How is this type of legislation not government restrictions in free speech? While I disagree with citizens United, it’s currently defining the law and most likely supported by these groups. This seems like a similar disallowed restriction.
I guess one difference is that they’re not explicitly banning the companies from those investments, they’re banning the state of Texas from doing business with the companies.
It’s really hard to tell anything about what’s going on here - the article is too busy telling you to get outraged, and it’s talking about legislation that apparently hasn’t even been proposed yet. It does quote one speaker as saying “if they’re going to mess with money that belongs to Texas retirees and undermine the very Texas economy, we’re gonna teach them some manners” which gives some indication of why Texas might have the right to interfere with the choice of investment and might care to interfere. But even then, once you null out the outrage, there’s so little here to go on.
The Texas law on ESG is so poorly written, hard to imagine this one would be any different. Any Texan should be outraged that their state is wasting time and money on this sort of nonsense (suing blackrock because blackrock doesn't invest enough in Oil co's, except of course for the fact that it's the #1 investor in Oil co's).
Citizens United was that spending money on getting a message out about electoral candidates - "express advocacy" - is protected. That doesn't mean spending money on other topics is protected.
Now I can easily see the argument being extended - and it has is some small ways (e.g. FEC vs Cruz) - but Citizens United is pretty controversial even in the legal academy so I don't think it's a given that it would be.
By bundling S and G together with E, we've doomed E. It's almost like that's what the oil companies wanted.
Even if you agree with some/all of the "ESG" goals though, it almost doesn't matter, because when you look at the ETFs that've been marked with that word, you see they're full of Exxon and Philip Morris like all the others -- just with a larger fee on top, for all the suckers.
It disenfranchises environment/energy/natural resource conservation efforts to associate them with woke topics such as "social equity" and related "governance" efforts.
I am personally a conservative environmentalist. Virtually 100% of "woke" related concepts to me, represent inculcation by foreign governments seeking to destabilize western societies.
The environment must not be politicized. It is the foundation of all biota including humans of course-- it is the matrix we live within.
Most of the oil companies score pretty well on the "G" - since it's really just a measure of how well-run they are and how responsive they are to shareholders.
They canceled a single contract based on a fairly simple principle that Walgreens is not providing medical service equitably.
The Walgreens situation is actually completely ridiculous on Walgreen’s part because they are not just not providing service where that service is disallowed by state law, but also where it might be disallowed by state law and a handful of lawmakers complained.
Also, there is literally no equivalence between ESG (which unlike what Elon Musk and Republican Senators who have no clue, is not about investing to improve the environment, for example, but instead is about investing in a way that considers environmental, social, and Governance risks to the business, so, for example, when investing in a new ski lodge, factoring the fact that the number of snow days have dropped and will continue to drop over the next few years when doing their projections) considering investment firms, which have tons of competition, and pharmacies, which sometimes are the only pharmacies in a region, refusing to provide essential medicine.
In reality, because they don’t have an understanding of what ESG actually is in the investment world (it’s not about making the planet better, unfortunately), what this will mean is that Texas will end up having to invest its money in tiny bespoke investment funds created just for Texas which are not allowed to factor a whole universe of risks, and will therefore almost certainly have much poorer performance relative to their ESG counterparts.
Which kind of raises why this bill is actually being put in place besides performative politics. It’s so their small time donors who would otherwise not be able to compete against the larger well run funds can get a slice of that Texas donation pie.
I guarantee when these contracts are rewritten they will go to mid sized hucksters who have donated individually to Texas State representatives.
Speaking as a pro-environmental and mostly "woke" Texan, but one who has lived here my entire life and more or less understands the perspective of type typical conservative here:
The destruction of the fossil fuel economy is an existential threat for the Texas economy. Imagine policies that threatened the tech industry in California or the tourism industry in Hawaii.
I read the "the Texas Legislature is here to protect you" as a sarcastic joke rather than a statemement. If that was the author's intention then it would make the article consistent.
This is an absurdly biased article that would have been flagged off the front page if it were in the other direction. I don't see any reason to trust the substance of the reporting when the article is adorned with such sanctimoniously juvenile attempts at humor.
I'm genuinely kinda curious what you think state power is for if not to serve political agendas. And outside of some abstract unactionable thing like "for the greater good" or "freedom" or whatever. Eventually you have to actually form policies and implement them, a political process driven by political motivations.
State power usage in political agenda's needs to be carefully evaluated, or it can lead to revolutions or disintegration.
When state power is used to serve political agendas, it can be easily abused for personal or party gain. This can lead to corruption, nepotism, and favoritism, which undermines the integrity of the government and erodes public trust in the system. Something we already see in many states, California's project to build a bullet train failed after millions and millons of dollars.
Using state power to serve political agendas can have serious negative consequences for democracy, governance, and society as a whole. It is essential that political leaders prioritize the interests of the people and use state power for the greater good rather than for their own personal or party gain. The "greater good" isn't a ironic or strange concept either just like the "noblesse oblige", these represent the contract between the governed and rulers.
The disintegration of these concepts in a nation lead to civil war or separation.
I know but "the interests of the people" is just as vague as "the greater good." When you get to the point of actually defining those interests and deciding what will further them, you're at political agenda.
What I'm workings towards is that that just isn't a useful distinction. You can't form any kind of useful framework for evaluation or action out of "political and therefor bad" vs "non-political and therefor good."
Some of these things are bad because they are bad, and you have to take a side opposing them on those grounds rather than invent these justifications that allow keeping your neutral purity intact.
The problem is without shared values, you can't define "bad" at a national level.
Both sides believe they are on the "right side of history", that's the problem here.
The "greater good" is "political" in nature, but it's not something that's hyper-partisan like what we seeing occur in the nation. We need a minimum set of neutral rules in nation with a very very wide variety of beliefs to maintain our technological nation.
You can and should think of the greater good in terms of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs at population level.
If you don't have food to eat and energy to keep you warm, self actualization or individuality really don't matter.
It depends on the specific power you're discussing.
Executive state power is supposed to be used to enforce laws on the books, regardless of whether the current political party agrees with them. If there's disagreement, there's a legislative process to follow.
Abusing executive power to selectively enforce, or harass, is obviously deeply problematic in a liberal society.
Legislative state power is where your points hit home. Absolutely, by all means, enact the laws that you're able to based upon the elected legislation. As long as it squares with the state and federal constitution, you're golden.
Judicial powers bent to political purposes are an absolute horror and should be rooted out as quickly as possible.
I think with a country as diverse as the US, balkanization is preferred. It's really by design, states have autonomy over citizens and the federal government presides over national issues. Unfortunately, the federal government has gained more and more power and tries to pass laws that half the country doesn't want. The next political party gets in power and does the same thing, except for the other half.
It's a good thing that I can move out of a state that's turning into something I don't like. It's expensive and uprooting, but at least I have the option. When the federal government passes a law I don't like, I'm stuck with it.
The Confederacy placed enormous control in the centralized government. It was not a contest between a loose collection of states and a centralized federal power.
Many people claim that the civil war was over state vs federal authority. They are wrong and have, at best, been duped by lost causers and white supremacists.
For example, it was written into the constitution of the confederacy that no state could ban slavery. The confederacy also had strong centralized control over things like money. These were not temporary powers.
>Many people claim that the civil war was over state vs federal authority.
It was; the state vs federal authority to regulate / abolish slavery. Both points of view are right but ignore the other half of the equation.
>The confederacy also had strong centralized control over things like money. These were not temporary powers.
Can you expound on this? One of the issues with the confederacy is their ability to fund the war through taxation, because many states didn't feel they were obligated to pay it, because state's rights (of course). It's pretty ironic that they seceded over the federal authority over slavery, and the lack of that authority in their own government to fund the war was a major contributing factor in them losing the war, and no longer existing.
It's crazy, the plantation class was unwilling to fund the war for their own economic survival, that they were winning at the time. Absolutely mind blowing.
Lots of things have nuance. I'd encourage you to speak with historians who study the civil war for that nuance. They'll tell you clearly that the narrative of state's rights vs federal authority is not based in the archive.
> Unfortunately, the federal government has gained more and more power and tries to pass laws that half the country doesn't want.
On the other hand, due to mechanisms favoring minority obstructionism left over from the slavery era, the federal government also hasn't passed laws that most of the country does want.
- Nationalizing healthcare[1]
- Getting money out of politics[2]
- Stricter laws about gun purchases[3]
Rather than having powerful state governments, what I'd prefer is that the states were dissolved in all but name, and their powers were ceded to county governments instead. The multiple tiers of government at the national/state/county/municipality made sense in a time when information could only travel as fast as your fastest horse, but that was nearly two centuries ago. Ceding state powers to counties would give you your options for moving away from policies you don't like, and would even make it more convenient since you wouldn't have to move as far.
I was actually thinking that, but I also think the Patriot Act was largely bipartisan. From wikipedia[0]
>Passed the House on October 24, 2001 (Yeas: 357; Nays: 66)
>Passed the Senate on October 25, 2001 (Yeas: 98; Nays: 1)
62 nays from democrats in the house[1], and only one nay in the senate and one not voting[2]. I'd say its more like Bush just happened to be president at the time. He didn't run with Patriot Act as his "platform" either (obviously). It also isn't directly about taking away state power in the first place so from that alone it isn't a great argument. That said, Patriot Act to me really seems like a turning point (for the worse) in US history.
I agree, I think on many aspects for the last 40 years, we have a uni-party disguised as a dual party. National security is one of those aspects. Having said that, the Patriot Act was proposed / championed by the GOP, but the Democrats were also culpable. I would add the drug war and militarization of police to the more-GOP side, but again, both sides are largely culpable.
Is it really preferred? I simply cannot return to my home state because my home state has become so disconnected politically and socially. It's pretty sad. There are several states that fit this category for many. I don't even particularly feel that safe traveling through some states.
Many states are effectively headed towards extremism and terrorist states. It's not like the extreme states are differing in subtle ways. They are openly attacking human rights and really what America should be about. It isn't good by any measure.
We won't balkanize because the federal government will give up power to the state governments to preserve its own existence before that happens (we hope).
Instead of HIPPO decisions, the states are serving as laboratories and experimenting with ideas to see which have the most merit. This is their role in The Union as intended by The Founders.
WEF/ESG assumes their choices lead to sustainability - there's no proof that the underlying methods of those choices are actually sustainable. That proof won't be available for decades. ESG without deeply examining issues like environmental impact of Wind Turbine/Solar Panel/Li-Ion Battery recycling, lifespan of alternative energy sources, mining, supply chain / global conflict, additional sunk carbon for manufacturing, manufacturing waste, electrical generation realities, or, as Texas is making clear here, financial and economic realities, ESG chooses to prematurely declare its ideas as winners.
Different does not imply improvement.
I'm for examining both pathways because it can only increase understanding.
So they are expanding the definition of "woke" to include caring about the climate now? It's almost like they're trying to create a blanket phrase for "everything we don't like" regardless of whether those things have anything to do with each other.
If I can hypothesize: I think what is going on is that conservatism posits that the world is ordered according to a strict hierarchy and order, and rules given by an authority. There is a purpose for everything and a plan for everyone, and that plan is simple and laid out according to specific rules that are easy to understand. And the promise is that if you follow those rules, then you are by definition virtuous, and if everyone follows the rules, then everything will be OK. The social order is not seen as having emerged gradually or having been created by humans- instead it is seen as eternal, unchanging, and sacred.
Now it might actually be psychologically healthy to believe that everything is going to be ok, even if it's not necessarily true. But the problem is that if you think that if you follow the rules of society then everything will be ok, then if things are not ok, it has to be because someone is breaking society's rules- by being gay for example. This leads to a bizarre conflation of social categories and norms with macroeconomic forces and scientific facts, which is why you see the right wing making otherwise baffling political connections between things like climate change and transgender identity. There's no logical reason those should be connected, but in the mind of the right, they are, because a) the existence of climate change contradicts the promise that if everyone adheres to the social order, nothing bad can happen and b) any non-traditional identity is crossing social boundaries. This also explains why you see things like monks flagellating themselves to repent in order to make the bubonic plague go away. It's the same logic.
I think that's what is going on. And despite the tendency of academics to try to frame this in value neutral language, I really do think that this is an inferior way to see the world. A worldview built on simple rules is really the worldview of a person who has not built layers of abstraction beyond the immediate and obvious. You might follow the rule "thou shalt not kill", and that's good- but if you understood why that rule is good in terms of more abstract concepts, you might also be able to predict other similar rules. And when there is a new situation that nobody has faced before, you can make good choices where there are no rules to follow that apply. Abstraction is flexible. Conservatism is not, because it is a shallow understanding of the world. It is more like the moral understanding of a child than an adult, in which the parent is always right and it is the duty of the child to obey without understanding.
That’s a question that philosophers have been writing about for centuries! There is no simple answer.
I suppose the best answer I could give is: try to think about the downstream effects of the choice you face, and think about what the world would be like if everyone made a particular decision.
Politically speaking, I think the best answer is: decisions should be made by the people affected by those decisions. People more affected should have greater say.
> And the promise is that if you follow those rules, then you are by definition virtuous, and if everyone follows the rules, then everything will be OK.
Is this not the promise of every ideological movement that isn't pure nihilism and wants to see the world burn (though I guess it would be for them too for some definition of "OK")?
Though I'd associate it more in an abstract way with organized religion ("if everyone follows these rules, we shall have paradise on earth") and progressive politics. Conservatives usually recognize that not everything will be OK for everyone, they just believe that you have some/more influence on whether it will be OK for you.
> which is why you see the right wing making otherwise baffling political connections between things like climate change and transgender identity
I don't think that's a connection they'd make outside of political tribalism. These days, you'll have progressives typically arguing both for gender-fluidity and climate change (and lots of other things), and conservatives take the opposing role on principle. Similarly, conservatives aren't fond of Islam, so in response progressives embrace Islam. They'll often switch sides with regards to specific issues as the larger front is moving this way and that and power shifts.
It makes a lot more sense to consider these things in a tribal way first and not try to wrap your head around how on earth someone's ideology drives them to do X. There's a lot of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and "the friend of my enemy is my enemy" going on all the time.
>So they are expanding the definition of "woke" to include caring about the climate now? It's almost like they're trying to create a blanket phrase for "everything we don't like" regardless of whether those things have anything to do with each other.
Yeah, they've been doing that for years, attempting to poison the well of progressive discourse by redefining its terminology through bad faith usage - it's all but impossible, now, to even use "woke" in its proper context.
> The south has never gotten over losing the civil war. And the north won't either force them to or let them leave.
"The South" and "The North" of the civil war era are even less distinct geographical units than they were at the time of the civil war (and, to an extent, the impression caused by factional control of state governments at the time of the war was misleading even then, many states had substantial factions -- including military units -- supporting both sides.)
62 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadI guess one difference is that they’re not explicitly banning the companies from those investments, they’re banning the state of Texas from doing business with the companies.
Now I can easily see the argument being extended - and it has is some small ways (e.g. FEC vs Cruz) - but Citizens United is pretty controversial even in the legal academy so I don't think it's a given that it would be.
Even if you agree with some/all of the "ESG" goals though, it almost doesn't matter, because when you look at the ETFs that've been marked with that word, you see they're full of Exxon and Philip Morris like all the others -- just with a larger fee on top, for all the suckers.
It disenfranchises environment/energy/natural resource conservation efforts to associate them with woke topics such as "social equity" and related "governance" efforts.
I am personally a conservative environmentalist. Virtually 100% of "woke" related concepts to me, represent inculcation by foreign governments seeking to destabilize western societies.
The environment must not be politicized. It is the foundation of all biota including humans of course-- it is the matrix we live within.
Most of the oil companies score pretty well on the "G" - since it's really just a measure of how well-run they are and how responsive they are to shareholders.
The Walgreens situation is actually completely ridiculous on Walgreen’s part because they are not just not providing service where that service is disallowed by state law, but also where it might be disallowed by state law and a handful of lawmakers complained.
Also, there is literally no equivalence between ESG (which unlike what Elon Musk and Republican Senators who have no clue, is not about investing to improve the environment, for example, but instead is about investing in a way that considers environmental, social, and Governance risks to the business, so, for example, when investing in a new ski lodge, factoring the fact that the number of snow days have dropped and will continue to drop over the next few years when doing their projections) considering investment firms, which have tons of competition, and pharmacies, which sometimes are the only pharmacies in a region, refusing to provide essential medicine.
In reality, because they don’t have an understanding of what ESG actually is in the investment world (it’s not about making the planet better, unfortunately), what this will mean is that Texas will end up having to invest its money in tiny bespoke investment funds created just for Texas which are not allowed to factor a whole universe of risks, and will therefore almost certainly have much poorer performance relative to their ESG counterparts.
Which kind of raises why this bill is actually being put in place besides performative politics. It’s so their small time donors who would otherwise not be able to compete against the larger well run funds can get a slice of that Texas donation pie.
I guarantee when these contracts are rewritten they will go to mid sized hucksters who have donated individually to Texas State representatives.
The destruction of the fossil fuel economy is an existential threat for the Texas economy. Imagine policies that threatened the tech industry in California or the tourism industry in Hawaii.
> ...rolling out legislation this year to punish insurance companies
I get you want to have a compelling lead but seriously did anyone proof read this? It's contradictory in the same breath.
When state power is used to serve political agendas, it can be easily abused for personal or party gain. This can lead to corruption, nepotism, and favoritism, which undermines the integrity of the government and erodes public trust in the system. Something we already see in many states, California's project to build a bullet train failed after millions and millons of dollars.
Using state power to serve political agendas can have serious negative consequences for democracy, governance, and society as a whole. It is essential that political leaders prioritize the interests of the people and use state power for the greater good rather than for their own personal or party gain. The "greater good" isn't a ironic or strange concept either just like the "noblesse oblige", these represent the contract between the governed and rulers. The disintegration of these concepts in a nation lead to civil war or separation.
I think most people here understood political agenda as partisan term here.
Some of these things are bad because they are bad, and you have to take a side opposing them on those grounds rather than invent these justifications that allow keeping your neutral purity intact.
The "greater good" is "political" in nature, but it's not something that's hyper-partisan like what we seeing occur in the nation. We need a minimum set of neutral rules in nation with a very very wide variety of beliefs to maintain our technological nation.
You can and should think of the greater good in terms of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs at population level. If you don't have food to eat and energy to keep you warm, self actualization or individuality really don't matter.
Executive state power is supposed to be used to enforce laws on the books, regardless of whether the current political party agrees with them. If there's disagreement, there's a legislative process to follow.
Abusing executive power to selectively enforce, or harass, is obviously deeply problematic in a liberal society.
Legislative state power is where your points hit home. Absolutely, by all means, enact the laws that you're able to based upon the elected legislation. As long as it squares with the state and federal constitution, you're golden.
Judicial powers bent to political purposes are an absolute horror and should be rooted out as quickly as possible.
It enables more competitions to fill in the void and hopefully cheaper prices.
But an outright ban is worse for the economy as less competition means higher prices.
Apparently, Gov. Gavin didn't or hasn't studied this President Nixon's failed regulation of gas price
Nepotism doesn't work like that.
It's a good thing that I can move out of a state that's turning into something I don't like. It's expensive and uprooting, but at least I have the option. When the federal government passes a law I don't like, I'm stuck with it.
I'm not familiar with it.
Are we talking about temporary war powers, or was this the long term government structure that would have been powerfully centralized?
If accurate, it would certainly change my understanding of the ideals of the confederacy.
For example, it was written into the constitution of the confederacy that no state could ban slavery. The confederacy also had strong centralized control over things like money. These were not temporary powers.
It was; the state vs federal authority to regulate / abolish slavery. Both points of view are right but ignore the other half of the equation.
>The confederacy also had strong centralized control over things like money. These were not temporary powers.
Can you expound on this? One of the issues with the confederacy is their ability to fund the war through taxation, because many states didn't feel they were obligated to pay it, because state's rights (of course). It's pretty ironic that they seceded over the federal authority over slavery, and the lack of that authority in their own government to fund the war was a major contributing factor in them losing the war, and no longer existing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_war_finance
It's crazy, the plantation class was unwilling to fund the war for their own economic survival, that they were winning at the time. Absolutely mind blowing.
Yeah, I'm sort of over absolutism.
Everything has nuance.
Authoritarianism's favorite tool is to reduce complex issues to "us" vs "them" absolutes.
On the other hand, due to mechanisms favoring minority obstructionism left over from the slavery era, the federal government also hasn't passed laws that most of the country does want.
- Nationalizing healthcare[1]
- Getting money out of politics[2]
- Stricter laws about gun purchases[3]
Rather than having powerful state governments, what I'd prefer is that the states were dissolved in all but name, and their powers were ceded to county governments instead. The multiple tiers of government at the national/state/county/municipality made sense in a time when information could only travel as fast as your fastest horse, but that was nearly two centuries ago. Ceding state powers to counties would give you your options for moving away from policies you don't like, and would even make it more convenient since you wouldn't have to move as far.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/29/increasing-...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/08/most-americ...
[3] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx
Can you give some examples? I'd say centralization of power has been mostly one sided for the past century or so. (FDR, JFK, LBJ)
>Passed the House on October 24, 2001 (Yeas: 357; Nays: 66)
>Passed the Senate on October 25, 2001 (Yeas: 98; Nays: 1)
62 nays from democrats in the house[1], and only one nay in the senate and one not voting[2]. I'd say its more like Bush just happened to be president at the time. He didn't run with Patriot Act as his "platform" either (obviously). It also isn't directly about taking away state power in the first place so from that alone it isn't a great argument. That said, Patriot Act to me really seems like a turning point (for the worse) in US history.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
[1]https://clerk.house.gov/evs/2001/roll398.xml
[2]https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...
Many states are effectively headed towards extremism and terrorist states. It's not like the extreme states are differing in subtle ways. They are openly attacking human rights and really what America should be about. It isn't good by any measure.
This is exactly a good thing long term.
Instead of HIPPO decisions, the states are serving as laboratories and experimenting with ideas to see which have the most merit. This is their role in The Union as intended by The Founders.
WEF/ESG assumes their choices lead to sustainability - there's no proof that the underlying methods of those choices are actually sustainable. That proof won't be available for decades. ESG without deeply examining issues like environmental impact of Wind Turbine/Solar Panel/Li-Ion Battery recycling, lifespan of alternative energy sources, mining, supply chain / global conflict, additional sunk carbon for manufacturing, manufacturing waste, electrical generation realities, or, as Texas is making clear here, financial and economic realities, ESG chooses to prematurely declare its ideas as winners.
Different does not imply improvement.
I'm for examining both pathways because it can only increase understanding.
Now it might actually be psychologically healthy to believe that everything is going to be ok, even if it's not necessarily true. But the problem is that if you think that if you follow the rules of society then everything will be ok, then if things are not ok, it has to be because someone is breaking society's rules- by being gay for example. This leads to a bizarre conflation of social categories and norms with macroeconomic forces and scientific facts, which is why you see the right wing making otherwise baffling political connections between things like climate change and transgender identity. There's no logical reason those should be connected, but in the mind of the right, they are, because a) the existence of climate change contradicts the promise that if everyone adheres to the social order, nothing bad can happen and b) any non-traditional identity is crossing social boundaries. This also explains why you see things like monks flagellating themselves to repent in order to make the bubonic plague go away. It's the same logic.
I think that's what is going on. And despite the tendency of academics to try to frame this in value neutral language, I really do think that this is an inferior way to see the world. A worldview built on simple rules is really the worldview of a person who has not built layers of abstraction beyond the immediate and obvious. You might follow the rule "thou shalt not kill", and that's good- but if you understood why that rule is good in terms of more abstract concepts, you might also be able to predict other similar rules. And when there is a new situation that nobody has faced before, you can make good choices where there are no rules to follow that apply. Abstraction is flexible. Conservatism is not, because it is a shallow understanding of the world. It is more like the moral understanding of a child than an adult, in which the parent is always right and it is the duty of the child to obey without understanding.
Can you explain what good is in your abstract concepts?
I suppose the best answer I could give is: try to think about the downstream effects of the choice you face, and think about what the world would be like if everyone made a particular decision.
Politically speaking, I think the best answer is: decisions should be made by the people affected by those decisions. People more affected should have greater say.
Is this not the promise of every ideological movement that isn't pure nihilism and wants to see the world burn (though I guess it would be for them too for some definition of "OK")?
Though I'd associate it more in an abstract way with organized religion ("if everyone follows these rules, we shall have paradise on earth") and progressive politics. Conservatives usually recognize that not everything will be OK for everyone, they just believe that you have some/more influence on whether it will be OK for you.
> which is why you see the right wing making otherwise baffling political connections between things like climate change and transgender identity
I don't think that's a connection they'd make outside of political tribalism. These days, you'll have progressives typically arguing both for gender-fluidity and climate change (and lots of other things), and conservatives take the opposing role on principle. Similarly, conservatives aren't fond of Islam, so in response progressives embrace Islam. They'll often switch sides with regards to specific issues as the larger front is moving this way and that and power shifts.
It makes a lot more sense to consider these things in a tribal way first and not try to wrap your head around how on earth someone's ideology drives them to do X. There's a lot of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and "the friend of my enemy is my enemy" going on all the time.
Yeah, they've been doing that for years, attempting to poison the well of progressive discourse by redefining its terminology through bad faith usage - it's all but impossible, now, to even use "woke" in its proper context.
"The South" and "The North" of the civil war era are even less distinct geographical units than they were at the time of the civil war (and, to an extent, the impression caused by factional control of state governments at the time of the war was misleading even then, many states had substantial factions -- including military units -- supporting both sides.)
I grew up south of the Mason-Dixson line, very common to see confederate flags, and occasionally burning crosses in people's yards.
Where in "the south" did I grow up?
About a 35 minute drive down I95 from Philadelphia.
But that being said, I don't agree that giving in to sectionalism is the answer.
We have more in common most of the time than the news entertainment industry would lead us to believe.