Why does the Right stand any chance - at all?

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Since most people are labourers/workers and as a result are low-middle class income, why does right or centre-right stand any chance in western democracies - at all?

I mean, com'on. You are _NOT_ I repeat _NOT_ "billionairs in the waiting".
Forget about earning enough money to not work or cut down on working hours, if you do not have a high income.

Then the right-wingers always say: "Of course you can't, as long as the state takes half your income through taxation".

But people have to remember that if the state doesn't take your money and spend on public health insurance, old age pension, sick relief, disability insurance and what-else - for you, then YOU have to save enough money to cover all this stuff. If you choose not, chances are (and frankly speaking, the risks are high) - if - or should I say _WHEN_ you get ill, or sick or disabled, ie. as a result of life (life is very, very generous when "sharing" chronical illness and disabilities with you) you end up on the streets as yet another homeless bum nobody cares about.

The thing is, rich people pay more taxes than middle-class citizens in western democracies.
They don't pay more taxes because they volunteer. They are forced to it. If they weren't force to pay that much, you wouldn't enjoy a welfare state - or rights as workers/employees at all!

You need not got 50 years back in time to see the evidence of this.
The evidence of how society worked with all its hierarchies and the employers right to physically attack (beat up) his workers. At least, this was the situation for the workers of Europe in the 1950's. And the teacher had the right to use corporal punishment against children who had attendency-deficiencies, ie. as a result of mental health problems.

The RIGHT cared not about rights or working conditions or any other rights for the commoners back then. It was _THE LEFT_ who cared about basic civil rights and conditions on work, in school etc.

Yet poor and middle-class people vote right-wing - or should we say: Rich-wing.

The left cares much more about middle class and poor people, the common people. Yet they are the ones discredited in the public for "over spending" or "economic crisis" etc.

So I'm simply wondering, given that all the equal rights, human and civil rights including various entitlements to social programmes that MOST people benefit from in todays western democracies, how come the Right/Centre-right stand any chances at all?

They are the ones who seek out all chances to reduce public spending on benefits for the common people and they ONLY talk the Rich-people cause. You know, the employer of the factory you work in and likewise.

Of course I'm not saying "go communist". But that's _ALWAYS_ the reply I get on my question. "You're a stalinist commie! get out - Kim Jong Un would be proud of you!"

WTF? Can't you be in favor of social programmes and civil rights without being a stalinist/communist?
As far as I recall from history, Stalin didn't favor social programmes and certainly not civil rights. Rather I see more similarities between Conservatism - then and now - and Stalinism than the 70's civil right activists and hippie-"commies".

Because the narcissists and sociopaths who dominate right wing thinking have no empathy, care only for personal wealth and power, and have centuries of experience of successfully manipulating, and lying to, the majority of people to make them comply with their will. We're still falling for it, and they're still grabbing more and more of everything at our expense.

Because the left knows how to burn all of it's cards and let its lunatic fringe run the PR.

This is also where two party systems really suck and why we need something like rank-order voting or some other mechanism to make third parties viable.

In Scandinavian democracies, there's a multi-party system. In Denmark there's currently 10 parties represented in parliament.

The reason you live in a 2-party system is because of your way of managing votes.

For example, in Denmark any party who gets 2 % of the votes, are being represented in the Parliament.

The percentage is converted to Members of Parliament. Any member of parliament have to only obey their own conscience, meaning they can choose to support any other party - or stand alone. If you get roughly 20.000 votes, you can get a seat in parliament.

You need 90 members of parliament out of 179 members to support your case. That's all it takes. That's just a little more than 50 %.

The Members of Parliament - not the Prime Minister - not the Queen - are the ones who make the laws.
If the Prime Minister have 90 members of parliament against him/her, the Prime Minister is forced to have an election to parliament.

There's no Gerrymandering and if say a party has won 51 % of a district, it doesn't mean the winner takes it all. Rather, it's converted to members of parliament in that district. So the parties with less votes may still get seats corresponding to the percentage who voted for them.

Because of this system, we have more democracy (because more people are being represented) in Denmark than in the UK or U.S.

Every citizen who's 18 years of age residing in the country can vote.
Including inmates.

Last edited by thinkinginpictures on 07 Sep 2019, 3:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yeah, and I think getting stuck in a two party system is a big part of how our political vitriol is spiraling upward faster than in Europe.

But that still doesn't answer my question.

In Denmark, we have the centre-right coalition roughly getting 47 % of the votes. Surely 47 % of the voter's aren't rich enough to benefit from their politics.

Yet they manage to pursuade roughly half the population to vote for them.

The parties talking politics in favor of the majority of the population, only manage to get 10-15 % of the votes.
The remaing 85 % of the voters outright hate them and discredit them on facebook and the like.

Fact of the matter is, if you look at their political views on a vast range of subjects and ONLY look at what most people would BENEFIT from, the far-left parties should be the ones the majority should vote for.

But that's far from the situation in real-life. It means the majority of the population don't want better lives.

In the US, the "left" …

-says it's OK to abort (kill) babies.
-wants to steal more of your money (taxes)
-wants to take away your health care (put you on government health care)
-opposes religious values (marriage is only a man-woman)
-wants to dictate how you should live (eco-friendly, only healthy foods, eliminate personal fossil fuels use)

There's a lot of deep pessimism about human nature, that it's not even the tribes that matter but the rules needed to keep society back from naturalistic/barbaric anarchy, that tend to lead a lot of people in conservative directions as they get older. They'll vote for whoever's about robust policing, being tough on crime (which if you have young children I'm sure starts switching on more in concerns for their safety), and if they're particularly pro-business they'll care a lot about individual liberties first and foremost out of the sense that what we have isn't invulnerable - it can not just be easily destroyed from the outside but from within if we don't educate children about what it takes for all of this to work in harmony.

Thinking of academics who started out on the left and drifted rightward toward or even slightly across center a lot of Jonathan Haidt's concerns about how we do society or all of the ingredients that actually need to be in place for a society to prosper suggest that much of that rule book tends to be, at least as the window goes these days, sitting in a sort irreligious but socially paleoconservative bubble. This is where I think classical humanism and liberalism of the 18th century are viewed as center-right stances these days and it can be bizarre sometimes to see who people are claiming are center center-right these days because it dips deeply into what used to be considered center-left.

Some people like John Gray have tried to launch takedowns of John Steward Mill as being founded on ideals that don't really ring outside of intelligencia or the elites, sort of the idea that Darwinian fitness will overcome our structures if we don't maintain them because human beings don't fundamentally care about truth and aren't lead by anything more divine than the natural urges to reproduce and compete rather destructively for survival.

This is where I worry that the left is actually giving a lot of it's best real-estate to the right. When the left claims the IDW is a right-wing or center-right movement I worry for them. There are similar cases too with a lot of thinkers, like Haidt, who could be considered adjacent.

Think about it this way - there are two ways tribes can form, gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, the first being blood bonds and the second being social contracts and values. When really pushed to shove the first usually wins and where liberal democracy starts looking shaky people are going to pull back to people like themselves, become more protectionist and their latent potential for racism will become more engaged because things in that case seem like they're getting bad and rather than participating in a tide that raises all ships the game has gotten particularly zero-sum, and when it gets zero-sum people have to trace their way backward quite often down whatever paths of their own identity are most important. In some ways that would appear to make religion a victory over race however, unfortunately, there's a lot of ugly baggage that goes with that too.


So this is the trouble - the left needs to stop doing things that make neoliberalism and neoconservatism look like such attractive alternatives. This would include really pulling the brakes on what's been dubbed the oppression olympics or having black-masked goons running around to see if they can out-militant the right which, hmm.... soy and kambucha vs. loads of guns and natural affinity to violence... it's not happening.

In America, I heard the reason that even poor people vote counter to their own interests is because in America, there is this in borne dream that anyone can make it. No one wants to cripple their own possibilities regardless of how remote.

Because rich people (the people with the most power) are highly skilled at convincing the general population that the people with the least power (the poor) are the root of all society's problems. Also, there's the on-going belief that we live in a just, fair world and that poor people are only "poor" because they're lazy/immoral/ect.

Because wealthy people know that The Right will enact laws to let them keep their wealth and pass it along to their heirs, while The Left would enact laws that would place a heavy tax burden on wealthy people and then distribute the wealth among the poor in the form of monetary payments, subsidies and vouchers, housing assistance, et cetera (with a healthy cut off the top for "administrative costs").

As a side-note, America does not have a two-party system. It just seems that way because the DNC and the GOP have most of the wealthy members, while the Greens, the Independents, the Libertarians, and the other dozen or so registered political parties can barely lay claim to a pittance by comparison.

Unfortunately, even if these other parties would form a coalition, they would likely still not have enough resources to mount an effective campaign for even one major political office.

Because of threads like this. The left cannot comprehend that the right has valid arguments for some of the things it believes and browbeats anyone that does not adhere to the dogma of left good, right bad. Treating people who disagree with you as evil, deplorable etc. tends to alienate those who disagree with you. There are relatively few people who agree with the entire liberal platform, and many view the purity contest as alarming.

When Nancy Pelosi a long time liberal icon is being attacked as behaving in a racist manner, people right of Nancy pelosi (THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE COUNTRY), get nervous about the left's intentions.

Also “poor people” is often code for people of color, and with Trump bringing white nationalists out of the woodwork, it’s totally out in the open.

The answer to the original post is in the following quote:

Let's quickly address each in turn.

1. Yep, strawman again on the abortion front from a right-ringer. No consideration for the greater socio-historical context, as usual. The woman is a hump-hound that delivers babies through her sacred passage, that and cook, but otherwise should shut the hell up about what comes out of "their", not "your", body. I could go through the horrific back-alley abortion stories, stats, logic, golden rule application and minimization of harm routine, but that takes so much time.

Simplicio ad reductum: it's OK to abort (kill) babies.

There you go, what was I thinking? It is ssoooooo simple after all, to a... certain percentage of the population, with, simple ideas. Very simple, so simple. What is the emoticon for sarcasm? Do you guys ever watch "Some More News" channel on youtube? I am that guy, right now...

2. Wants to steal your money. This one I have some sympathy for, but only just. This is actually part of the mind-game they get you with. Eh, this one deserves it's own whole thread, but what it comes down to is, how good are you at math? Conservative states consistently score worse at math and science than liberal states.

In general, people report not liking math. Well, guess what? It is not about Capitalism or Socialism, it is about how and what kind of Taxes are levied and laws past. That requires caring deeply about the math of the situation. Who wants to do that after all? The center-right Neoliberal corporatist capture of the democrats, as well as the extremization of the republicans to the alt-right means you will never hear any new good ideas from those quarters. Neolib v. Austrian, as if that is the only framework possible.

I would give you these new ideas, but it would be a huge block of text. I am sure the brilliance of the ideas would be lost on any conservative because they are usually either too brainwashed, or not too smart in the first place, in my personal experience, to understand the cost / benifit analysis that would be needed to grock.

So I will decline completely answering this question due to complexity.

3. Opposes religious values. No sympathy on this one, none. What others value in their own religion is of no value to the greater society. Your religion should be something you keep secret with you and your fellow coreligionists the same way a sex fetish club doesn't blab all over the place about their enema routines.

Hey, it's OK if you like to play dress up on Sunday and imagine your Big Daddy in the sky loves you, I won't judge, as long as you keep it to yourself.

The Romans had the same partiarchal attitude against the "slu*ty" Etruscans that the quotes display. Roman: one man, one woman (believe it or not), Etruscan: do what thou wilt as long as it is with love (and consenting adults, had to add this proviso for modern times, pagans and all that...). We will all raise the kids together at the end of the day. The Etruscans did just fine with their open-ended sex lives. No Yahwe to smite them.

The so-called Judeo-Christian values are a farce. They are an unprincipled accretion disk of ideas from multiple sources. The followers of those ideas blindly follow tradition because of "faith". Most of all though, religious thinking is not thinking, it is a form of execruble apologia. An elaborate excuse for why Christian ideas do not have to fit in with the modern world, or even have to make sense.

As a Christian or other person who denigrates science, how do you live with yourself? The cognitive dissonance must be unbearable at times. You use modern things and yet believe in fairy tales. I and my gay married partner are not a fan of your religion, so if you could kindly shove off with your BS and LDAR, that would be most kind of you.

I am sure you won't, so, you know... I will do my best to find cool cis-normies who understand reason and empathy to battle against the Dark Ages philosophy you and your fellow travellers whish to instaurate.

4. Wants to dictate how you should live (eco-friendly, only healthy foods, eliminate personal fossil fuels use). You're damn right, because I give a s**t about the future of humanity and don't expect a messiah to magically show up and save the day. Sometimes you have to give up the bad habits of the past to move forward.

I gave up the two addictions of tobacco and animal products. The thing Vegans are afraid to say is meat is an addiction. You don't need it. Meat causes harm as well. And yet when you tell people these facts, it is like you are taking their candy away. I could go on about how toxic masculinity and carnism are hidden BS philosophies. So much to say, but... Long story short, your an addict who is indignant of the facts.

On the fossil fuel, what do you get out of not holding industry to have better alternatives? Even if you don't believe in Climate Change, fossil fuel companies are not your friend. Do you have stock or something? Renewables and other energy sources are obviously the future, why do you want to live in the past? Oh yeah, forgive me, I forgot, that is part of your religion. I guess I should reverently shake at the insights you and your "higher" representatives from the magisterium might have to say.

My Apologies, let me scrape and bow away from your lordship.
All hail the King.

And the answer to this question is very simple

In the last US federal election Hillary Clinton won the popular vote with 48.2% and Trump only got 46.1% of the popular vote.

So why didn't the democrats rightfully win?

because i) only 55% of eligible voters turned up and the we know a large percentage of Americans who don't vote are low income and traditional supporters of democrats
ii) The republicans (and most conservative parties in the OECD) benefit from regional and rural votes and the way electoral boundaries were drawn in the 1800s reflect too much weight toward sparsely populated nazi thinking rural folk

If you fix the issues in points i) and ii) then the republicans would never win one election....

This is a bit technical though, OP was asking in a more profound sense - ie. going with the assumption that the last election proved 46.1% of active voters were racists, fascists, xenophobes, dupes, etc., how is that number 46.1 percent and not 5%.

I think the answer is nested in some of what I said above (and I think Antrax said it pretty well) - ie. the left is killing itself through a cocktail of confirmation bias and these distillation processes (ie purity testing) that select for confirmation bias.