Anti-Liberalism and Conservatism 

I'm a NeverTrump conservative and have been from the jump in 2015. But a question often arises in my mind: why do populist lefties hate him so much? He stole Bernie Sanders' economic and trade policies, he loves Russia almost as much as Hillary and Jill Stein, his tweets weren't any meaner or more slanderous than the shit you guys made up about Mitt Romney, his cult is only marginally more creepy than Obama's, he's got two more rape allegations than Bill Clinton who he was close friends with for 30 years and to whom he donated millions... basically, he's the same as the liberals that I've been arguing with for my entire life.

About 25 mins in, I think much of what he's arguing is incredibly weak. He seems to be defining "liberalism" in a very Whiggish sense.

You would be hard-pressed to characterize Obama as a socialist/communist. If you think that, I'd be interested in hearing how 8 years of Obama proved that thesis. It's NOT a stretch, however, to characterize Trump as an authoritarian who would flout the Constitution to hold and wield power. He's already previewed that. We don't have to guess.

@@timstevens3025 I apologize for any confusion I may have caused you, as I was not attempting to suggest that Obama was a socialist/communist. I brought up the relationship between fascism and socialism/communism merely as another illustrative example of the general concept that right-wing movements sometimes arise as reactions to left-wing movements. The idea that Trumpian/MAGA/whatever anti-liberalism is, in some way, a reaction to the anti-liberalism of the Left, and the idea the Trump is a weird, funhouse mirror version of Obama is a different illustrative example of that general concept. I would never suggest that Obama is a socialist/communist, since he, like the progressive movement of which he is a part, actually has more in common with fascism than socialism or communism, in particular, their corporatist approach to the organization of society and the economy; the attitude toward private property evinced in Elizabeth Warren’s proposed Accountable Capitalism Act, for example, sounds very much of a piece with what Nazis and Fascists in the 1930s said about the relationship between private property and the state. That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone familiar with history, though: in the 1920s and early 1930s American progressives routinely expressed great admiration for Mussolini. And to be clear, I am NOT saying "progressive = fascist"'; I am merely pointing out that they overlap with regard to several critical tenets, and the overlap between those two groups is greater than the overlap between progressivism and socialism/communism.

when Kagan ascribes ideological commitments to conservatives that aren't part of their self-conception that's wrong; when Goldberg call liberals concerned about civil rights post 9/11 "objectively pro-terrorist" that's fine 🤡🤡🤡