The GOP can’t help but tip their hand that way because they don’t actually believe in or have respect for democracy as a concept. They’re authoritarians.
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THIS.
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" Why aren’t more conservatives concerned about felon voting rights?
Possibly because almost all incarcerated felons can not vote. And in Republican-led states, even ex-felons who supposedly have the right to vote restored upon petition don’t get it, because nothing happens when they do petition.
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The Florida GOP has since altered that law to exclude any former inmates with unpaid fines and fees.
Guess what race and class most of the “unpaid fines and fees” folks are from?
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There’s also a strong axis of whether you trust governments more or corporations more.
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Fundamentally this. American conservatism has been about little else for a long time now. It’s about authority, punishment, and choosing who the good people and bad people are. It has nothing to do with individual rights or fiscal responsibility or anything else.
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Because the republican party understands that in numerical terms, it is in the minority. If an accurate popular vote were all that counted, they’d be voted out of office wholesale. And the numbers -from their perspective- only continue to get worse.
Falsely accusing minorities of being felons has worked for them for a long time now. They’re not about to give it up on some philisophical theory.
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Where do libertarian-socialists fit on that?
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Honestly, I think this is and always has been a false dichotomy, as a government plays a major role in creating the mechanisms for corporations, and as a means of regulating them. But plenty of people understand the problem in that way, at odds, one or the other…
Here’s how I see it… Modern governance has always gone hand and hand with the rise of corporations. That regularly shifts from regulating them (primarily because the population puts pressure on the government to do so) to government being exploited by them to protect corporate interests. Although we do have to face up to the fact that modern governments are almost always centered on the idea of protecting “private property” in the marxist sense of the phrase.
Both should be about serving our collective interests as a species - coming together to create long term projects with a historical memory and goals for future generations is a great goal. If what we have isn’t working, we should throw it out or rework it to make it better. I think a major part of our current set of problems is that the government is no longer about regulating corporations, but is now basically working for the interests of corporations. It might be time to radically rethink these structures in general, how they intersect and co-exist, and the role they play in our lives.
This turned into a meandering mess, so I’m sorry!
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Not enough have been charged w felonies 
I dunno, you’d have to ask them? 
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I wanted to see if you had an answer first, before jumping in with my beliefs.
My personal opinion is that libertarian socialism breaks the axis, as they don’t trust governments, corporations or capitalism at all. I’d argue that capitalism and most governments are so intertwined that they are often the same thing.
This may be relevant to the future, as more people refuse to be put into the boxes marked liberal and conservative and we try to keep the disaffected on the left from becoming tankies (basically Stalinists and Maoists)
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I generally agree with that, but I’d also argue that there are ebbs and flows with regards to “dominance” in shaping governance. The best balance tends to come about when you have labor as an independent factor - when the state instead of breaking labor for corporate interests, invite them to the table to help shape fairer policies. But I think with the modern state you don’t get one without the other, despite the capitalist fantasy of a distinction between corporations and governments.
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Apples and oranges. Governments only speak with one voice when they are authoritatian. Democratic governments can be a sprawling mess of conflicting signals, subsidizing tobacco (for example) at the same time it warns consumers against it.
Corporations, OTOH, generally speak with one voice pretty consistently, since they only have to cater to the needs of the shareholders at the end of the day.
If we trust one entity less, then it doesnt follow that we trust the other entity more. And if one trusts neither corporations nor government, there’s always private unaffiliated action. Which is usually what grabs the headlines.
Casting doubt and sowing mistrust is a growth industry these days. Anyone trying to actually build trust in such an environment… isn’t to be trusted.
I think you’ve characterized USian governance pretty accurately. But Scandinavian patterns of governance have gone in a much healthier direction.
I wish, when people react to Bernie Sander’s democratic socialism, they would think Scandanavia instead of east Germany.
Yes, but it did not happen over night. It was hard work getting there and it’s not guaranteed to stay that way. But I’d argue that what I said can be said broadly of modern governance in the age of globalization.
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Hard work… and a much more visceral experience of life under corporatism than the American imagination can contain.
I wasn’t equating the way the two entities rule us, only stating that liberals and conservatives tend to give more benefit of doubt to one or the other. This is a theme running through all sorts of partisan issues. Healthcare, regulations, climate change, fiscal policies, foreign policy, etc.
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That’s not an accident. It’s the result of a decades-long disinformation campaign by conservatives to poison the word “socialism”. Americans think it means something completely different than it does, as a result, and have lost all understanding of nuance in political systems. Or maybe they never had any?
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