Politics and Religion

[hollodero]

(03-02-2021, 12:20 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Yeah, the US has always had a healthy dollop of religion mixed in with its politics.  Seeing as how many of the earlier settlers were fleeing persecution in Europe you got a big mix of different denominations.  Of course the central theme was always a high degree of piety, feigned or not.  For anyone that religious it can't help but bleed into everything else in your life, politics being no exception.  You don't exactly stop being something you've been for three hundred plus years overnight.

Well, I'm an European. We more or less did stop it, and we used to be just as religious as those first settlers. The difference rather was the confession, not the devotion.

(03-02-2021, 12:20 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: You're kind of halfway there, but its quite honestly a clash between what those on the left see as confronting and correcting historic evils and the right seeing it as an assault on the very foundations of the nation.  Both sides are simultaneously correct and wrong.  As Bel has correctly pointed out Trump is a symptom.  He's accelerated a trend that has been in motion for some time.

I consider him a symptom for many things, for a media world creating rifts, a social media world designed to reaffirm beliefs and radicalize them, a strict duality in political thinking that I deem unhealthy, and then some. Trump is - in hindsight - quite a logical development in many respects. But the religion-like devotion is something I still see as special, and also something that is not quite that prevalent on the left. The left usually does not love their own that unconditionally. I say that to spark controversy, of course :)

(03-02-2021, 12:20 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: I don't think that's largely true, although it certainly is for some.  I think for many right leaning people the vision the left has for the future of this nation is abhorrent.

I totally understand that, and I tried to put a "not all conservatives" exception into my words. I get that many probably voted Trump for that very reason, or like you (I suppose) did not vote for the alternative for that very reason. I am not at all talking of people with a persepective similar to yours. Eg. you always kept it real when it comes to Trump, and did not quite advocate a "take him seriously, not literally" view, or claimed that sometimes God sends bad people to do good things and all that more religious approach. Not even all Trump supporters will have that approach. Just, imho, many many do.

(03-02-2021, 12:20 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: In a way their position is completely understandable, they're now being told that everything they stand for and are proud of in their nation is evil and wrong.

I read that often, and it is something I do not fully understand. Who tells them that everything they are proud of is evil and wrong? Imho, that's not quite as dominant as you make it out to be.
Most on the left considered feverishly supporting Trump as wrong, me amongst them. But rarely do I see someone calling conservatives flat-out evil. That there's vast disagreement on many things is not the same thing as telling people they are evil, or supporting evil by leaning right. There are times where I consider the conservative take on that as slightly hyperbolic. As I, admittedly, often do in many respects.
I am aware that Joy Reed (I don't even want to check the spelling) or some other figures could probably reasonably be seen as demonizing, but I doubt that figures like that are a fitting rolemodel for the left as a whole.

(03-02-2021, 12:20 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Their culture is discounted or dismissed as never existing.  Unfortunately exactly what I feared, and predicted here, is coming to pass.  There are many on the left who do not want a reckoning of past wrongs, they also want punishment for those they feel have perpetrated those wrongs or benefit from them.  Many on the right, often correctly, feel they are being lumped in with awful people or practices simply by dint of their genetics (there's a word for this type of behavior btw).  To combat this they turned to someone who promised a stop to this, a bulwark against this trend if you will.  So, IMO, it's more about a return to nationalism than it is to a religion, at least for most.

Yeah well, as an European again I have a hard time to see democrats as not quite that nationalistic. To me, almost everyone in the US is pretty nationalistic to begin with.
As for the grand scheme of the things you said, I reiterate that I do not feel conservatives are persecuted in quite that extreme manner. I also feel that many many conservatives take mere contradiction as being demonized. I might be tainted by my own experience, where time and again I was asked with much anger if I want to call soomeone a deplorable now? No, I just dared to expressed a different view, and I usually have no idea where this extreme reaction is coming from. Imho, there's often some fretfulness going on.

(03-02-2021, 12:20 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote:   I think a large percentage of his supporters want to return to being able to be publicly proud of the US as a nation and its culture without being ridiculed and labeled a racist, yokel, redneck, hillbilly etc.  

I don't really see that either. I don't see the left as being fundamentally opposed to all aspects of american culture, in fact not at all. To some aspects, sure. And some loudmouths probably take it too far, in colleges or some really spaced-out circles. But the average democrat voter? That one is still proud of the US, of its cultural achievements, of being a shining city on a hill and the greatest nation on earth. In short, I much more see Bels as a typical left-leaning American then I see Antifa folks as such.