How much hope is there for any progressive policies to ever be passed in the future?

[Hardkill]

My mom thinks that progressive policies like Medicare for All, big gun control rights, free community college, banning private financing for all political campaigns, big renewal energy legislation, etc. might be enacted by the US government in the future. My dad doesn't think so given how many times the progressives have failed miserably with all of their proposals ever since the 60s.

What are the reasons to be optimistic that these kinds of policies will ever become a reality in the future?

Edited April 30, 2022 by Hardkill

[Yarco]

On a long enough timeline (within a couple generations) many things you listed above are almost a certainty. Just depends on your definition of the future. Within 4 or 8 years, or your parent's lifetime, probably not.

[Hardkill]

5 hours ago, Yarco said:

On a long enough timeline (within a couple generations) many things you listed above are almost a certainty. Just depends on your definition of the future. Within 4 or 8 years, or your parent's lifetime, probably not.

Wait, I thought that you were for extreme right wing policies.

[Yarco]

4 hours ago, Hardkill said:

Wait, I thought that you were for extreme right wing policies.

I have my desired outcomes that I can work toward and try to persuade others of, but still be pragmatic enough to realize that it's looking like a losing battle at this point.

If there isn't a populist movement at least as strong as Trump in the next US election or two, I think a combination of increased censorship and more people becoming Stage Green will make it exponentially harder to have any kind of right wing policies after that. And it seems like the US influences every other country's position to a degree (ie. I don't know if Brexit would've happened without the background of Trump.)

Hard to say which way things will go. If you asked me at any point in my adult life where I thought the world would be in 5 or 10 years, I don't think I would've ever been able to accurately predict it. Sometimes things have turned out way more extreme than I could've foreseen, other times it's a complete nothing, and even more frequently some issue I wouldn't have ever considered will pop up. But the macro trend seems to be everything becoming more progressive over time.

It's also not necessarily as black-and-white as me just wanting all the right wing policies. On the Political Compass test I'm actually slightly bottom-left of center. There are a number of things I'd like to see socialized, but only after some existing problems are cleared up under a right-wing system first.

You're also seeing an extreme caricature of my beliefs here most of the time, because that's the kind of pushback that I think largely spiritual liberal people here need to be challenged with. I have a tendency to take the opposite position of whatever the majority belief is and play devil's advocate a lot. If I was on a right-wing forum I'd probably be doing the exact opposite.

I'm not an unchanging monolith either. I actually swung far to the left around 2019 for a couple years and was pretty prominent in a group helping to deradicalize racists and nazis. I went through a phase where I forced myself to stop watching all right-wing content, everything from actual nazis to as innocuous as Jordan Peterson. I replaced my media consumption almost entirely with stuff like Contrapoints, Thought Slime, Peter Coffin, PhilosophyTube, Noncompete, etc. But eventually had a big ego backlash and swung back to the right, plus I just find the left annoying and the right more fun to be around.

Eventually I think I'm going to have to become a leftist again and fully integrate everything. If I could, I would really like to have a worldview that doesn't require me to be a racist/bigot/homophobe/etc. But whether I'm so indoctrinated/propagandized or whatever, that provides too consistent and useful of a worldview to give up just yet. Like I said above, I also have a bit of an anti-establishment / anti-groupthink streak. So I'm always going to root for the underdogs... or at least when someone tells me I have to do something, or only one solution is the right way, I'm probably going to rebel and do the opposite.

Anyway enough about me

[Rokazulu]

If we still think along lines of Left vs Right. Good vs Evil. Nothing will change.