nothing but disdain for Progressives, whom they view as extremists.

I think it's more accurate to say that more Liberal or Centrist minded folks are more likely to think of Progressives as generally well meaning but naiive (which interestingly enough is a common criticism against Liberals from Progressives). And also that Progressives can be unreasonable in their demands, which is a fair criticism.

I would argue that's more true for people with a more developed perspective taking framework, but on much of the Right there's also a deep seated hostility and suspicion of the motives of people professing egalitarian Values. If your own moral framework conceives of society as a zero sum dominance hierarchy of groups fighting other groups, it makes sense that you would be suspicious of someone claiming to want to dismantle or flatten power hierarchies. In that person's mind, what an egalitarian is really trying to do is, far from make everyone equal, is to place thier own group at the top of the hierarchy by knocking everyone down a peg.

People tend to interpret the motivations of others though thier own moral and ethical framework, and how much this distorts one's views of others is directly correlated to how developed a person's perspective taking framework is. For someone who's at a stage of development where thier circle of concern doesn't expand far beyond thier immediate social circle or ethnic group, of course they interpret Progressive politics as a front to privledge one's own group (blacks, gays, the poor, etc) at the expense of others. The reason they end up thinking this way is because that's exactly what they would do. Progressives understand there are differing motivations between these two camps, while conservatives are more likely to project their own motivations on to thier opponents. Of course both camps are far from perfect in this regard, just that conservatives tend to be far worse at it than liberals or progressives.

Most of the supposed failures of liberalism can be chocked up to the failures of neoliberalism and capitalism. Liberalism is a necessary foundation in order to have a functioning pluralistic society. National experiments which have attempted to bypass liberalism have been unmitigated disasters (ie the Soviet Union). Of course there are limitations to liberalism, which is why it needs to be transcended and included in more forward looking models of socio-political organization (whether that's socialism, or process-oriented social democracy). And in it's extreme forms (ie libertarianism), it's absolutely detrimental to society.

How this will actually play out is that affluent people will still be able to get abortions, either by using their connections to bypass existing laws or by traveling to places where it's still legal. The brunt of this will be felt by the working class and the poor (which are disproportionately non-white communities). The practical effects of which will be an increase in cyclical poverty in those communities, and more people being fed in to a revolving door prison system. An interesting unintended side effect of federally legalized abortions was also a noticable drop in crime nationwide (from less unwanted children being born in to desperate circumstances), so expect that trend to reverse over time. https://www.prb.org/resources/new-study-claims-abortion-is-behind-decrease-in-crime/ And of course all of this is aside from misery for millions of women and families who will be forced to carry unwanted or unviable pregnancies to term.

That pretty much nails it. At the end of the day fascism is a symptom of a failing democracy. Trump's MAGA Cult is exactly what one would expect a proto-fascist movement adopted to the American system to look like. Does that mean that most conservatives are fascists? Of course not. But tens of millions of conservatives have been manipulated in to supporting what's effectively an Americanized form of proto-fascism.

The difference between someone like John McCain or General Mark Millie (regardless of what you think of thier politics) and someone like Trump or Desantis is a good demonstration of the difference between healthy conservatism and the proto-fascistic direction the Republican Party has decided to embrace.

From a few years back, from a Methodist Pastor with more wisdom and compassion than any on the Right who pushed for this outcome:

What are the features of 'actual' fascism that aren't already present to some degree on the American far Right? Fascism by necessity adapts itself to the society that it's operating in, so isn't it possible that what we're seeing are elements of fascism being adapted to the American socio-political context? After all the context and constraints here are quite different than in places like the Germany, Spain, or Japan of 80 years ago, so one would expect the face that fascism wears to be quite different. After all, literal neo Nazis have figured out how to adapt to a changed cultural landscape by trying to sanitize their ideology, and make it more palatable to modern sensibilities (as evidenced by more benign sounding 'race realism' being used as rhetorical cover for fascist ideology, to list just one example). I understand that we shouldn't be using fascism as a pejorative, but drawing out some of the parallels that exist seems completely legitimate if done with care (emphasis on the 'if done with care' part).