The difference between liberals and conservatives
I was reading about the Republican National Committee paying for Tea Party signs last night and had an ephiphany of sorts. I've been trying to distill the difference between these crazy Tea Party cons and liberals into a few words for a while and I think I finally have it. Conservatives care about "me" and Liberals care about "everybody."
What sparked that thought was the sign that the RNC provided to the event said, "Listen to Me!" If you think about all their rhetoric, it's incredibly self-absorbed. "I want my country back." "Keep your hands off my health care." "The government is stealing my money for taxes." Dan Riehl in the post below calling to euthanize Mrs. Reid says, "I can’t recall her ever doing anything for me." These people have no apparent social awareness, nor any desire to contribute to the communal good.
Liberals on the other hand talk about healthcare for all. Equal treatment for all. Civil rights for everyone. Save the planet for the next generations. There are of course exceptions, but generally, it's demonstrably true.
[More posts daily at The Detroit News]
What sparked that thought was the sign that the RNC provided to the event said, "Listen to Me!" If you think about all their rhetoric, it's incredibly self-absorbed. "I want my country back." "Keep your hands off my health care." "The government is stealing my money for taxes." Dan Riehl in the post below calling to euthanize Mrs. Reid says, "I can’t recall her ever doing anything for me." These people have no apparent social awareness, nor any desire to contribute to the communal good.
Liberals on the other hand talk about healthcare for all. Equal treatment for all. Civil rights for everyone. Save the planet for the next generations. There are of course exceptions, but generally, it's demonstrably true.
[More posts daily at The Detroit News]
Labels: conservatism, liberals, society
posted by Libby Spencer at 4:45 PM
5 Comments:
I think you are off a bit on this one. (Except for anything you want to say about Riehl, that lower life form deserves the worst you can think of).
I would say Liberals think more about the people, not so much about people. In your march to make things better for the people, you are entirely too comfortable with pushing individual people into little shoeboxes for me to support you.
I have never understood how a group of people who are against all the -isms can be so comfortable with group guilt and class warfare.
OMR, not sure what you mean by putting individuals in shoeboxes, but you were one of the exceptions I was thinking of when I wrote this. It's not an indictment in any event, it was just an observation.
I have a significant amount of interaction with tea party cons. Heck, half of my *fan* base at DetNews would fall into that category. For the most part, they're not crazy vile like the Riehl crowd, but they still frame the debate in those terms.
I'd agree that people broad brush groups too much in their rhetoric, and that happens on both sides of the fence, but I think it's a bit over the top to call it class warfare. Think it's more an ideological battle.
Thanks for my first laugh of the day. Nice how you construct a neat little house of cards and put us "liberals" into it. It's a nice idiosyncratic definition tailored to your argument, but you need to own up to the fact that the one putting people into boxes here, is you.
"Liberals" didn't invent class warfare and it's been the backbone of Right Wing TV and radio for years, trashing education and intelligence and even sanity as "elitist" while extolling the wisdom of the masses in fine Marxist/Leninist style to present Palin or Quayle or GWB as somehow better than Obama by virtue of angry, small minded ignorance.
Guilt? What guilt? I didn't demolish the economy, destroy education, set us all one against the other or start a war. I didn't oppose every bit of civil rights legislation in 150 years and make a racist joke of individual liberty: "conservatives" did that and their cheap, tendentious and self serving definition of "liberal" not only puts them in a box of their own creation, it nails the lid down.
Who made "liberal" into a nasty pejorative and a Procrustian shoebox into which you could stretch and trim and force anything and everyone you don't like and dismiss it all without further explanation? Listen to yourself!
No, I'm not going to dismiss conservatives categorically by claiming they're categorically dismissing me. I don't have to and besides I haven't heard from a conservative in ages and the Republican party hasn't owned one since Eisenhower - a man who would be stuffed mercilessly into your cardboard box of size 12 liberals along with Teddy Roosevelt and Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Tom Paine and Ben Franklin and Abe Lincoln.
There has always been class warfare but if we look at both sides of the battle line, it's not hard to see which side is oblivious to the self-contradictory, fallacious and even mendacious arguments such as yours. You've done yourself no good here, as polite as you've been trying to seem while doing what you falsely accuse others of doing. Got Guilt? Maybe you should get some to wash down the Crow.
Good post Libby and you're right. The only principle behind this is the avoidance of responsibility. It's all about the cosmic ME and that nothing I have owes anything to anyone and therefore it's all mine to keep. The only function of a government is to protect what's MINE from all attempts to get a dime of it by those horrible widows and orphans and lepers and colored people.
Ever notice how these sad people start their autobiographies with "nobody ever gave me anything?"
It tells a lot about the self-pitying type who have no pity, no sense of honor or responsibility or even patriotism. Just stunted souls crying ME ME ME.
No, nobody gave them a secure country, public education or a land of equal opportunity. Nobody protected their food and water and housing and transportation from being dangerous. Nobody protected them or their property or their families from being exploited by monopolistic robber barons, so why should they care? It's not as though they had any actual allegiance to anything but some goddamn flag and their "Christian" principles of snubbing the poor and sick. My Brother's keeper? What are you, a liberal?
Thanks Fogg. It continues to astound me how most of these folks self-identify as Xians and moderates, but their thinking couldn't more opposite the tenets of those beliefs.
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