Conservatives used to care about community. What happened?

[Sallow]

Sometimes you need a selfish voice to pull you back.

so that's it? wow liberals do come up with crazy ass answers. So in other words you can be selfish if you're liberal, kinda like being rich, it's ok if you're liberal. So in other words all the political arguements you make are only valid if you're a republican, if you're a liberal then you dont care what they do? Did I get that correctly?

Yeah..that's it.

Sometimes you need the perspective of evil to keep from doing evil.

But you guys are evil.

Get use to it.

 

[editec]

The thing that is screwing us up here is our failure to recongize the difference between the rank and file conservatives, and the LEADERSHIP calling itself conservative.

The rank and file conservatives are in fact, mostly patriotic Americans.

Their leadership?

Not so much.

 

[bigrebnc1775]

When have liberals cared about community, I love how republicans are selfish, based on what? Wow you socialist retards dont know jack. Look at liberal communities, like Detroit...awesome!!!!!! EJ Dionne is a joke, he reminds me of Gargemel from the Smurfs. When did he think conservatives were good? He never has.

republicans give more money to charity, they promote more freedom for the individual. I mean do all of you think your life would be this good in a socialist setting? Which socialist country do you think runs it right?

So what is your goal? Every person has the same amount of money?

Exactly...according to you and your cronies liberal equals socialism.
No middle ground, no chance of discussion.
People like you are the real reason for the mess.

Great, another Foreigner coming here talking about what is and isn't socialism in America

 

[idb]

When have liberals cared about community, I love how republicans are selfish, based on what? Wow you socialist retards dont know jack. Look at liberal communities, like Detroit...awesome!!!!!! EJ Dionne is a joke, he reminds me of Gargemel from the Smurfs. When did he think conservatives were good? He never has.

republicans give more money to charity, they promote more freedom for the individual. I mean do all of you think your life would be this good in a socialist setting? Which socialist country do you think runs it right?

So what is your goal? Every person has the same amount of money?

Exactly...according to you and your cronies liberal equals socialism.
No middle ground, no chance of discussion.
People like you are the real reason for the mess.

Great, another Foreigner coming here talking about what is and isn't socialism in America

You clearly need some perspective

 

[bigrebnc1775]

Exactly...according to you and your cronies liberal equals socialism.
No middle ground, no chance of discussion.
People like you are the real reason for the mess.

Great, another Foreigner coming here talking about what is and isn't socialism in America

You clearly need some perspective

America's beginning came about from people leaving the type of system that you would call the normal standard of life. God don't save the queen.

 

[midcan5]

There are lots of pieces to this puzzle. It is sort of funny but my mom would always tell us not to complain for she lived through the great depression and her woes then far surpassed ours now. Today the sense that the person lives in a world in which forces are outside their control has been lost, and now the privileged look down on everyone else. The success of the politics of sharing (from the thirties) instead of creating sharers created the greedy self centered citizens who believe they created this reality of comfort out of nothing.

"In 2004, the antitax activist Grover Norquist told a Spanish newspaper that one of the reasons the political equation in America was changing was that people who remembered the Depression were dying off. “The age cohort that is most Democratic and most pro-statist,” declared Norquist, “are those people who turned twentyone years of age between 1932 and 1952—Great Depression, New Deal, World War II, Social Security, the draft—all that stuff. That age cohort is now between the ages of seventy and ninety years old, and every year 2 million of them die.” The commonly held views of that group, he continued, were “very un-‘American.’ Very unusual for America."" *

This is from an editorial by Thomas Frank in the March 2012 Harper's Magazine. Now the question is why does the easy life make so many not care. Add revisionist historians and big money buying the ideas that come to be reality, and you get a sense why conservatives today are who they are.


"Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them." Tony Judt in 'Ill Fares the Land'

 

[Stephanie]

Liberals CARE for communties as long as it's FORCED monies off the backs of the working stiffs in this country..

I wasn't born in some commune..and I give enough to take care others..so screw Mr. Dionne and all you in this thread on your moral high horses

 

[CrusaderFrank]

RINO's suck

Boo Fucking Hoo for them

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Liberals care that every community drown in deficits and debt to pay union pensions

 

[The T]

Liberals care that every community drown in deficits and debt to pay union pensions

'Communal coercion'.

 

[Stephanie]

They never cared about community.

Conservativism is the philosophy of "me, mine, and myself".

Maybe that has been your experience, but not mine. I'm 65, and I don't ever remember Conservatives being so hateful, radical and selfish as they are today. That's why I truly identify with the OP.

oh brother...who cares what you remember...
here...

 

[NYcarbineer]

We are a nation in decline. As prosperity fades, people tend to think more about self-preservation than they do about the common good.

 

[Seawytch]

We are a nation in decline. As prosperity fades, people tend to think more about self-preservation than they do about the common good.

They will until there is no Fire Department to put out their house or a cop to respond to their call or a teacher to teach their children.

 

[Stephanie]

you have to love that...the common good..

We as a nation are fine..it's you whining liberals who never see good in anything or anybody is the problem..

If you all didn't have your panties in a bunch all the time you aren't happy..

 

[The T]

you have to love that...the common good..

We as a nation are fine..it's you whining liberals who never see good in anything or anybody is the problem..

If you all didn't have your panties in a bunch all the time you aren't happy..

We can and DO pull together. it's ingrained in most of us. WE don't need Government telling us when, where, and how.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

I remember when the Democrat Party had people like JKF and Zel Miller in it, now they have Hugo Chavez and Vlad Putin. What happened?

 

[LeftofLeft]

By E.J. Dionne Jr.

To secure his standing as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney has disowned every sliver of moderation in his record. He’s moved to the right on tax cuts and twisted himself into a pretzel over the health-care plan he championed in Massachusetts — because conservatives are no longer allowed to acknowledge that government can improve citizens’ lives.

Romney is simply following the lead of Republicans in Congress who have abandoned American conservatism’s most attractive features: prudence, caution and a sense that change should be gradual. But most important, conservatism used to care passionately about fostering community, and it no longer does. This commitment now lies buried beneath slogans that lift up the heroic and disconnected individual — or the “job creator” — with little concern for the rest.

Today’s conservatism is about low taxes, fewer regulations, less government — and little else. Anyone who dares to define it differently faces political extinction. Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana was considered a solid conservative, until conservatives decided that anyone who seeks bipartisan consensus on anything is a sellout. Even Orrin Hatch of Utah, one of the longest-serving Republican senators, is facing a primary challenge. His flaw? He occasionally collaborated with the late Democratic senator Edward M. Kennedy on providing health insurance coverage for children and encouraging young Americans to join national service programs. In the eyes of Hatch’s onetime allies, these commitments make him an ultra-leftist.

I have long admired the conservative tradition and for years have written about it with great respect. But the new conservatism, for all its claims of representing the values that inspired our founders, breaks with the country’s deepest traditions. The United States rose to power and wealth on the basis of a balance between the public and the private spheres, between government and the marketplace, and between our love of individualism and our quest for community.

Conservatism today places individualism on a pedestal, but it originally arose in revolt against that idea. As the conservative thinker Robert A. Nisbet noted in 1968, conservatism represented a “reaction to the individualistic Enlightenment.” It “stressed the small social groups of society” and regarded such clusters of humanity — not individuals — as society’s “irreducible unit.”

True, conservatives continue to preach the importance of the family as a communal unit. But for Nisbet and many other conservatives of his era, the movement was about something larger. It “insisted upon the primacy of society to the individual — historically, logically and ethically.”

Because of the depth of our commitment to individual liberty, Americans never fully adopted this all-encompassing view of community. But we never fully rejected it, either. And therein lies the genius of the American tradition: We were born with a divided political heart. From the beginning, we have been torn by a deep but healthy tension between individualism and community. We are communitarian individualists or individualistic communitarians, but we have rarely been comfortable with being all one or all the other.

Much More: Conservatives used to care about community. What happened? - The Washington Post

Liberals care about Community than do Comservatives?? That depends on the community. Take unions for example. They are a community that take precedent over non-union communities like small businesses or non union workers. How about the Poor? I see conservatives push programs such as school vouchers and tax payer funded scholarships so that poor, and in many cases, black or other minorities are not subject to unsafe, underperforming schools. Instead, this redirection of taxes enables students to go to schools with the 1 percent. Liberals would rather that money go to unions, bureaucrats, and political cronies. I did not see too much Liberal concern or care for the Gulf States comunities in the wake of the BP Oil spill. The "care" was focused on punishing and squeezing BP by shutting down drilling and refining in the region. How many communities' livelihoods were ruined? Do Liberals care about communities impacted by waves of illegal immigrants who come in and take government services from the taxpayers who pay into them? Check the number of hospitals shut down in the Southwest because of this and tell us how much liberals care.

 

[uscitizen]

They never cared about community.

Conservativism is the philosophy of "me, mine, and myself".

Maybe that has been your experience, but not mine. I'm 65, and I don't ever remember Conservatives being so hateful, radical and selfish as they are today. That's why I truly identify with the OP.

Hmm I still say this is the result of the end of the fairness doctrine and the corresponding rise of Rush Limbugh types and talk radio.
Hours of daily fear and hatred programming programmed them.

 

[Mac1958]

Conservatives once played an important role in American political society, as a counterbalance to the left’s idealism, lost now to the radicalism of the partisan right.

Indeed. But I still maintain the party can be turned around, if the loons can be marginalized. The absolutists, the dittoheads, are in control right now, but everything is cyclical.

.

 

[The T]

I remember when the Democrat Party had people like JKF and Zel Miller in it, now they have Hugo Chavez and Vlad Putin. What happened?

Infiltration in acedemia.