As a general statement, the Canadian government is involved in more areas than the U.S. government. If you are a Canadian progressive here, you criticize the United States government. While the differences are relatively minor in the global scheme of things, I think it's peoples nature to compare, contrast and criticize.
"The Canadian government is involve in more areas" is possibly true (these kinds of things are notoriously difficult to pin down).
That's a completely different thing from Canadians being unable to understand that Americans across many income levels don't believe in expanded government.
It's just a complete non-sequitur.
When the fairly liberal French President criticizes American "woke" culture and its harmful racializing and dividing society, it might be time for the American Left to step back and recalibrate. Macron seems to be a very smart and successful politician.
He's center-right mostly. But yes, he and Le Pen both took the imported right wing culture war and used its framing to try and shore up right wing votes in their country.
That's an argument in favor of the fact the GOP is driving that war.
Again this is one of those things, where without discussing specific examples we have no context for a discussion. I will provide some recent cultural conflicts. I do not want to have an exhaustive debate here, but there are a clear culture initiatives that the progressive wing of the Democratic party are pushing. One person's objectionable and unnecessary cultural action is another person's morally required cultural equity.
I won't even argue your boldfaced point.
But that does not change that the right wing is the one driving the culture war and insisting politics be fought on those terms instead of policy as much as possible.
Even if you think that they are CORRECT to do so, it is still them running on culture war issues.
- Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” I know you will want to make this about banning books. It's a good deflection. However, I don't think San Francisco voters had banning books in mind when they recently recalled three school board members. Uh yeah, three is a lot.
Yup, the Right made great political hay with a bad quote. Of course, they were able to do so on the back of Christopher Rufo's effective CRT culture war strategy which they aggressively ran on, which let them run with it as if it was the secret Democrat plan all along. The plan all along was always to stoke a culture war on the issue.
His new plan for 2022 is to use the "groomer" label to help his push for defunding public universities, discard academic freedom, and generally try to make public schools even more of a target of the culture war as a way to push a nationwide popular movement to privatize education. He is going to work in the realm of "curriculum transparency" next. (He likes to announce his plans on twitter since he knows the press will mostly just go along with him anyway.) Since curricula are already public, the plan is presumably to demand that "the hidden things you aren't saying" be made public. When the schools say they have nothing to show, it will be argued that is proof they are hiding something. That will get followed by laws that allow parents to demand access to all materials, written in such a way that it is extremely disruptive (I don't know if they will go with the same "CRT ban" method of allowing parents to sue if they suspect their child is being taught something they don't like.) The goal will be, of course, that the teachers and schools and really anyone who believes children should be educated and schools not be constantly under legal threat object. At that point (since these bills will be marketed as "curriculum transparency" or "education transparency", the right will go all in on how the Dems and Teachers are opposed to transparency and don't want parents to know what their kids are being taught and we have to destroy public schooling.
I mean, again. You have picked something that was a culture war created, stoked, and carefully messaged by the GOP. Created almost entirely out of whole cloth - where the guy in charge of the messaging even announced he was doing it.
Kinda proves me right.
- The State of California and Governor Newsom mandating diversity in corporate board rooms. The legislation was struck down in court.
Actually don't know that one and will give it to you until I can look it up. Not even sure that's a culture war issue, though. Still, I don't have the context.
- "Defund the Police" Did I just imagine that phrase? Didn't we hear that a lot in Democrat run cities the last two years?
You heard it used by GOP politicians a lot in Democrat run cities. Far more than by Democratic ones. It isn't really Democratic policy at most levels. There are activists who pushed it, though.
But that's a weird thing. "Defund the police" is a policy prescription - not a culture war issue. It's a budget argument about public safety. Turning it into a culture war where it was a secret attack on white people -- that's on the GOP.
- How about politicians including several 2020 Democratic Presidential candidates telling you their preferred pronouns? Whaaa?
How is that a culture war issue? Or is the existence of other identities by nature a culture war issue?
I think people play this game that the Republican's extreme flank is evil and destructive and on the flip side "what extremism in the Democrat party? There are no extremists here." Both parties pander to extreme flanks in stupid, stupid ways.
The main difference is whose extremists are in power and what kind of influence they have on the party platform an policy decisions.
And again, one side is running almost exclusively on culture war issues in that structure, and it is the GOP.
As with all political messaging Republican or Democrat, the rhetoric they use to describe the other side is over the top. So if you say the Republicans make far too much of culture issues, then I would tend to agree. If you say the Democrats do not cause self-inflicted damage to themselves pushing certain unpopular cultural agendas, I will completely disagree. And yes, we are all entitled to our own personal opinions on these cultural matters.
We are entitled.
All I am saying is that one side has culture war issues as its primary focus.
The whole "they cause self-inflicted damage by pushing certain unpopular cultural agendas" is exactly the point.
Those agendas are almost entirely driven by the GOP, who push them as if the Democrats are pushing those agendas.
A politician saying their stated pronoun is not a policy agenda by a party.
The other party pointing to that and saying "They are trying to ram things down your throat" is.
It's a VERY effective political propaganda tactic - especially if you have the machine to catapult it into the conversation.
You believe it. That should show you how effective it is.
www.politico.com
www.nytimes.com
www.argusmedia.com
www.businessinsider.com
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