Why do liberals fear fascism but not communism?
Dear Donald Gloudeman Pierce:The Cold War is over. Communism is not a serious threat on a global scale.Vietnam is a dictatorship, but is at least better than some others. They are not openly hostile towards the United States and are not in the position to send a nuclear warhead towards Washington, DC, should that policy changes.Cuba was an outpost of the Soviet Union. With the Soviet Union gone, Cuba is no longer a threat. Now is the time for diplomacy rather than for Donald Trump.North Korea has a long history of bluster and barbarity. Taken alone, North Korea is not a serious threat unless a nation invades. Then it will be a bitter fight.China is a world power. But China has no plans to invade the USA nor to conquer the USA. China wants respect and to have their perceived sphere of influence respected. They are not a threat, not unless provoked.And the current issue is Donald Trump, who has indicated that he wants to be the Boss of the USA. He would like to be able to pass laws by fiat and ignore the judicial system. What is worrying is the fact that his following seems to approve of this.“Fascism” is usually used as a synonym for “a ruthless dictatorship.” Donald Trump and his most extreme followers would love to have that dictatorship. They’d vote for it.It is a serious threat to the USA.Yours,Chrys JordanP.S. Here comes the boldfaced boilerplate: for this answer, the definition of “unreasonable” includes any claims that Donald Trump has solved the Korean problem. As of 6 May 2018, Trump has done nothing towards solving that problem. Unless and until that changes, making false claims on behalf of your candidate is grounds for deletion.P.P.S. Anyone who wants to prove my answer wrong should write their own answer and do so, if they can. Anyone who wants to rant about “that bastard Chrys Jordan” who is guilty of “Soviet style censorship” and so forth is free to write that in their own blog. Anyone who wonders what an unfinished sentence looks like…
Who do you think is worse, the extreme liberals or the extreme conservatives?
This is an interesting question to me because it kind of demonstrates a problem with how people casually define liberalism. They confuse it with the left. You can in fact be a conservative and a liberal at the same time, as was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. It also shows how the current understanding of conservatism is tied up with some rather flat understandings of politics from the right. It is a sad state of affairs.Liberalism has been the dominant political force in American politics from the Revolution through to the backlash to the Civil Rights era when the GOP flipped to accommodate the Dixiecrats and exploit that to obtain national dominance. Liberalism was less of a partisan identity than a structural way of organizing democratic problem solving. Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Washington, Lincoln, both Roosevelts and Eisenhower were for all practical purposes liberals. You avoided arguments on first principles, kept appeals to power out of debate, worked on consensus building and depended on systems and institutions to execute impartially and with a certain level of disinterestedness the result of that consensus. In this liberalism could be in a pretty broad ideological range from left to right. It could, as with Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and McKinley, be for a strong defense, imperial expansion and fair labor practices and civil rights all at the same time, integrating what can be seen as right and left ideas. In the case of more conservative thinkers, such as Justice Holmes, it could embrace First Amendment protections while establishing sensible limits. Liberalism as a way of thinking always avoided extremes.Liberals traditionally avoided strong left and right positions. For example, it was anti-communist and pushed labor to the center. Liberalism is why we don’t celebrate May Day. Liberalism is also why we have, thanks to FDR and Truman, a strong defense establishment.With this context I have to come down on the side of the liberals.
Why won't people just let President Trump do his job?
Dear Perry (I Have Two Quora Accounts) Moore:Let me be clear. The only person who is “stopping” Donald Trump from doing his job as the duly elected President of the United States is….Donald Trump.His rise to power, aided in part by individuals who hate foreigners, Muslims, and liberals, as well as assistance by Russian hackers who used various techniques to spread false rumors, bought political ads on Facebook, and attempted to steal voter information from various states’ data banks, has placed Trump in the White House.He is only the second Republican President in the past 100 years to reach the White House with no previous experience as a politician. The last man to achieve this was General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, the victorious commander who led the Allied forces in North Africa, the invasions of Sicily and Southern Italy, and the successful campaign in Northwest Europe during World War II.Unlike Trump, Ike was a respected (and respect-worthy) leader who led the nation through some of the toughest years of the Cold War. He wisely kept us out of the Suez Crisis in 1956, kept the tensions with the Soviet Union from getting hot for eight years, and actually focused on infrastructure improvements.The St. Lawrence Seaway? That was done under the Eisenhower Administration.The Interstate Highway system? Ditto.And Ike, unlike Trump, actually worked well with members of Congress from both parties.Plus, Ike was likable!“Your” President may have signed a few bills (Kate’s Law being one), but other than sabotaging the Affordable Care Act and making a mockery out of our democratic processes, Trump has accomplished nothing of great merit.Now, you seek, in this extremely loaded and insincere question, to pin the blame on liberals, protesters, and the “mainstream media” for “your” President’s ineffectiveness during his first nine months on the job.You seem to be saying, “If you naive liberals would just stop criticizing the President, he could do his job.”This would work extremely well if we lived in Cuba, North Korea, or the Galactic Empire. If that were so, dissent would be squelched, and we’d live in a dictatorship.