Lack of Empathy Is Not the Problem

[moonshaz]

Progressives want education, health care, and housing for everyone. And we’re the close-minded ones?

By Katha PollittIf I have to read one more article blaming liberal condescension toward the red states and the white working class for the election of Trump, I’m moving to Paris, France. These pieces started coming out even before the election and

Comments

[blackjedii]

Hmm. Needs "opinion piece"

If you go by actual deeds, liberals and leftists are the ones with empathy. We want everyone to have health care, for example, even those Tea Partiers who in the debate over the Affordable Care Act loudly asserted that people who can’t afford treatment should just die.
Except Nancy Pelosi, the current highest leftist in government declared that an actual functional health care system (ie Medicare for all) is a pipe dream and shouldn't be included in the party platform until she was largely pushed into it. Tom Perez, current DNC chairman, was equally 'meh' about the idea.

We want everyone to be decently paid for their labor, no matter how low they wear their pants-somehow the party that claims to be the voice of working people has no problem with paying them so little they’re eligible for food stamps, which that same party wants to take away.
Except Hillary Clinton was a proud supporter of TPP which while it was excellent wrt China economic containment, was going to undercut even MORE American jobs. Oh, and her husband back in the 90s wholeheartedly embraced NAFTA which helped kill manufacturing. And Clinton was equally 'meh' on a living wage given that we haven't had a minimum wage increase that actually outpaces inflation in like, 30 years or so.

We want college to be affordable for everyone-even for the children of parents who didn’t start saving for college when the pregnancy test came out positive.
Except again, Clinton was against that idea until she waffled into "well debt free sounds all right." And has not been embraced by the Democratic Party.

We want everyone to be free to worship as they please-including Muslims-even if we ourselves are nonbelievers.
Yeah no. Pretty much all on the spectrum of left and right can be flat out shitty towards people's religion.

You'll forgive me if I still feel deeply alienated from "the Left" who currently want to talk the talk with righteous fury (mostly on Twitter and blogosphere sites, mind) but haven't really positioned their leaders to walk the walk and once in power, are more interested in lining heir pockets with PAC and lobbying money than creating a platform with legitimate change at this point.

[moonshaz]

"Opinion piece" is there among the tags, has been all along. 😊

I guess I have a mre nuanced view--or what I think of as a more nuanced view--on a lot of these issues.

First of all, I don't actually know exactly what Nancy Pelosi said, and I would love to know the exact quote. Did she say she thought Medicare for all is a bad idea, or just that she thinks it's not doable? If the latter, did she mean it's not doable right now or not ever? Does she feels it's not doable because it wouldn't work or just that getting it past the Republicans in congress would be impossible? To me, those are important nuances. Either way, I'm sorry to hear that she's evidently so skeptical about something that I think is a great idea, but I don't necessarily see that skepticism as evidence that she doesn't want us to have a workable health care system. Again, I haven't read the original quote, so I don't know exactly what all she did say, and for all I know, it could have been worse that I think it was. But based on what I do know, that's how I'm seeing it right now.

No argument form me on TPP, but on the minimum wage issue, I seem to recall Hillary being pretty strong on raising it. The main difference betwen her and Bernie on that, if memory serves me correctly, is that he was pushing for $15 across the board, and she wasn’t sure it needed to be $15 in every single location across the country. I think she wanted to make it $15 in some places, where the cost of living is higher and $12 in places where the cost of living is lower. I don't think that's workable myself--the way I see it, the federal minimum wage needs to be the same throughout the entire country, and it needs to be $15--but I don't see it as her being "meh" on the issue of raising the minimum wage, so much as having different ideas on the details.

On the college issue, Hillary was NEVER against affordable college. No, she wasn't saying public colleges and universities should be tuition free, like Bernie--but making it affordable? Very definitely.  And yes, she did get pushed farther toward Bernie's stance in the end, but she was pushing for making college more affordable from the start.

No comments on the last paragraph, except that I'm truly sorry you feel so alienated. And also, even with all the failings of various politicians on the left, it still looks a lot better to me than the other side. The folks on the right don't think people deserve health care unless they can afford to pay for it themselves, they think letting people suffer and die is a great tradeoff for giving rich people big fat tax cuts, they don’t want to raise the minimum wage at all, and they are obsessed with policing women's reproductive organs and tryjng to force as many women as possible to have babies they don't want and can’t afford at the same time that they're busy cutting every thread they can in the nation's social safety net. And the poor, working class people who voted for Trump were voting for ALL of that and more, against their own best interests. So yeah, I don't see why I should have to aplogize to them. It's not my fault they decided to cut odff their noses to spite their own damned faces.