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Comment by argonaut | Hacker News Reader

You have your history all wrong. If you try to squeeze the Republican party of 1900's economic policy into the current American liberalism vs. conservatism spectrum (I say squeeze because obviously the political positions of that time were different than today's), they would be liberal, and the Democrats of that time would be conservative.

So the fact that once upon a time red meant liberal, but no longer does, does not prove that economic conservatives have reducing economic inequality as a direct goal.

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If you pay any attention to current political discussion, e.g. the field of Republican candidates they do NOT argue in favor of inequality. They describe it as a problem just as the Democrats do.

And of course that's false. The Democrats of the 1900s are conservative; the new deal is the most iconic conservative movement we've ever seen yes? And Hoovervilles were created by socialist thought?

What? The New Deal was socialist, which is liberal on the American political spectrum. Calling it part of American conservatism is clearly untrue.

Virtually no Republicans have a stated goal or platform of reducing economic inequality. Pretty much every Democrat running for president does. To claim otherwise is also clearly untrue.

I suspect you are mixing up the fact that in American politics, conservatism (which is "red") consists of what Europeans would call liberalism (in fact the New Deal was part of the reason the definitions flipped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_coalition).

It was sarcasm.

Okay... You should be a lot more obvious about it in the future. Probably didn't help to put true statements on the same line as sarcastic ones.

>>the new deal is the most iconic conservative movement we've ever seen yes?

No. The New Deal is the most liberal policy enacted in American history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal

The New Deal produced a political realignment, making the Democratic Party the majority... with its base in liberal ideas, the white South, traditional Democrats, big city machines, and the newly empowered labor unions and ethnic minorities. The Republicans were split, with conservatives opposing the entire New Deal as an enemy of business and growth, and liberals accepting some of it and promising to make it more efficient... By 1936 the term "liberal" typically was used for supporters of the New Deal, and "conservative" for its opponents.

You missed the sarcasm.

> the field of Republican candidates they do NOT argue in favor of inequality.

That's because they are, and have been completely fine with inequality. They have done nothing, absolutely nothing which indicates they are concerned with income inequality and propose no solutions. So when you say they do not argue in favor of inequality, you're correct. That's because they completely ignore it. They pretend it doesn't exist.

> [T]he new deal is the most iconic conservative movement we've ever seen yes?

The New Deal was economically liberal but socially conservative; I'm inclined to say that it _was_ an iconic conservative effort. In particular, it was what gave the country enough social cohesion to win WWII; and it was what made the South lose interest in a second attempt at secession. The Southern Agrarians had spent the 1920s building a new argument for an independent CSA; once the New Deal started up, they mostly switched to supporting the US.

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