A question for Republicans and Conservatives

Londoner

Gold Member
Jul 17, 2010
3,144
980
285
Democrats and Conservatives grow government in different ways.

Both groups, however, like to use the metaphor of war.

"War on Poverty"
"War on Drugs"
"War on Terrorism"

Each of these "wars" share something interesting: they are all conducted by Big Government -and they all claim to be helping us or saving us or protecting us.

BUT... Because they are conducted by Big Government, they tend to grow the power of Government without solving the problem. In many cases, government makes the problem worse, and in all cases the federal bureaucracy is left with vast new powers and vastly expanded budgets.

Republicans have been good at criticizing Democrats when they expand government. Indeed, an older generation of Conservatives not only protected us from the expansion of government domestically but also internationally, that is, they didn't think Washington bureaucrats were capable of saving or protecting or improving the world. They were realistic about the limitations of Washington's power. Yes, they knew that the U.S. had to fight against the Nazis, but they didn't think Washington was competent enough to take on larger projects, like reforming the greater middle east. Does anyone remember the old isolationist Conservatives? I'm thinking about the wise men who opposed Truman's attempt to use the Cold War as a way to expand America's global influence. The old isolationist conservatives warned us that this would result in making the American taxpayer responsible for policing the world. Indeed, they warned us that the Washington was not competent enough to run a laundromat much less manage the entire globe through military intervention. They warned us that any attempt to manage the entire globe militarily would create Pentagon budgets that would slowly bankrupt us. They warned us against giving trillions of dollars to foreign nations because Washington was not deft enough to manage these payouts in a way that benefited the nation).

INDEED, the old Conservative party (before Reagan and the take over of our political system by concentrated wealth) helped us realize that Washington was and is not competent enough to do BIG things. That is: they can't even run the post office on budget, so how in the world can the rebuild whole Arab nations like Iraq.

Granted, we would like to "stamp-out" all the world's evil doers and have complete safety on every airplane and in every skyscraper, but life is imperfect... and life is unfair... and life is unsafe - and sometimes we the people have to "man-up" and be our own first-responders... and protect our own families ... and be responsible for our own safety. That is to say, because we have less chance of dying in terrorist attack than getting struck by lightening, maybe we shouldn't erect vast new government bureaucracies in response to terrorism. [FYI: I agree that terrorism poses a real threat, but - unlike Republicans - I don't think the solution lies in growing the federal government's power. This is where I disagree with Republicans, who, after all their bluster about federalism, have tended to grow the federal bureaucracy more than the Left since Reagan]

Imagine if we built a new government agency for every threat no matter how small? Imagine if we built a bureaucracy to protect ourselves from lightening strikes... and imagine if we paid all these additional taxes and gave government all these additional powers to track our phone calls, internet use, and location . . . so they could protect us from getting struck by lightening. This would be insane because we would be growing government power in response to something that will only afflict less than .00001% of the population (which is considerably more than those affected by terrorism). And here is what Republicans don't understand: we wouldn't be made any safer by giving government all these expanded powers and budgets to protect us. We would only be making things worse. Therefore, the best thing to do is choose MORE freedom and MORE privacy and accept some risk. (Problem is: Republicans always opt for security over freedom. They always give Government more power when faced with this decision. Fucking morons. If you really want to honor those who died on 9/11, than don't build a freedom-destroying surveillance state in their honor. Do the opposite. Protect freedom in their honor. Protect privacy in their honor. Don't trade freedom for the illusion of safety.)

So .... I bet you're wondering what happened to the great isolationist, small government Conservatives under Ronald Reagan. They grew silent and powerless as Reagan expanded government to protect us from Drugs, sin and Soviets. Surely people remember the Reagan war on drugs. Surely they remember Nancy Reagan's "you can't fly if you're high". Ronald Reagan used the war on drugs to create a massive federal bureaucracy... and he used the Soviet Union to grow Washington's foreign powers. In each instance, vast new powers were granted to Washington, and vast new budgets were created - and whole agencies evolved around these budgets with their own universe of special interest groups... all of whom lobbied vigorously for government contracts so they could get easy access to the taxpayer's wallet.

In essence, Reagan used anti-Communism to convince Conservatives to make Government much bigger and much more powerful and much more expensive.

But how did he do it? He did what Big Government always does when they want to steal from the taxpayer. He scared them. He said "Hi, I'm from the government and I'm here to help." He acted just like Democrats, who offer to protect us from all the world's harms and injustices and be our nurturing nanny. Reagan, like the Democrats he first aligned with in the 40s and 50s, used the nanny government to keep us safe from the evil Soviets - to coddle us like our mothers, who protect us from all the world's dangers.

And when Reagan did this, why didn't a smart Conservative stand up and say: "Ronnie, I appreciate your desire to protect me, but here is the problem: you are using Big Government to do it. And, you see Ronnie, Big Government is incompetent and wasteful… and it usually makes the problem worse. For instance, Ronnie, one of your successors, Bush 43, also used Washington to "help" us and keep us "safe" from evil doers. But he ended up creating this wasteful, unaccountable, privacy-invading, power-centralizing bureaucracy called "Homeland Security". And as best I can tell, Homeland Security is like all BIG GOVERNMENT agencies: It takes away our freedoms. It makes government more powerful and unaccountable. Check it out: A hidden world, growing beyond control | washingtonpost.com "

We see how Democrats use social issues and health care to scare voters into giving government more power. And we've gotten good at calling "bullshit" on them. We've gotten good at deconstructing and debunking the clams of Democrats - and now we are immune to their tactics of growing government.

So here is my real question. Why have we failed so completely to analyze, deconstruct, and debunk and just plain recognize how Republicans grow government. That is, why are Conservative voters so fooled by their own leaders? The old Conservative Party would NEVER have let a president like George W Bush use the war on Terrorism to create the Patriot Act and expand Washington's surveillance powers so completely.

The reason I ask these questions is because the Republicans will probably reclaim Washington this fall or in 4 years. And we can't afford to have them continue to fool their voters with talk radio and their elaborate network of think tanks, publishing groups and television stations. How can we educate our good, well-meaning Conservative friends so that they are no longer so vulnerable to their leadership. How do we get them to be more analytical toward their own party and information sources. [FYI: you can ask the same question of Democrats: how do we get them to question their leaders and information sources?]

That is, how can we make it so that after the next attack, Republicans don't run out and by flag pins when they should also be making sure their leaders don't use the crisis to grow government power? [Maybe Government should focus on filling pot holes on budget rather than rebuilding the entire Arab world in our image. That is, how do we get our Conservative friends to be more cautious about giving their party vast new powers and budgets to protect us and eliminate evil and improve the world? How do we get Conservatives to realize that Government is not competent enough to do big things - and that if we give them trillions of dollars to sit-up tighter surveillance, the result will be disastrous, that is, we won't be safer, we will just be less free. And Government will be that much more powerful. How do we get Conservatives to see these things? How do we get them to question big government? ]

How can we break the toxic relationship between Conservative voters and their Big Government media sources? Do they even know that the entire Conservative Media universe from Rush Limbaugh to FOX News is funded heavily by Washington centered political organizations? Do they understand the Federal or National or centralized level of control exerted over the Tea Party by powerful Washington lobbying groups?

How do we help our Conservative brothers and sisters not be such dupes for the expansion of Government power?

Suggestions?
 
Last edited:
But there is no liberal media bias right?

Republicans can never step back and take a good hard look at themselves. It's all about "liberals" and Democrats.

It's why they take no responsibility for letting Bin Laden go or the disastrous war in Iraq or the shattered economy or Fast and Furious or what happened after Katrina or Enron or the BP apology. The list is endless. Started with Republicans but the Democrats "fault" for not stopping them.
 
You have a point. I would also like to see conservatives being more serious about "small government", which is actually the essence of the conservative thought.

Ron Paul has some great ideas, that it would be awesome to see being put in practice. Pity he's so naive about foreign policy.
 
You have a point. I would also like to see conservatives being more serious about "small government", which is actually the essence of the conservative thought.

Ron Paul has some great ideas, that it would be awesome to see being put in practice. Pity he's so naive about foreign policy.
Right...Big gubmint works as well in foreign policy as it has in the "wars" on poverty and (some) drugs.

Oh yeah....
 
But there is no liberal media bias right?

You bet there's a liberal media bias, but that's not really germane to the OP.

What the OP says IS true, the growth of government is the problem.

Dems do it with 'social justice' and Reps do it with 'national security'.

Folks get so caught up in the 'Us versus Them' mentality that they don't see the bigger picture, Big Government versus ALL of us. That's what all us small 'l' libertarians have been trying to get you to listen to since Ron Paul ran away from the 'Conservative Icon', Ronald Reagan back in the mid-80's.

Almost 30 fucking years, is anybody listening YET?
 
Each of these "wars" share something interesting: they are all conducted by Big Government -and they all claim to be helping us or saving us or protecting us.

A couple of other things they ave in common is that they cost the middle class a hell of a lot of money, they line the pockets of the ultra-wealthy and, best of all, they are mega failures so they never end.

And, by definition, there is no "liberal bias" as fux, beck, lushbo define it. There is bias, for sure. Liberal, conservative and everything in between.

rws really do need to stop their fucking whining.
 
Last edited:
So here is my real question. Why have we failed so completely to analyze, deconstruct, and debunk and just plain recognize how Republicans grow government. That is, why are Conservative voters so fooled by their own leaders? The old Conservative Party would NEVER have let a president like George W Bush use the war on Terrorism to create the Patriot Act and expand Washington's surveillance powers so completely.

You incorrectly infer that ‘conservatism’ in any way at any time advocated ‘less government.’ conservatives advocate ‘less business regulation,’ which is not the same thing. Conservatism is fundamentally authoritarian, seeking to provide government greater control to ‘fight crime,’ ‘fight terrorism,’ and to expand its power to enact punitive measures against certain classes of persons deemed ‘undesirable,’ such as homosexuals and immigrants.

Measures such as the PA and warrantless surveillance are classic examples of conservative ideology, predicated on the notion that if one has nothing to hide, one shouldn’t mild being illegally surveilled, particularly since it’s for his own safety.

Recall that conservatives are essentially motivated by fear: fear of crime, terrorists, diversity, and dissent – the role of government for conservatives, therefore, is to be as powerful and as expansive as possible to assuage that fear.
 
So here is my real question. Why have we failed so completely to analyze, deconstruct, and debunk and just plain recognize how Republicans grow government. That is, why are Conservative voters so fooled by their own leaders? The old Conservative Party would NEVER have let a president like George W Bush use the war on Terrorism to create the Patriot Act and expand Washington's surveillance powers so completely.

You incorrectly infer that ‘conservatism’ in any way at any time advocated ‘less government.’ conservatives advocate ‘less business regulation,’ which is not the same thing. Conservatism is fundamentally authoritarian, seeking to provide government greater control to ‘fight crime,’ ‘fight terrorism,’ and to expand its power to enact punitive measures against certain classes of persons deemed ‘undesirable,’ such as homosexuals and immigrants.

Measures such as the PA and warrantless surveillance are classic examples of conservative ideology, predicated on the notion that if one has nothing to hide, one shouldn’t mild being illegally surveilled, particularly since it’s for his own safety.

Recall that conservatives are essentially motivated by fear: fear of crime, terrorists, diversity, and dissent – the role of government for conservatives, therefore, is to be as powerful and as expansive as possible to assuage that fear.

Ladies and gentlemen, once again we have our proud peacock Clayton pontificating with utmost moral certainty that Conservatives are the devil, and only he and the 'enlightened ones' are graced with the ability to see it.

Notice how he totally ignores the OP in his quest to denigrate and demonize his ideological opponents. If it's 'Conservative', he's going to attack it, gleefully redefining words on the fly to fit his hateful narrative.

And let's not let pass the opportunity for hypocrisy to freely flow, alluding to the reprehensible Patriot Act as a solely Conservative endeavor, when the TRUTH is it was passed in the Senate by a vote of 98-1, and in the House 357-66.

What I find most humorous about our resident legal scholar though, is the fact that he thinks nobody recognizes him for the partisan hack that he is.
 
Last edited:
But there is no liberal media bias right?

I think each group has their self-reinforcing media sources.

As a Liberal, I can wake up and spend 100% of my day reading information that only confirms rather than challenges what I already believe.

For me personally that would be boring - which is why I have dog eared copies of Capitalism and Freedom, The Road to Serfdom, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and The Closing of the American Mind sitting on my bookshelf.

I also think Edmund Burke's criticism of the French Revolution is brilliant, namely that you can't merely change the organic structure of a nation from the top down. You can't impose equality or fairness or social justice or fill-in-the-blank on a people; these things have to grow naturally otherwise they will never become a vital felt-imperative at the affective level. Indeed, a culture is built from passionate, gut-level attachments to a particular way of life. Liberal bureaucrats can't change the American way of life any more than Bush can rebuild Fallujah in the glorious image of an American suburb, complete with shopping malls and fast food restaurants (Again: why do Conservatives think Washington can impose our way of life on others? The old Conservatives helped us understand why this is silly. Big Government Republicans and their Limbaugh-cheerleading-hordes need to let people and nations be as fucking insane and backwards and brutal as they choose to be. Give people freedom and then let God judge them. Who are we to save the world? Maybe Washington should aim for more modest goals, like filling pot holes on budget. How many times do I have to tell you: there are some things government can't do. Iraq Disney will have to wait. There are evil doers out there and occasionally some of us will get blown up in buildings. And some people are born crippled. Life is unfair. Life includes danger and risk. We don't need to give Washington more power every time something goes wrong in the world - even if those things are terrible. Washington can't fix every problem. Republicans allowed 15 sand monkeys with box cutters to be the cause of us creating a massive surveillance bureaucracy. Republicans keep giving more power to Washington. They are 10x worse than the fucking sell-out Democrats but they can't see it. The Right has expanded the power of government exponentially more than the Left since Reagan)

Anyway, I'm a moderate Liberal, but there a host of Conservative thinkers who I think are absolutely fucking brilliant. What bothers me is that some of my Conservative friends are not allowed to even read or appreciate the arguments of thinkers on the other side of aisle. Their information sources have convinced them that "the other side" is un-American and evil [FYI: this is what fascism says, i.e., there is one model of the true citizen] It is so simplistic and infantile to believe that one side of the political spectrum (nearly 1/2 the country) is simply evil or crazy. At the very least: if you want to defeat the other side, you should take the time to learn the most defensible arguments for it. Don't just wave a wand over everything you don't like and call it socialism. We need to take the time to learn the difference between Karl Marx (who didn't believe in private property and markets) and John Maynard Keynes (who absolutely did). Life is too short to get our information and our historical data from Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, etc. Go to a library and read some books. There are brilliant thinkers on both sides. The pundits that have captured our voters have fucking destroyed the analytical tools of an entire generation. They have replaced a rich vocabulary of political differences with silly words like socialism. Obama doesn't have the political courage to be a socialist. That's why his economic team is identical to Bush's, Clinton's and Reagan's - they're all from Goldman Sachs.

People think we are living under socialism. Wrong. We are still living under the Bush tax structure and the GOP plan of expansionary austerity - this is why the states have been forced to slash jobs and thereby take tens of thousands of potential consumers out of the economy, thus further weakening demand and thus resulting in more job loss. If a true Keynesian was in office, you would see money being pumped into the states so that they could reflate their workforces and get people spending money again. You would see the anti-consumer monopolies in charge of health care and energy busted up so that we could see genuine competition. Big pharma wouldn't get away with raping Americans with the world's highest drug costs. Their monopolies would be destroyed and competition restored. As it stands the health insurance industry has 40% of their employees literally working in the U.S. Senate. People don't fucking get it. ObamaCare isn't putting Government in charge of an otherwise free market. Competition in Health insurance has been destroyed by trillions of dollars in lobbying. There are a million ways to destroy competition, and spending 30 years replacing regulators with industry insiders is one of the most certain ways of doing it.
 
Last edited:
Measures such as the PA and warrantless surveillance are classic examples of conservative ideology, predicated on the notion that if one has nothing to hide, one shouldn’t mild being illegally surveilled, particularly since it’s for his own safety.

Well said.

This notion of privacy assumes that the only value of privacy is to hide something. If you have nothing to hide, than you don't need privacy.

(It's fucking scary)
 
Measures such as the PA and warrantless surveillance are classic examples of conservative ideology, predicated on the notion that if one has nothing to hide, one shouldn’t mild being illegally surveilled, particularly since it’s for his own safety.

Well said.

This notion of privacy assumes that the only value of privacy is to hide something. If you have nothing to hide, than you don't need privacy.

(It's fucking scary)

That is NOT Conservative ideology, that's NeoCon masturbatory fantasy. Why do you lefties always conflate the two?
 
Measures such as the PA and warrantless surveillance are classic examples of conservative ideology, predicated on the notion that if one has nothing to hide, one shouldn’t mild being illegally surveilled, particularly since it’s for his own safety.

Well said.

This notion of privacy assumes that the only value of privacy is to hide something. If you have nothing to hide, than you don't need privacy.

(It's fucking scary)

That is NOT Conservative ideology, that's NeoCon masturbatory fantasy. Why do you lefties always conflate the two?
Because they need to deflect and distract from the fact that they support the same policies when their team is in charge.
 
Ron Paul has some great ideas, that it would be awesome to see being put in practice. Pity he's so naive about foreign policy.
Naive? If you have to pay someone to be your ally... Are they really your ally?

*ponders*

If you believe that the country is basically broke... Wouldn't lending (I'm sorry giving money it's not even lending) money to other countries be... I don't know... Intellectually stupid?

I can think of plenty of things to knock Paul for... But foreign policy? That just seems like people arguing sound bites from news than any actual thought process on the matter.
 
I've been a Republican since I first voted and the agenda has changed so dramatically to make me want to face all elections as an Independent. I followed the GOP when we can a clear separation of church and state but after Bush handed out grants to the churches, the religious right is running the Party. I'm not a Christian and will never be a member of any church. I have never voted for a Democrat and since 1988 I have not voted for a Republican.

I realize Bush could have not won his election without the Christians but he lost my vote and the GOP will never get my vote again.

With the agenda changing every time a Republican speaks how can anyone know what they will get. Conservatives despise gays and will never allow them to marry. They don'[t even know why. The Conservatives believe that Americans should be white and preferably Christian. In the last 6 months, Conservatives demand that the federal government take a stand against all abortions. This doesn't make sense when they also want all welfare to be removed to those need. Birth control has been added to the list of items removed from any level of health care. This of course puts women in a lower category of being an American. Just in the last couple of months, women are not to be considered on the same level as men. Violence against women lost in the House as did equal pay for equal work.

This new action against black voters is trying to disqualify them from voting. This sets a return to racism that many of us thought was long over.

I do not want to vote for a Democrat as I am a capitalist.

Is there ever a chance that the GOP can get off this Christian kick or at least believe that all humans are equal? In 2008 it all became clear to many of us that the GOP/conservative party members were obviously too dumb to be trusted with an agenda. Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin made a joke out of being Conservatives. They borrowed the personae of Larry the Cable Guy and used him as a role model.
 

New Topics

Forum List

Back
Top