So, the traditional divide in american politics over the past century or so seems to be this. The right is essentially individualistic and self interested, the left is essentially collectivist with less emphasis on self interest. And it's a crap divide, and it's one that is unfavorable to the left.
I don't believe that human interest is "evil" per se, but I do believe it's self interested. At the end of the day, people care about themselves, their families, and maybe beyond that their local communities and close circles of friends, but that's it. People only have limited mental bandwidth and expecting people to care about everything and everyone is something that just doesn't compute for most people. Me, being autistic, my bandwidth is even more limited. I care more intensely about fewer things, but all people only have a limited amount of bandwidth for caring.
That said, most people trend toward the right. The idea that people get more conservative as they get older is a nod to this, and might actually be summing up my malaise to some extent. I'm in my 30s now, I have less bandwidth to "care", so I just...don't. Honestly, I don't really believe my values changed, but I will say that how much I care about advocating for them has. I've focused more intensely among my top priorities, and have kind of stopped caring about so called lesser priorities. I could see, as people get older, get entrenched in jobs, and have kids, that that becomes their world and any challenge to it scares them. So they seek to preserve what they have. Of course, being a millennial, and living in this dumpster fire of an economy, I just...haven't done that. Instead I got a fire under me about how this economy sucks and needs change and I ran with it. But still, over time, I've become more narrow and focused on what that means, what the core issues are, and how to solve them. I can't afford to get bogged down on everyone else's issues. THis means that I'm not driven to the right, but maybe I am some sort of yang-esque center.
But, in a sense, that's what I believed all along, and I'll get to that in a bit, before that, I want to go back to outrage culture on the left. The left has this obsession with caring. Even Rush Limbaugh noted this when i was a conservative in his books. he pointed out that a big thing about the left is they need to constantly circlejerk about how much they care. They gotta wear those little pins for cancer or AIDs awareness. They gotta hashtag everything about BLM. And encountering leftists online, everything is a purity test of caring. You're supposed to drop everything and care about the latest flavor of the month, or you're a bad person. Even progressives do this. Like screaming about israel and brown kids being bombed. is the treatment of palestinians awful? yes. Can you expect people to want to perform activism surrounding that constantly and purity testing people who might see the issue in a more nuanced way? No. After a while, outrage culture leads to backlash culture, and backlash culture leads to the right gaining more dominance as people focus more on self interest and "screw you I got mine" mentalities. And people eat it up. And this is, in my opinion, why the left seems to struggle so much in politics. Because they come from a disadvantageous position of lofty causes that dont connect to the every day lives of people, and people stop caring, start getting annoyed at the self righteousness of people who do care, and it just leads to the right gaining more support.
So, how would I, as an ex conservative, counter this? Simple, what I liked to call "enlightened self interest". There is nothing wrong with being interested in yourself. But, we need to have a left wing movement that actually furthers most peoples' individual self interests. And this is why I'm so big on UBI and medicare for all. Basic income is a policy that structurally would benefit roughly 60-80% of the population. Sure, the top 20-30% would lose under it, but those are the richest 20-30% of Americans who pay the most money in taxes. Most people, including most of the middle class (as defined by the literal middle, none of this nonsense about an 80 percentiler being "middle class"), would benefit from these proposals. In an immediate way. They would see themselves getting more money in the long term. it would be positive for them. And it would fit yang's idea of modern and effective governance. People might hate paying taxes, but they like getting money, and if you get more money than you pay in taxes, then you should support the policy. And given the prevalence of anti work culture in modern years (the one good thing to come out of this crapshow), maybe UBI could appeal to those with anti work goals. Not everyone would be a winner here. Those upper class suburbanites the democrats love to pander to will be horrified and vote republican, but if we can get the rest of the working class on board, it won't matter.
Same with medicare for all. Many people hate the healthcare system and its full of holes. If we get universal coverage we might see not just the poor get covered, but the middle see clear benefits as the cost of their coverage decreases significantly. No more insane copays and deductibles and everything else. This is kind of why I'm for M4A even if expensive. People are paying anyway, it's a matter of how. And medicare for all could do a good job reducing costs for most Americans with, once again, only the rich paying more.
These are only a few ideas, but this is the sort of stuff the left needs to embrace. Because you could sell it to people as "hey this directly benefits you." It makes your life materially better, in a direct way, and the only people it backlashes against are the top 20%, who are the most wealthy in society anyway and would remain so even after higher taxes.
If we did this, there would be no need to keep the left in cycles of perpetual outrage and caring that turn people off. After a while, I just get to the point that all of that caring is energy wasted that could've been spent more productively. If we do things this way, we can ensure that most people will be better off. We can eliminate poverty, a lofty goal, while being able to go to normie voters and say "hey, this appeals to you, vote for us."
Honestly, I think this is what yang does right that everyone else on the left gets wrong. Hillary's big slogan was "I'm with her." As in, im gonna give up my own interests to vote for her in an abstract way even if I dont benefit from it. Bernie once asked if you're willing to fight for someone you don't know. A noble sentiment, but one that I don't think will work long term.
Yang is basically like, hey, how much better off would your family be with $1000 a month? What if the government was much simpler? What if things actually worked? He is the perfect blend of left wing humanitarianism combined with the self interest of the right.
It's not left or right, it's forward. And policies like UBI are forward. They combine the best elements of both sides to create what should, in theory, become the ideal approach to do things. Sadly, due to extreme factionalism, I feel like this is getting lost as culture wars and constant outrage over abstract issues wins the day.
Maybe if politics focused more on this sort of stuff, I wouldn't be so darned burnt out. Or maybe I would, as autistic burnout is common and happens. It remains to be seen, but yeah.
Anyway, I expect this to be my last post for a while, unless I have some other random thing I want to talk about. Even if burnt out, i feel like doing this blog for the past year has accelerated my own personal growth politically. I now know where I fit in in a post 2020, post bernie electoral environment. And while I hate the environment, at least I found a home and some sort tenets to get behind.
I still might post once in a while if I have something to say. But honestly, I'm just so burnt out on most politics right now that I expect I'll be taking a long break after this. Heck, maybe I'll do one more before I leave as it's another topic worth discussing.
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