And do you believe in an ideal conservative government, the government has a role in subsidizing policies like IVF and childcare as well as incentivizing having children? The current GOP nominee has come out in favour of doing something like this with IVF. You may not agree with the exact policy, but do you agree with the spirit of the proposal?

And if so, how do you square that with your free-market beliefs? Why shouldn’t something like this be left to the free-market and let those families decide if they can afford to have children on their own merits?

A lot of traditional, old-school conservatives are appalled with this new type of thinking within the GOP. They believe, like all other welfare programs, the government doesn’t have a role in taking from people who figured it out on their own to people who need a hand-out. They believe the government is fundamentally inefficient and, if anything, this should be left to private charities to finance. If you disagree with this, how would you reason with and convince such people that this is different and it’s a necessary role for the government to be involved in?

If you believe illegal mmigrants are voting in our elections and that it's widespread. Then this recent ruling by the Supreme Court would be a major game changer in the election. So this should bring VA into play for the Republicans no? What do you think? If it doesn't does that mean there just isn't as widespread Illegal Immigrants voting maybe?

I remember in the 80s/90s most of the best comedians were liberals. Making fun of "the man" and the way society was.

I've watched a few sets lately, these days most liberals are doing essentially "safe" PC style DNC propaganda. I watched a whole Hannah Gadsby special and I literally only smiled like 2 times, never laughed once.

What happened to liberals being funny?

What I mean by "state-mandated cultural assimilation": Governments requiring immigrants to conform to the culture of the society they are moving into.

How does it work?

I don’t usually get an answer to this question and people always kind of just focus on “promoting the traditional family.”

But, someone who finds themselves only attracted to the same sex but not the opposite, what exactly do you think should they do?

Hide it? Try to change? Marry someone of the opposite sex? Be open but stay celibate?

Follow up question: if you were gay, would you actually follow your previous answer?

Whenever I hear people say to stay celibate, it often comes from people who they themselves are married and clearly did not want to stay celibate.

I am curious how people here feel about censorship of "hate speech". In some very limited instances I can understand why hate speech should potentially be censored but I think it falls more into the inciting violence category. My biggest issue is who decides what is hate speech?

Quick example. I just got off a 3 day ban for "promoting hate" by the auto mods. I am not going to say exactly what my comment was for obvious reasons but I asked a question if the same mockery people were justifying for the group being discussed should be allowed for a different group. I asked a question and in no way made a statement of support for hating a particular group. This was deemed "promoting hate". I never got a response from my appeal which I was not really surprised about but it makes me wonder who should be the judge of hate speech.

As someone who is not a political philosopher, I see a key advantage of federal systems in how they moderate national politics by delegating certain powers to individual states. This separation of powers is generally accepted when it comes to routine governance, but it becomes more contentious when dealing with civil and personal rights.

Take the issue of abortion, for example: regardless of where one stands personally, many people feel disturbed when any state adopts laws they find morally unacceptable, even if it’s not their own. Meanwhile, the federal government retains control over interstate commerce and other national affairs, though these boundaries have blurred over time.

How do you approach thinking about how states should handle highly controversial issues within a federal system? Setting aside current Constitutional precedent, what should be the limits on how far states can diverge from widely accepted moral standards? If (somehow, hypothetically) a state still had slavery (and we hadn't already resolved that issue by Constitutional amendment) would the rest of the nation just need to accept that until an amendment was passed?

To what extent, in other words, do citizens of a federal system need to tolerate (what they consider to be) extreme injustice elsewhere in the country?

Disregarding the legal particulars of any specific question, I find it difficult to develop a simple way of handling this question.

Here is a campaign website for a Democratic candidate for Wyoming at large House of Representatives districts:

https://www.cameronforwyoming.net/

My question is: why do Democrats think running such campaign would help win in a state that voted 70% red in 2020.

There are of course MAGA Republicans running in deep blue states as well (I can think of Dan Cox in Maryland in 2022) but I get the impression than Republicans run more moderate candidates in hard races, than Democrats do.

https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/29/busted-the-inside-story-of-how-the-kamala-harris-campaign-manipulates-reddit-and-breaks-the-rules-to-control-the-platform/

https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/30/block-community-notes-we-dont-like-harris-campaign-caught-red-handed-manipulating-x-to-censor-criticism/

I feel like the answer is Donald Trump isn’t a conservative, but he’s the leader of the Republican Party so let’s bear with this one.

One of DJTs biggest promises is imposing tariffs on foreign countries. They’re literal protectionism and hurt the consumer in the short run and long run. It distorts market prices, leads to a less efficient domestic industry, and reduces the consumer’s purchasing power. All things that go against the free market.

Another thing DJT has done is favored a more monopolistic or (big dog) approach to industries. From 2016-2020 26% of agricultural subsidies went to the top 1% of the industries leaders while 23% went to the bottom 80%. The 2017 tax cut and jobs act favored significantly reduced corporate tax rates which helped out bigger businesses more than small businesses. These literally make the big players control the market meaning smaller players can’t compete screwing consumers in the end.

So when did my values not become the norm for the party and conservatives?

For example, missed opportunities to support more aggressive efforts to deregulate housing and health care markets in order to improve affordability and access at the federal level?

For this question I am excluding churches and other explicitly religious non profits as long as they do not accept direct government funding.

For discrimination, I am speaking of the same kind of actions we do not allow against other groups (race, religion, age, veteran status, etc).

I am defining harassment as any behavior that would result in HR problems if directed at another group. Examples: refusal to use preferred name, failure to use preferred pronouns, use of slurs, etc.

This is in the work environment only. You can be rude on the street all you want.

2 questions really.

Is engaging in these behaviors ok in a work environment?

If not ok, should the law protect trans people from these behaviors?

Edit to clarify: I understand these protections currently exist. The question is: Should they?

Over the past few weeks, the Trump campaign and supporting PACs have spent tens of millions of dollars on advertisements hammering the Harris campaign over her support for gender affirming care for prisoners. But the ads go beyond that: they show pictures of Harris and allies with other random transgender and gender non-conforming people, and end with the slogan in the thread title. It’s an explicitly “us vs. them” message, placing transgender and gender non-conforming people firmly as a “them”.

As a transgender person honestly this ad campaign has me shaken, and I’ve never seen so much fear and anxiety in the LGBTQ community. Do you support this kind of messaging? What do you think about its impact on transgender people?

Normally this isnt a topic I would be talking about, but my best friend is disabled, not even 40, and lives off SS to support his family. Normally he's not exactly political, but today he went off on Trump "He's gonna remove Social Security! You better vote Kamala, for my family!"

I'm over here like uh wtf? So far I've seen stuff about cuts to SS, but removing the tax on it, and the booming economy will improve SS for coming generations. And at Madison Square Garden, he said something about tax benefits to people who are caregivers/take care of other family members. So that sounds kinda good to me?

I’ve seen a small number of conservatives who are half expecting Biden to endorse Trump. It’s more of a “Oh wouldn’t this be funny” kind of thing than something that’s actually ever going to happen, but IF Biden endorsed Trump, what effect would that have on voters?

I’m a pretty conservative person and grew up in a conservative home. I’ve never been shy about my support for Trump. However in the past two weeks my brother (a left leaning person) continues to publicly call me a fascist and a fascist sympathizer because I will be voting for trump. I’m 26 and have never had as much hate thrown at me as I have in the past few weeks. How do I combat this? I hate feeling like I even have to defend myself against such baseless accusations.

I've been doing some deep reading into JD Vance and Vivek's America First conservative policy. In JD Vance's essay here, he says:

my friend Oren Cass published a book arguing that American policy makers have focused far too much on promoting consumption as opposed to productivity, or some other measure of wellbeing. The reaction—criticizing Oren for daring to push policies that might lower consumption—almost proved the argument. “Yes,” I found myself saying, “Oren’s preferred policies might reduce per-capita consumption. But that’s precisely the point: our society is more than the sum of its economic statistics. If people die sooner in the midst of historic levels of consumption, then perhaps our focus on consumption is misguided.”

In Vivek's interview here, at around 10 minutes:

I am more committed in my rejection of blithe neoliberalism...of a variety that says we were somehow going to export Big Macs and Happy Meals and spread democracy to China. That the sole goal of immigration policy was to view the United States as an economic zone, and that the goal of all immigration policy was to maximize the size of that economic pie without regard to national identity. Those are some of the big mistakes of the blithe neoliberalism of yesterday...

But that's I think the sin number one of the old blithe neoliberalism and number two related to this issue of immigration, is that somehow I don't care what language you speak. I don't care what your allegiance to the civic ideals of the United States are or if you know the first thing about it if you're going to add some unit of economic efficiency to the US economy. Our immigration policy is effectively just a subset of Economic Policy, which I think has had the effect of eroding our national character and national identity. And it just wasn't in the scope of concern of the Paul Ryan style worldview of the 1990s, so in that sense I depart in no uncertain terms from the blithe neoliberalism of yesterday.

These to me seem like statements that I would use, literally verbatim, to explain why I ended up on the political left. The rejection of a dehumanizing economic philosophy that sees us as nothing more than units of economic output, where our only purpose in society is to gain ever more marketable skills and spend time away from our family cultivating them. The idea that I'd rather the stock market grow slower if it means we have a work-life culture where dads are playing catch with their sons in the front yards, and neighbors are spending time together and creating traditions.

These thoughts and conclusions are the exact lynchpins that drew me to the left. I remain surprised that these types of thoughts are not only being said in public by prominent conservatives, but are used as justifications of conservatism. It's honestly only in the past 8 months or so that I've even seen conservatives talking like this.

• Where did this wing come from? Have there been internal discussions and conferences and debates within the conservative movement where these ideas have been hashed out? Was this wing present in the 90s? The 80s? The 70s? Why did it develop now? I'd be fascinated to read more about it.

• Is this wing of conservatism represented in elected Republican officials at all? By my estimation, besides maybe the odd Senator like JD Vance or maybe a Congressman here or there, nearly 100% of elected Republicans are still essentially Paul Ryan acolytes. What is the plan for conservatives of this stripe to take actual power, when it doesn't seem the Republican electorate is interested in voting for these candidates in primaries?

• What makes one think like this and gravitate towards conservatism? In JD Vance's essay, he says:

The left’s intellectuals focused much more on the structural and external problems facing families like mine—the difficulty in finding jobs and the lack of funding for certain types of resources. And while I agreed that more resources were often necessary, there seemed to me a sense in which our most destructive behaviors persisted—even flourished—in times of material comfort. The economic left was often more compassionate, but theirs was a kind of compassion—devoid of any expectation—that reeked of giving up. A compassion that assumes a person is disadvantaged to the point of hopelessness is like sympathy for a zoo animal, and I had no use for it.

But I don't really understand what that means. Whenever I see this new crop of America First conservatives describe their political awakening, there's always this throwaway line that to me reads like "I was appalled at what the right was doing, it was the opposite of what a strong society needed. My thoughts actually did line up somewhat on the left. But there were some small philosophical differences in the way I approached things, and I kind of didn't like seeing blue haired, androgynous, pierced people at the meetings. So rather than try to shift the left a couple of degrees, I decided to devote my life to getting the right to do a 180." And I'm left kind of flabbergasted at that conclusion.

It seems to me that these people would be a natural fit for the protectionist Blue Labor for example. But there's a deep cultural affinity for conservatism that they just can't shake. And they choose to climb this arguably higher mountain to get their ideas to propagate. Can anyone explain this thought process?

Just a hypothetical discussion but let's say a magic spell makes the entire Democratic party as tough as crime as modern Japan is today. No more progressive DAs, no more leniency on drugs and crime-- just straight up "Do not pass go, do not collect $200" for offenders. A lot of people say this would put off minorities, but I disagree since a lot of law-abiding, honest minorities living in high-crime areas do actually want law and order. What would this do for the Democrats' election prospects?

This was reported by Rolling Stone at a 10/26 rally in Lancaster, PA.

"When asked about “tackling the nation’s debt,” he mentioned changing the tax code, and then went on to say there would be some financial difficulty imposed on some Americans. “Most importantly, we have to reduce spending to live within our means,” he said, adding that these efforts will “involve some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.”

Later on, Musk said that he would “balance the budget immediately,” adding: “Obviously, a lot of people who are taking advantage of government are going to be upset about that. I’ll probably need a lot of security, but it’s got to be done. And if it’s not done, we’ll just go bankrupt.”"

Do you believe his statement that the U.S. will eventually go "bankrupt" without governmental intervention? Do you trust his statement that "it will ensure long-term prosperity?"

I have a few questions on abortion and the Constitution.

1. Why is abortion not protected under the right to privacy? Is it because the right to privacy is strictly for private matters involving consenting adults? Or is there some other reason?

2. Does the federal government have the constitutional power to make any laws on abortion, either for or against? Either protecting it nationwide or restricting it nationwide? Or is it constitutionally a states’ right?

For decades wages vs housing has gotten worse, from 37,200/11,196 in 1974 to 442,600/74,580 in 2022 or 3.3 years of income in 1974 to 5.9 years of income in 2022. I've put in the numbers in random times and democrat or republican they only seem to get worse with the exception of 2008-2011 and 2016-2020 with the latter marking an improvement and the former staying flat.

The right argues lowering immigration and deporting illegals will fix the problem, but several studies suggest otherwise are republicans all on the immigration front, what if it doesn't work? Do they have any other policies to address wages vs cost of living? The left claims zoning and NIBISM is the biggest issue but they don't seem to be solving it, things are certainly getting worse under Biden but perhaps he gets a pass because of Covid but for the same reason Trumps term doesn't have good data either either.

So assuming Republicans win the election what are Republicans going to do to improve wages vs cost of living and when can I expect results?

My best friend and I are on opposite sides in this election but we coexist. Just made me curious if this is common.

To clarify, this post isn't about whether or not I support the positions of these parties or not, I'm an american, I merely take an interest in international stuff.

So recently as some of you have probably heard, the right wing in Europe has had a string of political victories as of late, most recently in Austria I believe. However in some of these cases such as the recent Austrian election, the major parties refuse to collaborate with the party that won due to them being considered "far-right", and this often stalls negotiations. My question is, isn't this inherently anti-democratic? If the people as a majority vote for a certain party, shouldn't that party be guaranteed a seat at the negotiation table regardless of what they believe? Now I'm aware that Europe does certainly have a long & storied history of totalitarian governments, so there is a fear there, but to me at least from the outside it seems like a lot of the policies of these parties aren't really that insanely radical, mostly just anti-immigration rhetoric, and we've seen some of them in power before (notably, Italy) and there wasn't a dictatorship or anything of that sort established, regardless of whether or not you agree with these policies. It just seems like an excuse to me to not allow representation of certain groups deemed "extremist" by their opponents. Now I'm well aware this post may get very downvoted but I'm just curious how everyone thinks here. Thanks.