Originally posted by Jessup
There are differences between the left and right in some respects, but mostly belonging to the left or right in the US means supporting status quo economic and foreign policies, and then advocating for a set of liberties that have been determined to be acceptable to your particular group, i.e., identity politics.
Whether or not the ever-popular and profitable "kill brown people for ca$h and then rebuild for exorbitant amounts while ironically shorting domestic infrastructure" Program(tm) should remain in effect, for example, is not something that is debated, or, indeed, that most people are even aware of. Near-unanimous passage of the 2018 defense budget, raising it another $60,000,000,000, ensures this healthiest portion of the US economy will continue its work "protecting" citizens from the War on Scariness. (Oh, and for the 2 people who don't already know, Terrorism Spoiler alert: the US runs ISIS. A constant state of unending, low-level war is an absolute economic necessity, and the best way to ensure it continues is to be on both sides of it, like Catch-22's Milo Minderbinder. Hey, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Or itself. Who cares?)
In short, anything that's actually important is not up for discussion, and you're left free to divide into opposing camps based on whether hate speech should be a crime, if transgendered folks can use the bathroom of the gender they identify with, if abortion should be legalized or guns allowed to be owned by private citizens. Not that those issues are without meaning, but they pale in comparison to the bigger picture. The for-profit media will work us up over relatively minor points unlikely to change, no matter how many enraged social media posts we slaves make, and at the end of the day we are left with a feeling of having done something meaningful, when in reality we've just exhausted ourselves in petty squabbles precisely so that we will be unable to do anything of any meaning or consequence.
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