What exactly are Democrats afraid of?

[bamacre]

You guys won.

In all seriousness, the Democrats have the Oval Office, and the majority in both houses of Congress. Yet lately here at P&N at least there seems to be a sharp increase in, well I'll just say anti-Republican, threads posted. I won't name names nor post links to said threads, I don't think it's even necessary. A few appear to even have a raging erection of hatred toward Republicans.

Hatred almost always stems from fear. So my question is, what exactly are you afraid of?

It can't be Republicans in general. Their numbers are and have been dwindling. They have no bound vision, not even a generally presumed leadership. The Republican Neoconservatives have failed. The social conservatives have failed. The party is fighting amongst itself.

And what exactly do those small remnants of Republicans have as ammo in which to use against you? Nothing but complaints that make them total hypocrites. Increasing deficits? Ongoing wars? Losses of civil liberties? Unless they were asleep during the previous 8 years, they have nothing.

And certainly you cannot be afraid of Ron Paul & Co. I mean, they make up maybe 2% of the voting public? Sure they have made some strides, some progress. I guess they've gone from a rounded-down 0% all the way to 2%. Heck I don't know what the numbers are, perhaps 5%? That even sounds high, so it certainly isn't the "rEVOLution" you fear.

So what is it? What is it you fear?

Well, there's only one thing left. There's only one possible thing left that Democrats fear enough to have this raging hatred toward those outside their party. And that one thing is located right in the mirror. You fear that what Obama is doing is wrong. You fear that what he is doing to stimulate the economy is the wrong plan, that he's been listening to and taking advice from the wrong people. That maybe we won't be leaving Iraq as soon as we hoped. That perhaps increasing the war efforts in Afghanistan is a bad idea, and spreading the war into Pakistan is a bad idea as well.

Yet, I think all of these things above are individually irrelevant. What the Democrats fear is exactly what many Republicans feared years ago. That their own party is generally bad. Not just corrupted, and not just morally corrupted, but completely lost. A lack of direction. A lack of ideology, a lack of true vision. But more importantly, and this is the real kicker, there's nowhere to turn, and no one to turn to. The other party is simply not attractive. So you remain stuck. Stuck supporting a bad party. You have become a Republican of yesterday. You feel what they felt, you fear what they feared, and thus, you hate what they hate. You are them, and they are you.

Oh how the tides of change have come. Or not.



I want to offer a preemptive apology to anyone who accidentally clicked on this thread and read my OP.

 

[jpeyton]

You have to remember that P&N is a collection of a lot of polar opposites and few moderates. People like me want to see the complete and total destruction of the Republican party.

 

[Kirby]

People have to have something to bitch about.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

What makes me afraid is that even after how Republicans ran things in 2002-2008 there are still people that support that kind of Republicanism.

 

[OrByte]

/shakes fist

you MADE ME CLICK!! arrggh

 

[theflyingpig]

Originally posted by: jpeyton
You have to remember that P&N is a collection of a lot of polar opposites and few moderates. People like me want to see the complete and total destruction of the Republican party.

I want to see the complete and total destruction of you.

 

[0marTheZealot]

Originally posted by: jpeyton
You have to remember that P&N is a collection of a lot of polar opposites and few moderates. People like me want to see the complete and total destruction of the Republican party.

Me as well, but for a different reason. I'd like to see adults running an opposition political party so we can actually have some meaningful debate in this country.

 

[glenn1]

Originally posted by: bamacre
You guys won.

In all seriousness, the Democrats have the Oval Office, and the majority in both houses of Congress. Yet lately here at P&N at least there seems to be a sharp increase in, well I'll just say anti-Republican, threads posted. I won't name names nor post links to said threads, I don't think it's even necessary. A few appear to even have a raging erection of hatred toward Republicans.

Hatred almost always stems from fear. So my question is, what exactly are you afraid of?

It can't be Republicans in general. Their numbers are and have been dwindling. They have no bound vision, not even a generally presumed leadership. The Republican Neoconservatives have failed. The social conservatives have failed. The party is fighting amongst itself.

And what exactly do those small remnants of Republicans have as ammo in which to use against you? Nothing but complaints that make them total hypocrites. Increasing deficits? Ongoing wars? Losses of civil liberties? Unless they were asleep during the previous 8 years, they have nothing.

And certainly you cannot be afraid of Ron Paul & Co. I mean, they make up maybe 2% of the voting public? Sure they have made some strides, some progress. I guess they've gone from a rounded-down 0% all the way to 2%. Heck I don't know what the numbers are, perhaps 5%? That even sounds high, so it certainly isn't the "rEVOLution" you fear.

So what is it? What is it you fear?

Well, there's only one thing left. There's only one possible thing left that Democrats fear enough to have this raging hatred toward those outside their party. And that one thing is located right in the mirror. You fear that what Obama is doing is wrong. You fear that what he is doing to stimulate the economy is the wrong plan, that he's been listening to and taking advice from the wrong people. That maybe we won't be leaving Iraq as soon as we hoped. That perhaps increasing the war efforts in Afghanistan is a bad idea, and spreading the war into Pakistan is a bad idea as well.

Yet, I think all of these things above are individually irrelevant. What the Democrats fear is exactly what many Republicans feared years ago. That their own party is generally bad. Not just corrupted, and not just morally corrupted, but completely lost. A lack of direction. A lack of ideology, a lack of true vision. But more importantly, and this is the real kicker, there's nowhere to turn, and no one to turn to. The other party is simply not attractive. So you remain stuck. Stuck supporting a bad party. You have become a Republican of yesterday. You feel what they felt, you fear what they feared, and thus, you hate what they hate. You are them, and they are you.

Oh how the tides of change have come. Or not.



I want to offer a preemptive apology to anyone who accidentally clicked on this thread and read my OP.

It's not enough for some that their preferred party wins. They want to be seen and acknowledged as morally superior for holding their viewpoint, and the other side as evil for holding theirs. Theirs is the path to salvation, and their opponents not only recognize this, but only oppose them due to greed, thirst for power, or some other malevolent reason.

 

[Cuda1447]

Originally posted by: jpeyton
You have to remember that P&N is a collection of a lot of polar opposites and few moderates. People like me want to see the complete and total destruction of the Republican party.

So you admit you are one of those fringe lunatics that so many of us despise?

 

[Whitecloak]

paulbots!

 

[Moonbeam]

I am not the only person who knows anything:

What gives birth to hatred?
By Alice Miller
Excerpt from Paths of Life: Seven Scenarios, (1998) pp. 150-56


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Although centuries of novels and autobiographies have dealt with the subject of child abuse in all its forms, society has been slow in recognizing the frequency with which this assault is committed. Only in the last twenty years has there been any real progress in this respect, and most of it is due to the efforts of a small number of researchers and above all to the media. Still underestimated and sometimes contested are the consequences very early abuse will have for the victims in their adult lives. The issues involved have been largely ignored by the scientific and academic community... Even in certain therapeutic circles there is still controversy about the real significance of childhood experiences in the lives of adults...
Why has research into the subject of "childhood" been so rigorously avoided? Many possible reasons suggest themselves. One of them is surely that...we somehow fear that the things it brings to light might cost us the love we have for our parents and cast a shadow on cherished memories.

But the risk of that is slight. That first, unquestioning love of our parents is so deeply rooted that hardly anything can destroy it, and certainly not insight into the truth. It is grounded in the natural need to love and be loved. Understandably we treasure these positive, life-giving feelings. And yet the fear of losing them can prevent us from facing up to the truth. That fear can sustain the delusion that we owe it to our parents to practice denial.

And it really is a delusion. Of course, in childhood there are frequently irreconcilable conflicts between loyalty to our parents and being true to our own selves. Many people would not have survived an unswerving allegiance to the truth when they were small; they had no choice but to seek refuge in denial. But as adults we can learn to identify and get closer to what is true for us and thus free ourselves of the symptoms and consequences of self-deception. This will not involve giving up the good feelings we have for our parents: as adults we understand the position they were in and can find out for ourselves why they did us harm without realizing it or admitting it to themselves.

If adults can find someone to assist them in this process of learning...they will ultimately be able to do both: to be loving and understanding on the one hand, and true to themselves on the other...

Children cannot understand why they should have injuries inflicted on them by the people they love and admire. They therefore reinterpret that behavior and believe it to be right. Cruelty is thus given a positive valuation in the child's cognitive system, and that valuation will be retained for life. Unless, that is, the child submits the whole process to a re-evaluation when he or she grows up.

Many people succeed in doing precisely that, either relatively early on in life or later. ...they realize that forsaking their childhood status and all its limitations and restrictions does not mean giving up the love they have for their parents. With this understanding, they will be able to leave the valuations of infancy behind and as adults acknowledge what was wrong, harmful, maybe even actively dangerous about the way their parents treated them. To do that, they first have to grow out of the state of childlike ignorance and helplessness. This will enable them in retrospect to understand both themselves and the pressures to which their parents were exposed.

They no longer need to pretend that the beatings they were given did them good although precisely the opposite is the case. Nor do they need to hurl accusations at their parents like a toddler unable to understand why he has been wronged. Today they are able to put a name to the things they went through and to empathize with the situation their parents were in, in cases where their parents are communicative enough to describe it to them. The result is understanding--something fundamentally different from the religious act of forgiveness, which avoids or indeed actively shuns precise insights.

But what happens if adults continue to steadfastly deny the harm they suffered, maintaining the infant position and glorifying the mistakes made by their parents? They may then end up condoning that violence as such, because they were given no opportunity of experiencing any alternatives and because the reasons for their parents' actions remain hidden from them. The destructive consequences may manifest themselves in adolescence in tyrannical treatment of younger siblings, in acts of violence, and possibly even murder.

Unfortunately, adults have some more methods at their disposal for denying the violence done to them in youth and taking that violence out on others. With sophisticated ideological justifications they can even contrive to pass it off as a good thing. The less inclination they show to recognize and revise this ingenious self-delusion, the more likely it is that others will be made to suffer the consequences. And it is this that ultimately confronts us with the apparent paradox of a nice, well-behaved child consummately skilled in living up to the adults' expectations and never voicing any criticism of their ending up thirty years later as a commandant in Auschwitz or as an Adolf Eichmann.

In all my books I have been concerned to demonstrate how the violence done to children devolves back on society as a whole. I was led to this conclusion by my inquiries into the way hatred develops, where it comes from. I wanted to find out why some people incline to extreme violence while others do not. Only when I started examining the childhood biographies of dictators and mass murderers did I begin to understand. As children, all of them without exception were exposed to the horrors born of hypocrisy, and all of them ignored or denied the fact in later life. The atmosphere of hypocrisy they grew up in taught them to see cruelty as something good and useful. It was this denial that incited them to the retaliation campaigns they subsequently embarked on. A child battered and humiliated in the name of parental "care" will quickly internalize the language of violence and canting insincerity and come to see it as the only effective medium of communication.

In my work I have often referred to Hitler and Stalin as graphic examples of the effects cruelty to children can have on society at large. In response, many people countered by saying that they had often been beaten themselves and that had not made war criminals out of them. Asked in more detail about their early years, they invariably disclosed that there had been at least one person who had shown them honesty, affection, or love, even though that person had not been able to protect them from physical mistreatment. This type of figure (I use the term "helping witness") can also be found in the biography of Dostoyevsky, who by all accounts had an extremely violent father but a loving mother. She passed on to her son the knowledge that such a thing as love actually exists, a knowledge without which his novels would have been unthinkable.

Among the victims of early cruelty, there are some who encounter not only helping witnesses of the more unconscious variety but also "knowing witnesses"--people who actively help them to recognize the wrong done to them for what it is and to articulate their sorrow at what has happened. Naturally enough, these children usually do not turn into violent criminals at a later stage. They are reasonably well aware of what they feel and what they do.

Studying child abuse confronts us with the astonishing fact that parents will inflict the same punishment or neglect on their children as they experienced themselves in their early lives. But as adults they have no recollection of what they went through. In the case of sexual assault on children, it is quite usual for the perpetrators to have no conscious knowledge of their own early life history or at the least to be cut off from the attendant feelings aroused by those experiences. It is not until they are in therapy--always supposing they are given any--that it transpires that they have been reenacting what they went through as children.

The sole explanation I can advance for this fact is that information on the cruelty suffered in childhood remains stored in the brain in the form of unconscious memories. For a child, conscious experience of such treatment is impossible. If children are not to break down completely under the pain and the fear, they must repress that knowledge. But the unconscious memories drive them to reproduce those repressed scenes over and over again in the vain attempt to liberate themselves from the fears that cruelty and abuse have left with them. Some victims create situations in which they can assume the active role in order to master the feeling of helplessness and escape the unconscious anxieties.

But this liberation is a specious one because the effects of the past don't change as long as they remain unnoticed. Repeatedly the perpetrator will go in search of new victims. As long as one projects hatred and fear onto scapegoats, there is no way of coming to terms with these feelings. Not until the cause has been recognized and the natural reaction to wrongdoing understood can the blind hatred wreaked on innocent victims be dissipated. The function it performs, that of masking the truth, is no longer necessary...

But what is hatred? As 1 see it, it is a possible consequence of the rage and despair that cannot be consciously felt by a child who has been neglected and maltreated even before he or she has learned to speak. As long as the anger directed at a parent or other first caregiver remains unconscious or is disavowed, it cannot be dissipated. It can be taken out only on oneself or stand-ins, on scapegoats such as one's own children or alleged enemies...

An animal will respond to attack with "fight or flight." Neither course is open to an infant exposed to aggression from immediate family members. Thus the natural reaction remains pent up, sometimes for decades, until it can be taken out on a weaker object...

 

[LumbergTech]

Originally posted by: Cuda1447

Originally posted by: jpeyton
You have to remember that P&N is a collection of a lot of polar opposites and few moderates. People like me want to see the complete and total destruction of the Republican party.

So you admit you are one of those fringe lunatics that so many of us despise?

I don't think either party is essential to the country personally...they could be replaced and shit would be the same no big deal

 

[nageov3t]

Originally posted by: LumbergTech

Originally posted by: Cuda1447

Originally posted by: jpeyton
You have to remember that P&N is a collection of a lot of polar opposites and few moderates. People like me want to see the complete and total destruction of the Republican party.

So you admit you are one of those fringe lunatics that so many of us despise?

I don't think either party is essential to the country personally...they could be replaced and shit would be the same no big deal

political party is just a fancy name for clique.

they're going to exist no matter what happens and will be somewhat a reflection of the nation's political landscape.

jpeyton has a hard time accepting diversity and the fact that people who think differently than him might in fact not be demons.

 

[blackangst1]

Well said bamacre

 

[Moonbeam]

l: political party is just a fancy name for clique.

M: What is that supposed to explain?


l: they're going to exist no matter what happens and will be somewhat a reflection of the nation's political landscape.

M: You mean that cliques are going to exist and are just a unfancy name for political party and that therefore as political parties in the nation they will somewhat represent the political landscape. Gee, you are kidding.

l: jpeyton has a hard time accepting diversity and the fact that people who think differently than him might in fact not be demons.

M: jpeyton sounds like a demon.

 

[cubby1223]

"What exactly are Democrats afraid of?"

Conservativism making a comeback.

Just because many hate dubya, doesn't make me want to vote for more government...

We just had another Chicago alderman indicted today on federal fraud and bribery charges, not to mention the ongoing saga of our junior U.S. Senator



AT P&N is filled mainly with moderates and some far-left progressives hell-bent on wanting the Republican party destroyed. You haven't a clue what a far-right nut actually is, when you guys try to call someone like me one :roll:

And if you think one party rule is beneficial to the country?

 

[theeedude]

Nothing. Gonna push our agenda, pedal to the metal.

 

[nageov3t]

Originally posted by: senseamp
Nothing. Gonna push our agenda, pedal to the metal.

when? because you have a filibuster-proof congress and the white house and it's certainly not happening.

 

[Fear No Evil]

Its gotten so bad that some liberal members actually encouraged conservatives to kill themselves, and another encourages waterboarding ALL conservatives. Winning politically enough enough, they want conservatives dead.

 

[aphex]

Your thread is based on a false premise, that there can only be a single reason why Democrats hate Republicans. I'm sure there are many reasons across the board, thought I doubt that the conclusion you arrived at is anywhere in the majority. In fact, after reading your "conclusion", I find it slightly far fetched to think many Democrats believe that at all considering the current governmental makeup as you correctly stated.

Personally speaking, I don't hate republicans, I never paint with a brush that thick. What I find annoying from some republicans is the petty attacks that a select few have decided to make, which is then echoed by the chorus of dittoheads, Hannity watchers, and Fox News patrons. Obama the Communist, Facist and Muslim? RNC calling for the Democratic Party to rename itself the 'Democrat Socialist Party'? All Obama supporters worship him like a diety? C'mon. It just gets old and feigns as actual discussion, when it reality its just childish mud slinging that's gotten old long ago.

I also find it fairly annoying that so many people seem to be armchair economists when in reality most people don't even understand what got us into this mess in the first place. The fact remains that no one knows whether or not Obama's plans thus far will have any real impact on our current economic situation as it can take years to assess what impact, positive or negative, they had. Who knows what position the economy could have been in had Obama done nothing upon taking office? Its way too soon to tell.

 

[Perknose]

A few thoughts on the matter:

1. The Democratic Party sucks. It has a huge number of career cover-your-ass bozos in it's elected ranks.

2. The Republican Party is so far worse, there is really no comparison. It is a false comparison to just say, "Well, gee, they're both bad." It ignores the titanic and world class social and ideological ignorance and dangerous declasse stupidity of the party that put forth Sarah Palin for national office.

3. Ron Paul fanboism is a deluded detour to a non-existent nirvana for those who simply can't deal with the almost overwhelming complexity of the a large scale state in today's internecine world. Sorry guys, but your "purity" is that of the eternal dilettante outsider. There are more literal monarchists in England than there are Ron Paul supporters in America, and with good reason.

Tear down your Ayn Rand posters and get over yourselves, there's work to be done.

4. George Bush and Dick Cheney fucked us but good. They left a mess that's not going away anytime soon. Best to roll up your sleeves, pick up a shovel with Obama and the rest of us, leave the holy jihad against gay marriage and other such asshole diversions like crying "socialism, socialism" behind, and lend a hand. We've got a hard stretch of road ahead, and we really need your help.

 

[Siddhartha]

I do not know of any Democrats who are afraid of the Republicans.

 

[Lemon law]

Well I am a democrat and we are afraid of the usual things like a black hole eating the earth, a thermo nuclear war, and the crazy idiots
that would welcome such a war.

And as a personal note, when I was small child, I was afraid of alligators under my bed. As a more rational adult, I simply cut the legs off my bed.

 

[Moonbeam]

Some of the upset could be attributed to the fact that the the profound pervasive titanic and phenomenally unbelievable stupidity of conservatives in power for 8 years has left the country in ruins. You elected a disaster and the predictable results have been disaster.

And the fact that you not only show your stupid faces in public and continue with the same titanic stupidity and are completely embarrassed by what you have done puts the rest of us folk who aren't brain dead in a rage.

It could be that, but I'm not sure.

But don't forget that because you are already brain dead, nobody is doing anything immoral or wrong wishing you dead. And the faster you filthy crud become extinct the better the chance humanity will have of surviving.

On the other hand, just as I cannot get to the real root of this hatred, I can only identify it has to do with feeling unloved, I know it is totally irrational because just like me, you can't help yourselves. I am as stupid as you and you are as stupid as me and by stupid I mean unconscious of the roots of emotion.

 

[Moonbeam]

Originally posted by: Lemon law
Well I am a democrat and we are afraid of the usual things like a black hole eating the earth, a thermo nuclear war, and the crazy idiots
that would welcome such a war.

And as a personal note, when I was small child, I was afraid of alligators under my bed. As a more rational adult, I simply cut the legs off my bed.

Nice but if you have a box springs there is a whole world that can fit in the hollow in there that can send tentacles out.