I ll start : I have been following a pretty known tech/Linux journalist, and always found he is a fun dude to listen to, with interesting tech takes
The fact that he is also very openly “american conservative” (aka, religious & weapon nut, anti abortion, etc) annoys me, but i keep those things separate. And he does keep it separate too (politics channel vs tech channel), which is a great decision.
Illinois has open primaries and you don’t need to register a party when you register to vote; but you can still register with the parties themselves. I also grew up in South Dakota, which has closed primaries, and you do fill out an party (or not) when you register to vote there, or at least when I turned 18 you did.
I’m conservative in the sense of opposing change, especially to our political system. Not all change, but my default stance is “don’t fuck with it”.
Ah. An actual conservative like from the pre 80’s. I keep telling folks that conservatives used to be quite different.
Would you mind elaborating on “change…to our political system” perhaps with some examples and your stance on them? I’m exhausted and struggling to understand and find any examples aside from stacking the courts.
If not no worries, I’ll be chewing on this for a while. I appreciate your perspective and your willingness to share it.
For example: eliminating the Electoral college, term-limiting senators, declaring an official language, limiting jus soli citizenship, granting senatorial representation to the federal district… there are others that don’t come up as often that I can’t remember now.
I do have things I think should be changed or reformed, of course, as everyone does, but I’m very much against change for the sake of change. Society can be dynamic, the government should be stable.
I’m confused. Is this a bit? You’re essentially describing the Democratic Party and all the things progressives complaining about the party “really being conservative” compared to the rest of the world.
The Democrats have a big problem with “solutions” that either don’t address the problem or create worse problems in doing so. And maybe I’m biased by dealing with the Chicago Machine, but there’s too much corruption as well. And don’t even get me started on the corporatism.
The DNC is pretty left socially on a global scale, which I approve of, but just all over the place in terms of economic policy, and I think that axis is where they get labelled as centrist or even right-leaning globally. Though, yes, Secretary Clinton in 2016 was the most conservative candidate with any real support, partly because she was the most experienced in actual governance.
The alternative is a party only focused on making the rich richer and staying in power even if they have to kill democracy to do it. I’d take partial solutions or failed attempts at doing the right thing every time over that. We don’t have other realistic options. From time to time we get populists who are mostly talk.
The word corruption gets thrown out far too much too. Those that break the law should be punished, but simply adding something to a bill to benefit your constituency is literally the job, and far too often I hear people say that’s corruption. It’s compromise.