Political Memes

Nobody claimed that Biden was a perfect president or even a particularly good one. And Harris was certainly deeply flawed in her positions in many ways. But saying that those two are no different from Trump is like saying that a plumber who just stands there and watch your pipes leak is the same as a plumber who bashes them open and floods your house, because neither of them actually fixed the leak. Obviously one is way worse.

Yes, and if that's the only issue that matters to you, and you ignore the impact on all those other people, I guess that's fair to say they are the same. But does all that extra suffering serve a purpose? Are you volunteering yourself to bear any of it, or only others?

Eh it's more like "right wing people are masquerading as centrists because they want to get laid"

Well there's the issue of defining things and crossing up a bunch of language, trying to smash multiple different points together.

The headline of the original post suggests concern that Joe Biden is basically the same as a Republican. In order to identify whether that is true or not, you need tofirst define what a Republican is and compare that against what the Biden administration actually did (executive orders, appointments, legislation supported and passed, regulatory changes, etc). Accounting, of course, for the checks and balances of the US Federal Government. So for example, Biden forgave hundreds of billions of dollars of student loan debt, but the conservative (Republican-appointed) Supreme Court shot most of that down. There were limits on what they could pass through Congress without a supermajority. This is even easier to do today because we have several months of Republican government to compare against and the changes are really obvious. You canook at the creation and catastrophic consequences of DOGE, or the foreign policy changes that have abandoned Ukraine and worsened the Palestinian genocide (the handling of Israel is probably my biggest criticism of Biden and Harris, but Trump has been far worse). Tons of government agencies are being refunded, there is a "war on woke". Critical infrastructure that keeps our food and water supplies safe are being abandoned. The EPA has been gutted. The IRS has been gutted and is essentially being forced to stop auditing the wealthy and focus on the poor instead. ICE is being weaponized against unions, trans people are being pushed out of the military, US citizens are being illegally detained and sent to El Salvador, the Secretary of Health is an anti-vaxxer who wants to create an autism registry, tarrif nonsense is destroying US trade, and I'm still waiting for the price of eggs to go back down. Claiming Biden is a Republican is only possible if you completely ignored both Biden and Republicans.

The blurb under the headline is almost completely irrelevant to all of that. It's starting to get to what the article is really about: individuals who self-identity as Centrist or Moderate whose values are truly conservative and often align heavily with the Republican party. Especially with regards to online dating. This is nothing new - it's a phenomenon almost as old as online dating, and may date back to printed personal ads or older (though much better data exists for online dating). Conservative men know that their mispgying views don't make them popular with women, so they are trying to hide that. These people don't have much to do with Democrats or Biden whatsoever.

And then in your response, you lost a picture-of-a-tweet claiming that "Democrats spent 4 years desperately trying to get "moderate" Republicans to break from Trump". First of all, with no source- this is just whoever owns that account saying shit. But if you stop to think about it- there were a ton of "traditional", non-MAGA Republicans disillusioned with their party going after Trump all the way back in 2016. Most of them have already broken from Trump after historically voting for people like Bush and Romney. It would have been foolish to ignore that contingent of people, so the Democrats were absolutely correct in running attack ads against Trump and his followers in red states trying to win those votes.

If the Dems had changed their policies to be more conservative and attract those voters, that would garner some heavy criticism from me. But they didn't. The only policy I can think of that I would criticize them for is their support of Israel, which is moreso because of their wealthy donors who want to do business there than any courtship of Republicans.

If you look at what he accomplished, or if you're lazy and just want to look at an outlet that evaluates presidents for you, there's pretty much unanimous agreement that Biden was the furthest-left president since FDR. Harris ran on a platform of essentially continuing that. And progressives chose to stay home on election day rather than vote for someone who isn't 100% in agreement with them on everything. And that's how you get fascism.

I don't think it's just that recent. Appealing to "common sense" has always implied that there's a true way of evaluating the situation that is just obvious without the need to think about it. It's about going with your first reactions and thinking no further. That is quite clearly a reactionary tendency and it has always been a driver of conservative politics. After all, what's "just obvious" is not a magical intuition but, more often than not, what aligns with the dominant ideology that you have absorbed unconsciously and hold to unquestioningly. And not questioning the dominant ideology but demanding people fall in line is an inherently conservative way to live.

Generally, Conservatives believe that there is one correct worldview (which they may refer to as 'common sense') which is what unifies their ingroup and justifies ostracization of ourgroups. Liberals are generally more open to the idea of there being multiple correct worldviews.

without using it in the way recently popularized by US fascists.

It was a campaign slogan for the Canadian Conservative Party too, as well as used heavily by Conservatives in my province during the last election. "Common sense" has always been a fig leaf for somebody wanting to believe they hold a majority view when that is not supported by polls.

The irony of "common sense" being privatized and made worse in the process.