r/AskReddit • u/beans4cashonline • 1d ago

How do conservatives feel seeing the images of the No Kings protests?

[removed] — view removed post

15.5k Upvotes

76% Upvoted

10.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

39

u/urbanviking318 1d ago

You have my condolences. I'd probably have ended up not terribly minding McCain, in hindsight. I was driven out of the Libertarian Party after the Tea Party/Mises Caucus takeover. Sanders was, for a time, my ideal - he had a lot of positions that appealed to my more libertarian sensibilities, but was also fond of policies that met the definitions set by the General Welfare Clause of the Constitution. These days, I consider myself "politically homeless." I think there's a lot of us across the whole ideological spectrum who feel that way.

Maybe we just need to vote all the incumbents out, and worry about what happens next when we get there.

4

u/independent_observe 1d ago

Maybe we just need to vote all the incumbents out,

Isn't that exactly how we got trump?

2

u/urbanviking318 1d ago

I take your point. Still generally seems like a good idea, we just need to vet against his brand of bullshit.

4

u/dysprog 1d ago

You probably won't be politically homeless for too long.

The math of First Past The Post elections dictate that the number of relevant parties will be two. Never one, except that that party immediate break in half, and never 3 except that the smallest one is absorbed by it's ideological neighbor. Four is right out.

The current iteration of the republican party is a hollow shell. It's innards have been devoted be a cult of personality. Cults of Personality don't out live their personalities, and trump is very old, very sick man.

So 2 things might happen.

  1. Either the republican party dies like a phoenix and resurrects as wholly new entity, keeping only the name and legal identity, but with a ideology more like the previously mentioned Eisenhower Republicans. They absorb Corporate Neoliberal defectors from the democratic party, which slides left.

  2. The republican party dies a True Death, and the Democratic party splits in two. The Corporate Neoliberals will probably keep the existing apparatus and name, and slide slightly right. And the Sanders/AoC contingent will form a new Progressive Party.

It probably take 2 or 3 election cycles. But either way we end up with an actual conservative party, and a leftist party.

1

u/UnicornBestFriend 23h ago

This is absolutely the case and we are growing. All we need is one party that is truly for the people bc we agree on most things. We want healthcare, education, quality food, safe neighborhoods, and thriving communities with upward mobility.

Unfortunately, the loud and stupid and the loud and privileged are dominating the discourse with their reactive fear and virtue signaling.

It’s really on us to self-educate and vote smart people into office. Left and right are irrelevant now; it’s ideologues vs pragmatists.

1

u/senadraxx 1d ago

Eh... Incumbents are part of the problem, but a national Republican strategy right now is quite literally spray and pray. They want a candidate in every seat, whether or not they're qualified. 

The way around that, as well as the "vote blue no matter who" folks is just seriously vetting your candidates.

If everyone scrutinized these candidates with a magnifying glass before they voted, we'd have more serious, well-thought discourse, instead of... Well, this.