To be honest I always had the imagery of horses doing the work, so the “quarters” would be three limbs and a remaining limb still attached to the rest of your body.

If you want a balanced society, first you have to fully grasp what that means. Political ideologies are not unchangeable like race or sexual orientation, you can literally just go “oh, this position isn’t serving me anymore” or “this party has changed and moved away from representing my principles” and you can do it whenever.

Being a “moderate”, especially if you’re in a place where true support of the working class has evaporated and the right has gone full fascist is such a silly thing. All it does is scream that the only thing you care about is being between two things, not that you’ve actually thought about if either of those two things have become invalid as a point of reference. In the US and Canada the overtly right-wing parties have shifted so far to the right as to not be even remotely valid and the center has, because it has no values to keep it in place, moved to fill the conservative gap.

“Balanced”. Sure thing, champ.

Centrism is not “balanced”, though, it is just a political ideology that can’t commit. The left says people need to have equal rights, the right says society needs to be segregated in one form or another, and the centre comes along and says “what if we just took away some rights?”

This, of course, generally leads to them spending all the momey the left would but on terrible investments. In most places on the planet “the left” isn’t that extreme if you look at them from an objective point of view, they just get treated as extreme because the right goes off the deep end and the center is there saying “our position is reasonable and therefore anything else must be extreme!” while completely ignoring the fact that almost all centrism is simply right-wing economic policy without as much of the overt homophobia and racism. I have to say overtly, ecause of course actually helping minority groups would constitute an extreme action so im most cases they just don’t do anything and call it a win.

There’s a reason MLK said that the greatest enemy to black people is the white moderate. There’s a reason Canada is struggling under the Liberal party. There’s a reason so many places are just slowly descending into fascism as their governments do very little to stop it because of a naive sense of decorum and a strong unwillingness to ever admit that maybe holding the line isn’t working anymore.

You haven’t explained it your position, you’ve just called the guy who votes strictly progressive a fascist which is, frankly, absurd.

But sure, keep telling everyone that the solution is to keep enabling the ratchet effect, that’s totally not going to help the far-right. You got this, champ.

Do you understand where conservatism came from? Are you familiar with what it’s trying to conserve? It’s cultural stagnation in favour of the privileged class with an economic approach to match.

In what way? “Just give in to the endless cycle of the right getting worse and the center-right doing nothing to fix it” is your plan for a better tomorrow? Sure thing bud, that’ll definitely work this time!

The US is a fascist country with the only opposition being “centrism”. Centrism is a relativistic political ideology which really only exists to provide an incredibly weak alternative to conservatism that doesn’t immediately scare voters with things like actually doing anything different and of value.

Sure, I don’t disagree with that and I probably would have voted if I were in the US. At some point, though, it’s not the fault of people who refuse to vote for the controlled opposition. They’re sick of the cycle, sick of this “strategic” voting crap, and sick of lending their voices to the validation of major human rights violations. I really cannot blame them for their decision.

The US clinging to false, centrist comfort instead of doing the uncomfortable thing to get shit done is a big reason why they’re in this mess.

Why didn’t those people vote? It wasn’t because Harris was a progressive and they thought she wasn’t progressive enough, it was because she was already just a corpo centrist and refusing to acknowledge the genocide in Gaza was the nail in the coffin. All she had to do was say the truth and she refused.

And then she fucked off immediately, leaving everyone else to the GOP because actually caring isn’t her style.

In a place where elections don’t happen, or are obviously rigged? Sure, mostly agree. In the US, though, tens upon tens of millions of people gleefully, zealousy voted for Trump. When Biden was in the primaries with Bernie lots of the supposed “left” voted for Biden even before the DNC really got fucky with it.

US citizens really need to understand that it’s not enough to be acting like stupid, scared little babies who can’t be held accountable because they had a surprising amount of control over the situation for decades and yet still let this happen mostly voluntarily. As a Canadian who has always voted progressive, it’s the same situation here, arguably worse in some ways because we’ve even had a viable third party option the whole time. Our two countries are embarrassing, and acting like a dude saying “not all men” whenever someone expresses anger over our collective actions doesn’t help anyone.

I’m sure all those Palestinian/Iranian/Lebanese people killed by US/Israeli strikes, with unconditional help from Canadian resources, would really love to hear how it wasn’t your fault, specifically.

You have to actually listen and pay attention to more than the most absolute surface level stuff. He wants people who are worse.

The enemy of your enemy is not your friend if they’re just looking for a power grab. In fact, they could very likely be a lot worse.

MAGA is the cult name, so yes that makes sense. Once you leave the cult the whole thing kinda falls apart. You can still be a piece of shit, but will at least not support Trump(the lowest bar and not deserving of much, if any, respect).

I think it’s to show the fact that those people have got nothing that they asked for, the lying is not at all well-hidden, and yet they still support him with a fervor that is often not considered worth very much in polls and the like since 100% can be an indicator that the surveyed person didn’t really pit much thought into their response.

Eh, up here in Canada we’re not too far behind. Still better, but the bar is super low and we’re kinda cowards when it comes to standing up for ourselves. Hopefully the most recent utter failure of strategic voting helps, but who knows.

An incredible pull, but hell yea I see you.

What a wonderfully privileged life you must lead. You do know that he and his party have caused the mass suffering of untold millions and much of it simply for the sake of cruelty so that they can make “others” for their rabid voter base to hate on? The damage he and the conservatives across the globe have done just for the sake of getting slightly more power than yesterday so they never need to worry about the humanity of the people they hurt is immense in a way could never be calculated.

If you don’t wish at least just Trump a miserable death then you don’t stand for fuck-all of anything.

I am. I hope it hurts, a lot. Not just physically, but also that whatever emotions he’s capable of are all steered towards deep feelings of being a stupid little bitch for nothing.

You need to be angrier. You don’t need to be the one to do it, but on the internet where you can say whatever you want I do not understand why anyone would choose to be worried about appearing too mean for hating one of the worst people on planet.

He’s playing on easy mode. Conservatives are so easy to fool, and he has a huge media system designed to control their thoughts through the most embarrassingly simple kinds of manipulation imaginable. He works for them as a loud, obnoxious figurehead so that everyone else can contimue to be evil like they’ve a been for many decades.

You miss the fact that conservatives, nearly universally, do not accept that any of their situation is their own fault(sounds strange when us on the left will blame capitalism and the elite for most of the problems in the world, but we also come with petabytes of receipts and the right is allergic to facts). Many of them who live deeper in poverty are also living in cheaper areas, too, and have already cognitive-dissonanced themselves out of needing to worry about paying for things like health insurance(especially since many benefit from public healthcare systems, even in the US).

Now, the other important thing to remember is that conservative said those things. That’s crucial because it means that they aren’t talking to their voting base which is cool and tough and good with money, they’re talking to the other guys who need to get their shit together. If their guy does it then there must be a reason and if their enemy does it then there must’ve not been a reason, except they don’t base that on anything real like who’s actually done the research and shown their work.

Conservatives, no matter where you find them, are inherently anti-social power-seekers who refuse to take true responsibility for their actions. Whenever someone I know moves away from conservatism it is around the time they also, for whatever reason, begin to finally understand that the rich don’t actually love them and that maybe they actually do want to have real friends who aren’t also just other hateful goons, afterall.

They do this because they’re stupid and it’s an old, parroted line aimed at passing the blame to other people. If they said what you’re asking for that wouldn’t be as effective at blaming others.

The other reason is that they know that the centrist/conservative idea of a Starbucks costumer is a woke person who likes fancy drinks and not just black coffee. It’s all about creating a strawman for their base to hate. If they were doing it honestly, they’d also be saying that people should buy smaller vehicles that consume significantly less fuel but SUVs and trucks are associated with their base so they don’t do that. Their base isn’t smart enough to make those connections so it’s all good. They’re not clever, these politicians, they’re just playing “manipulate the voting base” on baby mode.