This is why, fundamentally, we can't "come together." The left and the right in America really do fundamentally disagree on what it means to live in a society. There is no calm and fruitful debate that can bridge that gap. You either give a damn about other people or you don't.
To make matters worse, so many of our constitutional and legislative structures make much easier to do evil than to do good. Think about how onerous a lift it's been to get anything close to universal healthcare or to save the environment and how easily Trump has savaged both.
Trump has freely abused immigrants, rolled over human rights compacts, the Hatch Act, the Emoluments Clause and the separation of powers, even stealing money from military schools to put towards his dumb wall and our representatives in congress are seemingly helpless to stop him.
On his way out the door, Trump is charging up the electric chair, reinstating firing squads and turning over Native lands to developers with a Thanos snap while we all sit here and watch. Voter disenfranchisement? Easy! All it took was a 5-4 SCOTUS ruling in Shelby v Holder.
Passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act? McConnell alone can hold that up and also allow a dozen covid relief programs to expire, condemning millions to poverty, hunger and homelessness. But passing covid relief? Apparently impossible. Can't be done. Senators, to your vacations!
Snatching thousands of migrant children? Boom! Reuniting them? Yeah, about that ... probably not possible. Oh well! Those who benefit financially from cruelty have built an airtight system that makes hurting people so much easier to pull off than helping them. That has to change.
I left an "it" out in one of the previous tweets, but you get the idea...
There are fundamental intra-ideological arguments. But on the left it's "how far should or can we go to help these people and what can we pragmatically get done?" and on the right it's "how can we stop the rich paying one more dime in taxes and business submitting to regulation?"
That's just an unbridgeable gap, sorry.
Typical responses from the right in this thread and in arguments I’ve had with right wingers over the years:
-Don’t take my money in taxes to “force me” to give a shit about the needy. Charity can deal with the poor.
- Why don’t you take in a homeless person if you care so much?
There is just a core disagreement about whether there should be any common enterprise at all, or whether we should live in a world where everyone fends for themselves. People on each side view individualism or collectivity as a moral imperative. We will never agree.
The right views almost any kind of collective societal action that requires taxation, whether of gazillionaires or just them (who knows, they think, they might be a gazillionaire somehow someday!) as theft and evil socialism.
The left views a society that doesn’t care for everyone, especially the “least of these” — the sick and the vulnerable — as fundamentally immoral. And chipping in via taxes as a moral imperative.
There is no middle ground there. It’s just a fundamental disagreement about how you structure a society. And then you throw race into the mix, and the racialized perception of who the vulnerable are and it’s like setting off a nuclear bomb in a society like ours.
Remember: the right, led by outgoing one-term president Herbert Hoover fought FDR tooth and nail to prevent him using governmental action to STOP THE F—NG GREAT DEPRESSION.
https://t.co/4TPerJkk4h
Not different from Mitch McConnell’s “let it all burn, and let the covid-poors fend for themselves” attitude now.
