[Arainach]

It sprung up from capitalist propaganda and intentional sabotage of the government by conservatives.

> I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

Grover Norquist said the quiet part out loud in 2001, but conservatives have been running that playbook since the New Deal.

[yonaguska]

For me it happened when I was growing up and I watched my family bankrupted and pushed to near homelessness with zero legal recourse due to a corrupt local government. There are countless others that have found themselves at the mercy of a large government, with unlimited money and resources.

[Arainach]

....so you prefer a "small" government, which history has shown time and time again leads to corporations doing evil en masse, ruining all sorts of lives around them?

[GolfPopper]

>*"conservatives have been running that playbook since the New Deal"

I think one of America's many failures is allowing a radically revolutionary right-wing (that is currently headed full speed to fascism) to keep calling themselves "conservatives" when that label is about as incorrect as can be. They don't "conserve" anything. They're not actually reactionary, although they often pretend to be. They are not trying to be defenders of Chesterton's Gate[1]. They're radicals, who want to reshape society to their own whims and prejudices. And they ought to be address and treated as such.

1. https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/

[questionableans]

I agree. Of the two major US political parties today, one is primarily radical right with a small conservative branch that is struggling to stay in their party. The other is conservative to moderate with a small liberal branch that is fighting to make their party stand for something.

[jampekka]

That liberals are the left wing in US is quite telling. In Europe and Latin America liberals are (center-)right.

[b800h]

The word "liberal" means different things in different places.

[jampekka]

Maybe, although many policies by European liberal center-right parties are to the left of US liberals.

The main reason is probably that US never had the major socialist movements of 20th century Europe. Before those liberals were the left in Europe too.