Comment on What is the difference between an American liberal and a liberal outside the USA?
yakko@feddit.uk 1 day agoBold of you to assert that the American right isn’t effectively a monarchist movement. Trump and his hangers-on have been stridently in favour of a presidency that is king in everything but name, and they have shown an abiding disdain for democracy since at least the Reagan era - though those dots connect backwards as far as you please.
frisbird@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
They don’t believe in hereditary monarchy, they don’t believe that private property should be abolished and that the crown should dole out land based on politics. They’re liberals who want a strong executive that can champion the private property foundations of liberalism against the democratic foundations of liberalism. Remember, liberalism didn’t start because people wanted the common peasants to control the county, it started because the merchants wanted their ill gotten wealth from their rapacious adventures to translate into political power and the crown was not willing to allow lowly merchants to usurp multiple generations of aristocratic family ties.
Musk is a liberal, not because he loves democracy but because he justifies his actions on the basis of free speech, freedom to profit, private property claims, free movement of capital, and the rights the employer. None of these things are compatible with monarchy.
Yes, there is actually a monarchist movement in the USA still, but it is very very small and very fringe and they hold that position in a way that seeks to take the current owning class, turn them into a formal aristocracy, and eliminate not merely democracy but also the liberal foundations of capitalism. It’s anachronistic and impossible, but there are some who think that way
Most conservatives just want to go back to the liberalism of our forefathers that genocides and enslaved millions, when the poor and the women and the brown couldn’t vote because they weren’t considered fully human, and where conquest was a valid legal foundation for a state.
AfterNova@lemmy.world [bot] 18 hours ago
Musk funded a illiberal president that uses the power of the government to terrorize people with draconian anti-immigration policies and pushes highly destructive import tariffs. How much does Musk receive every year from goverment subsidies and government contracts?
frisbird@lemmy.ml 18 hours ago
With profits gained from private property
Who built his whole wealth on private property and is actively attacking Venezuela for the crime of nationalizing (deliberalizing) their natural resources.
None of which are illiberal
A lot. Because he owns the companies that receives them. Because the system is a liberal system of private ownership and everything else is illegitimate in their eyes.
AfterNova@lemmy.world [bot] 17 hours ago
Musk receives govenment contracts and government subsities. Trump is using the government to terrorize people. Without the government he couldn’t deport people into foreign dungeons. Banishing legal residents into a foreign dungeon without due process is illiberal. Restricting free trade with massive tariffs is illiberal. Using his position as president to pressure a television network into firing a host is illiberal. The government could stop giving Musk subsities and increase the minimum tax on his companies.