Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/02/14/tom-the-dancing-bug-the-american-story-liberals-are-always-right.html
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A little on the nose don’t we think?
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Maybe Ruben got fed up with having to tiptoe around economic anxieties and to be fairs?
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A non-partisan version of this (that still avoids bothsidesism) is that liberals are willing to consider new ideas and try new things, conservatives much less so. Because the world has always been full of lots of horribleness, and because trying new things also includes a willingness to observe which of them make more sense, the liberals tend over time to converge on a subset of new ideas that are much better than what we have now.
In other words, whichever liberals ideas manage to get enacted as law and stay there are very likely to be right in hindsight. There are also a lot that would be right, but never get enacted. It does not mean every major liberal idea is right, or even better than the status quo. The comic talks about abolishing slavery, which was of course obviously right even at the time. In practice, we got the 13th-15th amendments, and those were the right thing to do. But there were also a not-insignificant number of people, who really couldn’t be considered conservative by the standards of the day, who thought free black people in America should go (or would want to go) “back” to Africa. These people were also advocating a large change in the direction away from slavery and towards black freedom from white oppression, and they were very very wrong.
I really wish we still had a conservative party that actually had any sort of coherent vision of the country and governance at all, instead of the absurdity we have now. Debate with a competent opposition is really valuable for refining new ideas into the best versions of themselves, and I’ve basically never seen it in US government in my lifetime.
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Racism and bigotry and other things far too many conservatives hold dear should not be a thing that needs to be non-partisan. People who embrace those things are the problem. Not sure why we need to couch that in terms that preserves some people’s feelings…
When has it been anything but prop up the ruling class at the expense of the rest of us… The Republican party hasn’t’ been the party of lincoln and abollistionist in a very long time.
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I would argue that the modern Republican Party isn’t conservative at all. They’re quite radical reactionary. They are proposing massive change, including rewriting the Constitution and installing a dictator. These are not conservative. The modern conservatives are the centrists of the Democratic Party. The modern day liberals, in the American political sense of that word, are the much smaller progressive wing of the Democratic Party. In other words, we have two parties. One is fascist, and the other contains a mix of conservatives and liberals.
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Hmmm… following along with the guidance of @the_borderer, I’d call them reactionary rather than radical? Yes, they want change, and extreme change at that as you note, but in order to preserve a mythical hierarchical social order based on the pre-capitalist, pre French Revolution understanding of a proper social order…
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Pat gets it.
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Fair enough. I wasn’t taking into account the historical context of the usage of those terms, because that’s not my area of expertise, so thank you for enlightening me.
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Given how much you educate me on the legal system, turn about is fair play, sister! 
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So it really does have a liberal bias! Reality, I mean.
(Not that I don’t have problems with Murican “liberals” from my further-left perspective, but whatevs.)
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And remember that this “proper social order” also involves uppity wimmin knowing their place as well as the peons doffing their caps correctly.
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What I wish is that we didn’t have a significant proportion of the electorate that was basically happy to go full on fascist. I mean I’ve always known that we had some Nazis on the fringes, but I never realized just how many people have been biting their tongues and biding their time.
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Well, this is a refreshing change. I don’t need to go cry after for once.
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Just to keep us all in shape…
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This reads like a big FU to the Republicans that like to remind people that Lincoln was an R and that the racist, southern governors were Ds.
I loathe those assholes.
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The comic is non-partisan, though. It is explicitly about differences in moral stances independent of what political parties the people belonged to.
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If it helps any, they’ve always been here and they never believed in democracy. I’ve said before how I grew up in an extremely conservative, christian nationalist household (and dad was a cop, no less!). From a very early age their justifications and grievances never added up. Every Sunday we heard a litany of mostly fabricated stories of the oppression of christians right alongside unironic admonitions that muslims were inherently evil because they were the descendants of Cain cast out east of eden. They have always believed that “god’s laws” trump the laws of man, that women should never have been “given” the right to vote (scare quotes because rights aren’t given, they’re merely recognized after long hard-fought battles for equality) and in the same breath that America is god’s chosen kingdom on earth and the government is the problem.
My earliest memories are of trying to square all of these circles with what I was witnessing in real-life. There is about a 15% portion of America and realistically every nation on earth, that is fully supportive of the concept of strong-arm dictatorships. There is another 15% or so who are dictator-curious and can be swayed one way or the other depending on how charismatic the candidate is (those wily Obama/trump voters for instance). Those are appallingly high numbers, but only because we tend to think we’re more highly evolved than we are. Honestly, I feel really fortunate that my experience is what it is because I am still able to see that hope ultimately does prevail having grown up in such a hopeless, hateful world. It only solidified my belief in democracy, the decency of the vast majority of people and the reality that humanity ultimately does win out… it just takes a lot longer than it would if everyone acted on empathy and a sense of service instead of fear and hatred.
I’m with the bug on this one.
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I’ve been thinking about this for a while in terms of “what is one thing conservatives have been right about?” and I can’t think of anything.
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