In thinking that Left = Good and Right = Bad has gone too far?

[WilmaFlintstone1]

A few things have made me pause in the last few days and I realised I have become increasingly irritated by the Left vs Right discourse,

Take the recent spat between Lee Anderson and Jack Monroe. Now neither of them covered themselves in glory but I don’t think demonising him because he is Tory and praising Jack because she is a Lefty is right. They both have deep flaws and neither is getting it right.

The Margaret Thatcher statue is another thing. Why are people pelting it with eggs? Firstly in a country where there are food shortages it’s immoral to be doing this. Secondly I am not getting the wholesale glee with which certain commentators are reporting it. The very woke lot being all “hey, people are selling eggs by the statue” to wholesale amusement. I just keep thinking “FFS get over yourselves.”

Now I hated Margaret Thatcher BUT she was the first female PM which was in itself a massive step forwards. I am not about to go pelting her statue with eggs, yes I’d rather the investment has been put into local services in that community but pelting a statue with eggs won’t change that.

Its become as though some people will pass any behaviour because it’s Lefties sticking it to the Right.

For removal of all speculation I’d probably consider myself a Lefty and they tend to get my vote…for what that’s worth in my heavily Blue area

isn’t it possible that there are deep flaws both sides?

For me, Angela Rayner's rant about Tories, the one where she strung a load of cheap insults into a huge sentence, typifies the downside of today's political discourse. It's all passionate denunciation a d there is no substance to it, no mention of policies, just a list of current buzz words.

Even the term "attempted putsch" is loaded. Why not call it a "mostly peaceful protest"?
That's a genuine question, that gets to the heart of left good/right bad framing.

It's not like the Capitol building wasn't targeted before, there was a group of feminists who protested against Kavanaugh, I think, and in the seventies there was a bomb plot.

Trump was a dick in many ways, but he didn't orchestrate a coup or a putsch or an overthrow that day - there were no weapons, no fore planning, no smoke filled rooms with operatives briefed on strategy. Just a fool spouting shit and other loons getting riled up in a disorganised manner, after a season of disorder and 20+ deaths from the other side of politics which was celebrated and condoned. Stripping the rhetoric from the facts shows that there was a few thousand people with lot of anger, but not much organisation.

Extremists exist at both ends of the horseshoe.

1Week what matters with the Capitol Hill riot was the constant stream from right win media that the election had been 'stolen'. And this was most definitely fomented by Trump - there was that call to Georgia asking to find 11,000 odd votes to overturn the result - a call made by the then President. Framing this particular incident in the light of 'they're all as bad as each other' is disingenuous if I'm being very kind about it.

It's a scary comparison, ie, wars across Europe, including one that caused more deaths in Britain and Ireland than either world war. If you blame them on the printing press

TomPinch - I don’t understand this - which war in Europe caused more deaths than either world war?

I agree to an extent pointythings, I'm not defending Trumps actions which were reprehensible.
But there was a solid 4 years previous of the opposite side taking every opportunity to declare the 2016 election fraudulent, stolen, Russian kompromat and all the rest of it. The Steele dossier turned out to be very flimsy and the investigations turned up nothing solid. So to half the US voters voted for Trump and were called deplorable, nascent fascists, racists, in the most mainstream and respectable media. You might think that was entirely correct but 70million Americans saw it as a politically motivated attack because Left Good, Right Bad.
I don't see how it's not a Both Sides thing tbh, unless you're deeply partisan.

What you hear depends on who you hang out with. I live in a Tory town and know plenty of people who think right = wise/sensible and left = unrealistic moron who can’t be trusted with money.

What I do think is very, very concerning is the rise of fanaticism everywhere. I first noticed it in Christian fundamentalist movements, and Islamist extremism, but now it’s everywhere and even pervasive in secondary schools where a child saying something like “I don’t think there should be boys in the girls changing rooms” can be beaten up and hounded out of the school by people who think they are being good guys.

Look at the Green Party, a former leader was physically assaulted (twice) at a conference for expressing unpopular views. When I was a kid the Green party were the good guys 😢

Civil debate of different views is the basis of democracy. When we lose that, it’s just a matter of time until war kicks off or a dictatorship emerges.

People who think vandalism and violence are morally right worry me a great deal. Hitler Youth genuinely thought they were the good guys…

SM plays a role, people are so used to resorting to insults and abuse online if they don’t agree, MPs are under a barrage of it. Then if the lines between online and rl lessen more separation irl too.

Overall I have no loyalty and either party can get my vote based on policies. The centre goes and it’s an odd feeling to be politically unrepresented

1Week the difference IMO is that with Trump it was actual people in government claiming the election was stolen, which lent the point a false legitimacy.

I very much doubt the 2016 election was stolen either, it was just time for the political pendulum to swing. I don't agree that Democratic objections were on the same scale in that they were not embedded in the outgoing government itself.
I do also think that the way Hillary's emails were handled was blatantly partisan.

You can certainly argue that Trump should have been presidential and toned down his rhetoric, realizing it could ignite a powder keg. OTOH, I know lots of Republicans who are not crazy people that would march on the Capitol building, who still have some pretty deep concerns about vote fraud in the US, and I don't think those have really been sytematicly addressed in a serious way by any official body. They've been investigated, but in the way that you would if you seriously thought there was something nefarious going on. Maybe that just reflects that Americans in general are so disenfranchised by their political system. But maintaining some trust in that system is essential for it to work and should be a priority whether you think the doubts are justified or not. Democrats are happy to imply people with doubts are just stupid but will happily create their own conspiracy theories in the next breath.

I don't really think either of the elections were won on the basis of fraud either. THough I think for sure Hilary screwed over Bernie with the nomination and that might well have changed the election outcome, because there is a good amount of cross-over between Trump and Sanders supporters.

Yes I think that's true MangyInseam
I think I read somewhere that a lot of the Obama voters switched to Trump in 2016, and the analyst suggested that this was because voters were hungry for change, for someone not embedded deep in the arse covering and corruption in Washington to actually stand up for the ordinary person in unglamorous locales. OK so Trump and Obama were opposites in many ways but they both ran on Not More Of The Same tickets.

That seemed to be a lot of truth in that, imo.

You could be right that they were not on the same scale,pointythings but there's a definite ratcheting effect in US politics, every action has a more extreme reaction.

Look at the abortion debates at present. Something like 75% of Americans support abortion access up to 12 weeks. Ordinary people are pragmatic and middle of the road on the issue, the frothing lunatics are only a minor segment. But what to the Democrats do? Put up a spokesperson to the Congress hearings who refused to rule out abortions at the point of birth and straight out said men could get pregnant and need abortions. Why react to the fringe minority with that sort of counter- extremism?

It's a widening gyre

I think the electoral system in the UK and the US cause the same problems - a two party system where no other movements get a look in, where the centre ground becomes a desert in terms of representation and where getting voters out means taking up ever more extreme positions. It's sad, because when you look at countries which routinely have coalition governments, this sort of polarisation is much less severe. PR isn't the only solution, but it's one solution.

When Trump was elected president no one encouraged an armed mob to go to the Capitol to try and prevent the election result being implemented.

I also don't remember anyone afterwards trying to get the result overturned by any method, legal or otherwise. The purpose of the Muller investigation wasn't to see if Trump's election could / should have been overturned.

The facts don't support the equivalence you're trying to draw.

Trump is just the sort of wrecker that the current environment is creating. He's a disaster of a man who shouldn't be anywhere near any sort of influence. I can only guess that the reason why he hasn't been prosecuted for incitement to violence because of the attempted putsch is because he had legal immunity as president.

Sorry, I was unclear- the wars of the Three Kingdoms (which included the English Civil War) caused more deaths in Britain and Ireland than WW1 or 2 caused in Britain and Ireland.

I'll add that in absolute terms across the continent WW1 and 2 caused the most deaths in Europe as a whole but proportionate to the population the Thirty Years War in was much more destructive.

There are no perfect politicians out there as there are no perfect humans; however, I think that the Tories can live with that status quo of 'they are all as bad as each other' though as they tend to retain power almost by default. The current government are shockingly bad though and as the Tories are the ruling party then in my mind they take the bulk of the criticism.

I don't disagree with what you said above. @Isitsixoclockalready , but I would like to hear or read a coherent set of proposals from both left and right when we next have an election.

Trump caused a lot of the problems himself.

Ignoring his politics for a moment, he was his own worst enemy - just extremely ill-disciplined. I think he saw it as part of his formula for success; be deliberately controversial in order to get press coverage.

His public appeal for Putin to ‘find’ Hillary’s emails wasn’t a great look, nor was hiding his tax returns (still being audited apparently, 7 years later), nor the meetings between his campaign and Russians.

What was especially stupid was firing the head of the FBI (a Republican) in an apparent attempt to obstruct investigations into Russian interference in the election. That caused Rossenstein (another Republican) to appoint special counsel Robert Mueller (also a Republican) and an investigation which engulfed most of Trump’s presidency. I also think we should recall that it was quite clear, from the Mueller report, that Trump continued obstruct Mueller’s investigation.

He could not have made himself look guiltier if he tried. Yes the Democrats screamed ‘stolen election’ but it was other Republicans who, also concerned, initiated and led the investigations in opposition to Trump.

And no matter, the Democrats’ reaction stopped far short of the events of January 6 and Trump’s various attempts to steal the election.

What really bothers me is the various Republican politicians and the right wing media’s attempt to whitewash Jan 6 and everything around it, despite leaked text messages and audio recording from the day itself, when they plainly recognized the seriousness of the situation. That was really a pattern of his Presidency, before he became their candidate, many prominent Republicans condemned Trump in terms at least as strong as the Democrats did, only to go on to be staunch defenders in public thereafter (while privately still condemning him).

And, as incredibly serious as January 6 was anyway, I really think we came within a whisker of the unthinkable. The zip-tie handcuffs, weapons and calls to kill ‘traitors’ (whilst actually killing police). I know it’s difficult to do because of the volatile situation in the company but, by right, Trump ought to have been put on criminal trial. I’ll be very interested to see the report of the Jan 6 committee, although I fear accountability is dead in US politics.

Company in that last para = country

Probably off-topic but I find it strange that the political persuasions of the head of the FBI should be anyone's business but his own. They will be irrelevant to how he ought to about his job.

You’d certainly hope so, I guess its largely a byproduct of how voter registration works in the US.

But, in any event, I think it’s hard to (truthfully) paint the investigations into Trump as a partisan witch-hunt when it demonstrably was not.

Trump was definitely a fool and totally unsuited to the job - I wouldn't argue any different.

But just a couple of points, the mob was not armed and they didn't kill a police officer - he died of natural causes shortly after.

But people voted for Trump. He increased his share of the vote among minorities and women the second time around. Despite his boorishness and despite the respectable media's treatment of him half the people thought many of his policies were all right. Are they all deplorables in flyover states (both phrases predate Trump's presidency, they're emblematic of a long held disdain), are they all white supremacists, xenophobes who want women chained to the sink? Or do they want decent jobs, homes and schools in their area, immigration restricted to legal entrants, lower crime, society to take sex and marriage more seriously? Nobody respectable seems interested in finding out, rather caricaturing half their own country. But what then? If they don't agree, do you force them to agree? If they still won't, what's the next step?

There's also a fundamental question about governance, are elected politicians supposed to carry out the will of the people and be accountable to them - even if they're wrong, or are the people supposed to fall in line with what experts say, who may well end up being wrong too?

I know I'm coming across like I'm supporting Trump. It's a wider thing I'm getting at though, the utter disdain shown to people of a conservative or traditional bent , the tribalism that's rising, the dismissal of reasonable concerns and putting the worst possible light on them, all in lockstep across multiple agencies and institutions. I'd feel the exact same way if the boot was on the other foot.
It would be great to get to a place where both sides 'steelman' the others position and see where they overlap and how the vast middle ground can make real advances. But that doesn't get any clicks, I suppose.

There were plenty of armed people in the mob, including one guy with 5 guns and 11 Molotov cocktails

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/capitol-riot-molotov-cocktail-trump-b1957164.html?amp

OK thanks fluval I'll read up.

That article is paywalled fluval so I went further afield.
670 people were arrested (as of last Nov)
Most for 'entering restricted area' and 'disorderly conduct' and the like.
Of which, 82 were for weapons offences, including a knife, hockey sticks, flagpole, a desk drawer etc.
Of those 82, 5 are charged with firearms offences inc the man above, and 2 of those were for offences connected with but not on the Capitol itself.
So that seems quite comprehensive.

And with those numbers, you ought to bear in mind that an overwhelmed and unprepared police force hardly conducted any searches on the day of January 6, so those figures likely represent only a tiny portion of those that were there on the day.

One of the rioters who was charged with firearms offences gave evidence that almost everyone around him were also carrying firearms.

We came within a sliding doors moment of a potential massacre. Various of those involved in the insurrection had expressed their intention to ‘arrest’ and execute certain politicians, and came prepared with zip-ties and weapons in order to carry it out.