Liberal vs Conservative

Unless those goals are to do something that religious conservatives deem is against their religion. One of the paradoxes that has always bothered me is how someone can believe in little government interference but think it is fine for the government to tell a woman what she can do with her body or to prevent someone from ending their life if they have no quality of life left. Conservatives are fine with medical science as long as it doesn't use stem cells to find ways to treat diseases. Religious conservatives praise the family unit as long as it is a man and a woman raising the children. They are just fine with government interference to set people straight on issues they find immoral. Religion trumps personal freedoms.

I believe that many people take a liberal stance on some issues and conservative on others.

The issue I have with the authors of the piece using the dog whistle “traditional American values” rather than explicitly listing what they mean is that it - on the top surface level - reinforces the notion that conservatives are “true” Americans, more patriotic, etc., while liberals are pinko lovers of socialist/communist countries.

It feeds right into the dialogue we’ve been having on the other political threads where the assumption was stated that because one is a conservative one loves the military - the inverse being implied that liberals don’t love the military.

I’m sick and tired of the farcical narrative that paints conservatives as true patriots and liberals as the ones who want to destroy America when we all just witnessed the President and the GOP take a huge messy crap all over the Constitution.

Financially conservative but socially liberal is a fallacy. It costs money to help other people less fortunate. You cannot be both.

Also, we don’t both want the same things. Conservatives want to control women and their bodies, liberals want equality and peace.

I love that!

Serious question: what do you think it would mean to be "fiscally liberal?"

Thank you to all those who answered the question. Since 2014 British children are taught four fundamental British values in school. The initiative was introduced to prevent terrorism.
The values are -
Democracy
The rule of law
Individual liberty
Mutual tolerance and respect for different faiths and beliefs

I’ve had many online discussions with people who are against supporting asylum seekers as they feel we should take care of ‘our own’ first. They also argue that accepting refugees will be the death of ‘British values’. Though they usually can’t explain exactly what they are.

Anyhow, I don’t want to get off topic. I am interested to compare recent British values to the people’s definitions of traditional American values.

I read this post from Heather Cox Richardson today and I think it does a goof job of explaining some of the differences between liberal and conservative ideas on social programs and the economy, both historically and presently.


February 8, 2020 (Saturday)

On Monday, Trump will release his 2021 budget. It contains $800 billion worth of cuts in Medicaid over the next decade. On January 22, in an interview on CNBC when he was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, when pressed on the enormous budget deficits his policies have created—he has added almost $3 trillion to the national debt-- he suggested that he is considering cutting Social Security and Medicare in his second term. “That’s actually the easiest of all things, if you look,” he said. And despite his pledge at the State of the Union to protect health insurance coverage for people with preexisting conditions, his administration is currently asking the courts to repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) entirely, a decision the Supreme Court has put off until after the 2020 election.

One of the reasons the nation’s deficit and debt is soaring is that Trump’s 2017 tax cut slashed tax revenues. And rather than helping regular Americans, “the plumbers, the carpenters, the cops, the teachers, the truck drivers, the pipe-fitters, the people that like me best,” as Trump put it, 60% of the tax savings went to people whose incomes were in the top 20%.

These cuts to both social programs and taxes are the end game of a movement that started in the 1930s. It is designed to take American government back to the 1920s, when Republicans led by Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge turned the government over to businessmen in the belief that they alone truly knew what was best for the country. For eight years, it seemed like this system was the best ever designed as the economy appeared to boom and some men became very rich indeed.

But the Roaring Twenties came to a crashing end in 1929, and in the introspection that followed, Americans discovered that some businessmen and financiers had been cheating, while even those who were trying to live within the law were gambling with customers’ money or taking advantage of risky schemes. Meanwhile, the economic growth of the era had not translated to higher wages for workers or better pay for farmers; all the profits from the booming businesses had gone to those at the top of economy.

Republican President Hoover assured Americans that the economy simply needed a self-correction. He refused any large-scale government programs to steady the nation, insisting that such government activism would destroy the “rugged individualism” that lay at the heart of the national character.

His Democratic opponent in the 1932 election disagreed. Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered a “New Deal” to the American people, who had had their world yanked out from under them through no fault of their own. FDR maintained that the government must step in to regulate the economy to keep businessmen from cheating and to protect workers. It must provide a basic social safety net so that Americans did not starve, and it should promote infrastructure both to develop resources and to enable all Americans to share access to the modern world. In the long Depression that followed the Great Crash, Americans embraced the New Deal programs that helped them find work, offered new Social Security for the elderly and disabled, and built new roads, schools, airports, libraries, roads, and bridges all over the country. When this newly active government went on to fight and win against the Axis Powers in WWII, popular support for the new government system was cemented.

So secure was it, in fact, that Republicans themselves adopted it. When Dwight Eisenhower entered the White House in 1953, he offered his own version of the New Deal, calling it the “Middle Way” and launching the largest public works project in American history: the interstate highways. Most Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, loved the active government. It had pulled the nation out of the Depression, won a world war, and presided over a booming postwar economy.

But some Hoover Republicans resented government regulation of their businesses, and insisted that the new system was simply a redistribution of wealth. The bureaucrats necessary for enforcing regulations and providing a social safety net would cost tax dollars, forcing wealthy men to pay for government programs that benefited poorer Americans. This system infringed on their liberty, they insisted. It was socialism.

It was not socialism, of course; socialism is a system in which the government owns the means of production. The new US system was regulated capitalism, designed to stabilize the traditional economy so it did not self-destruct again. But, calling themselves “Movement Conservatives,” these men organized to attack the New Deal government.

They had little luck convincing voters to join them in destroying the popular system. But in 1954, the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision requiring the desegregation of public schools enabled them to harness racism to their argument. Movement Conservatives harped on the idea that an activist government was using its muscle to protect African Americans. Desegregation and the programs it required to enforce, they said, cost tax dollars. Those tax dollars would come from hardworking white taxpayers to benefit African Americans. It was a redistribution of wealth that hurt white people to help African Americans.

With this appeal to racism, Movement Conservatives broke what had become known as the “liberal consensus.” Voters began to swing behind the Republican Party, with its promises to lower taxes and cut programs that sucked money from the nation’s “makers” to give it to the “takers.” Now, two generations later, the heirs of those Movement Conservatives have taken over the Republican Party, and they are in control of the government.

Because our government has regulated business, provided a social safety net, and promoted infrastructure since the 1930s, most Americans make the mistake of thinking that this system is here to stay. The New Deal government remains enormously popular. Americans like decent wages, and clean air and water, and bridges that don’t fall down, and roads without potholes. We like Social Security, and Medicare and Medicaid. Most Americans cannot fathom that anyone really wants to get rid of these things, and think Republicans and Democrats are both simply arguing over how the system is implemented.

But the opposition to this activist government is not a question of degree; it is ideological. Those currently in control of the Republican Party believe that government regulation destroys the liberty of men to run their businesses as they wish, and that a social safety net and infrastructure investment redistributes wealth, so, they believe, it is socialism. This system, they think, has turned Americans into “takers,” rather than “makers,” and it is destroying us.

Since he has been in office, Trump has advanced the goals of this ideological contingent, a practice that has surely helped to keep Republican leaders behind him. He has slashed business regulations and the government, leaving key positions unfilled and decimating departments. Now, his new budget takes on Medicaid, and his comments about Social Security, Medicare, and the administration’s lawsuit about the Affordable Care Act suggest they, too, might soon be on the chopping block.

At long last, it seems, the dreams of the Movement Conservatives are on the verge of coming true. Trump is already saying he will make "socialism" the centerpiece of his reelection campaign. But our American system is not socialism; it is the regulated capitalism that has stabilized our economy for almost a century.

Liberals largely believe in reality and evidence. Conservatives largely believe in beliefs.

Most liberals will change their minds if the evidence shows them their beliefs are wrong. Too many conservatives will not consider anything that goes against their beliefs, let alone accept it.

That's why it is so hard to argue w/conservatives. Their beliefs are more important than reality.



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Nye%E2%80%93Ken_Ham_debate

The "take care of our own" is something that is common with Americans, too. Interestingly, often the folks who insist we must limit immigration and resources for immigrants because we must first "take care of our own" are the same folks who will vote against social programs that allow us to actually care for our own, like universal health care, unemployment programs like welfare, social security. Because SOCIALISM. 



It really often boils down to, "we only like white people who think like us." 

Many of the people who describe themselves as socially liberal are speaking specifically about some of the social conservative positions - gay marriage/rights, abortion, euthanasia etc.  It's not necessarily about helping people or government funding. For example almost half of the items on @fred's list on the first page would fall into socially conservative policies that aren't about funding. 

And your second paragraph emphasizes that difference - people who describe themselves as socially liberal have no desire to control women and their bodies.   



 

I should have just waited for this post

Huh. That’s an excellent question, and one I’m not sure I’ve ever really thought about.

I guess, for me, I mainly consider myself fiscally conservative because I think we can accommodate the programs we need to with our existing taxes. Sort of a “have our cake and eat it too” without having to pay more in federal taxes.

Although I’m not totally opposed to paying more on a local level; I’m very outspoken in our community which has now tried (twice) to bond for new school buildings and failed. Many people are up in arms about the higher property taxes, and it seems absolutely worth it to me. But, that’s to pay for education, so it’s easy to justify.

What do you consider to be fiscally liberal? You know me off the board, as well... would you say I am?