I was initially replying to a question asked by @SpunkyTWS. So why are the two of you entitled to discuss how money factors into Republican ideals?
The fact that some people buy into practices that enable those ideals while being largely unaware of it IS relevant to “the GOP world view.” People of the US being economic captives to the hegemonic interests they front for is completely intentional.
People on the BBS go into huge digressions in nearly every topic here. So it seems very telling to me when I am actively excluded from input only within a very specific range of topics here.
I think the ideal GOP world is one in which hard work is rewarded and in which one is always rewarded because one has always worked hard. People only get what they deserve but one always deserves good things. People of all different races and religions have equal opportunity to succeed but one is never exposed to anything that makes one uncomfortable. People all follow the same set of rules and moral precepts because each of them has individually concluded that set is the right set using their own free will. God has a plan for everything and everything will work out for everyone.
Reason to feel like a winner but also no fear of ever being a loser.
How do you map that impossible fantasy onto the real world? I think you do it largely by treating classes of people as though they don’t count. People you know get included in the set of people who are supposed to be in the utopia while other people are secondary characters and phantoms - they cease to exist as soon as your interaction with them is done so you don’t have to consider how it fits into your worldview. Or they exist only as examples of what not to do.
Or they map that fantasy onto reality using impossible hypotheticals to avoid ever having to confront how unrealistic their fantasy is. If only we had more personal liberty we’d see that hard work is always rewarded, and then we’d also see that people do hard work under that system, and then everything would be fine.
Or they just throw their faith behind a strong man who they think can protect them from being a loser, even if it creates other losers.
Nevermind that these strategies don’t bring them closer to their utopia. The ideal world is not physically or even logically possible. There is a reason why the GOP is the anti-fact and anti-reason party.
Which isn’t what this topic is about. You want to ramble on about fiscal theory and who should/should not control currency that really is a different topic.
When I was a child, my brother and I would sometimes play Monopoly. By about half-way through the game, it’s pretty clear who’s going to win and who’s going to lose, but we kept playing. And you inevitably get to the point where one person owns everything and the other has nothing. But the winner is enjoying this - he’s winning, and every turn just puts him farther ahead. So the winner would offer to loan money to the other player, just to keep the game going longer, even though the outcome of the game hasn’t been in question for quite some time.
I think the GOP ideal world looks a lot like that endgame
Yes that happens… also it usually rerails back on topic quickly enough or if it keeps off the rails it is usually from the fact all useful discussion has been done and silliness overtakes things.
The GOP ideal world is one in which the President of the US can say something like this and it will actually make liberals physically start sobbing, like nerds in the bathroom after the school bully makes fun of them in front of the class.
When the original Bioshock came out I would regularly see Randroids saying that they thought it was good that Ayn Rand was getting more exposure. They seemed to be ignorant of how their underwater libertarian-capitalist “utopia” was a disrepaired hellhole where the population had turned feral.
So some Republicans do know all the lines to This Land is Your Land!
As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
Of course, systems of reward and punishment make a mockery of the individualism many such people profess to. Why is it that instead of people being naturally compensated for already doing what was beneficial, it inverts to people needing to be bribed into doing anything worthwhile? Why do they complain that voluntary sex work is “prostitution” when the entire work ethos of the country is prostitution of literally everything else?
If hard work is so important, then why are people so worried about being “uncomfortable”? Isn’t some discomfort a natural consequence of most rigorous activity?
We could go on like this indefinitely.
And I think this is also the reason why they need to be taken to task both in the media and in the streets. It is such an ideologically shaky house of cards that facts are hardly even necessary to highlight its own internal contradictions.
There’s a rather ugly irony in the fact that maintaining belief in a just world requires inflicting more injustice than almost any other theory, including a bunch of outright cartoonishly evil ones.
Psychologically, it’s a stress-reducing viewpoint for the holders–rather than live in fear that some random occurrence might destroy them out of the blue, they can console themselves that they’re safe from bad things, because bad things only happen to bad people in their worldview.
This, of course, directly leads to victim blaming and a host of other vileness…
A lot of people grew up spending more time watching these shows than doing other things in life, so the Hollywood feel-good milieux was more of their perception than reality. And those shows portrayed a very peaceful, happy, easy-going life. (How stressed are people at their jobs in Andy Griffith? They’re standing around reading magazines, chatting with customers, and playing checkers!) No one ever had to worry about money or other problems that couldn’t be solved in half an hour. Worst-case, the whole community would pitch in to help someone out and everyone would cheer about it. That’s the life that people want - what they think things used to be like. What they grew up thinking things had been like a generation before them.
Of course, it’s not just TV. Older people remember the good times and suppress the bad and tell stories about the good old days, how much better things were back then. Younger people, facing the hardships of reality, hear those stories and want some of that.
The GOP ideal world is safe, secure, comfortable, and relaxed.
A lot of gold-bug survivalists/preppers trend libertarian/conservative/republican to varying degrees. The idea of central banking and paper money controlled by the federal government being unconstitutional fits in with a lot of far-right-wing beliefs.
Or to anyone who cries that the use of money is a life-or-death issue for them, because it gives entrenched capital lots of control in their lives. Anyone who has to do many, very socially irresponsible things because they prostitute themselves for money. I would argue that “characterizes” as an acute problem for nearly everyone.
The difference might be that some on the right (even there a minority) actually try to give their ideology (such as it is!) some teeth. Meanwhile, the position of the center-left over the past few decades has been that other elite people have the real economic and political power, so our recourse is to petition them for fair treatment. Needless to say, that’s had mostly superficial results.
If you use tools given to you by plutocrats, those tools will mostly serve the interests of those plutocrats. So you don’t do it, unless you are fine with losing your kids, your time, and your ethics to a real-life game of monopoly.
Last time I mentioned something about being wary of statism, somebody kept saying that I was some sort of crypto-capitalist. I’m quite far from it, so let’s not go there. Many of the commentariat like to throw militant leftists under the bus.
