Defining conservative vs liberal in america today

[Micky G. Jagger]

American Liberals are more tolerant of and prefer more government control to regulate the activities and choices of the people.
American Conservatives are less tolerant of and prefer as little government control as reasonable to regulate the activities and choices of the people.

If judged by what they actually do when in power, Conservatives love more government. That's why they expanded Socialized Medicine in 2003.

 

[Foxfyre]

The dispute between Modbert and foxfyre is what usually happens to me and my fellow Republicans. I want smaller government, less waste and better-designed social programs. I oppose corporate welfare, undue military action, and needless nanny laws.

BUT....

I want a clean environment. I want less dependence on fossil fuels. I want the rights and dignities of others respected. I want abortion rights protected. I want drugs decriminalized and the death penalty ended.

Okay we're on the same page with most conservatives on issues of smaller government, less waste and better-designed social programs, opposition to corporate welfare, undue military action, needless nanny laws. . . . .

AND we're on the same page with most conservatives--most Americans actually--in wanting clean water, air, soil, preservation of aesthetic beauty, reasonable protection of the diversity of plants and animals on earth. More conservatives than you or Modbert are probably willing to acknowledge also want abortion rights protected, want drugs decriminalized, and want the death penalty ended.

Such things are not what defines a conservative or liberal. How such things are decided defines whether one is conservative or liberal using the definitions in the OP.

When I hear things like "we need to return to a position of support for the nuclear family, so that they can take care of granny" and I know....

I'm not gonna get what I want.

Support for the nuclear family? That's a new one on me so not sure where you're coming from there.

Conservatives (usually) are far too willing to deny others their rights.

And here you introduce a toxic element into the discussion that is not only absurd and unnecessary but also irrelevent to the OP. But since you brought it up, I have repeatedly said that Conservatives want the Federal Government to secure their rights via their constitutionally mandated responsibilities and then leave the people free to form whatever sort of society they wish to have. How do you translate that to wanting to deny others their rights?

There is room for discussion of what is and is not a right however.

Liberals seem to think money grows on trees and behaving in a fiscally sound manner is an option.

I disagree with this too because I know too many liberals who believe budgets should be balanced, that people should live within their means, and who are as worried about the unsustainable deficits and debt we are accumulating as any conservative is worried about that. Both conservatives and liberals are capable of being irresponsible and/or self serving at the expense of others.

Where the debate occurs between conservatives and liberals on this is HOW should budgets be balanced; how much responsibility do we expect people to assume to live within their means; and how best to bring down the national debt. For instance Liberals more often might opt to increase revenues through additional taxes. Conservatives more often might opt to require Congress to balance the budget and then limit how much it will have to spend.

Neither POV is any too comfy.

Wrong headedness, whether liberal or conservative, is not comfy for people who are level headed. But a good place to start is by utilizing intellectual honesty about what each side wants and stop demonizing each other and instead of assigning blame look for the best possible solutions.

And that will be difficult because going back to Modbert and my discussion, there are sometimes low tolerance levels for what an acceptable solution looks like depending on whether one is conservative or liberal.

Example: If conservatives are able to show that increasing taxes on the rich will actually hurt the poor, will liberals be able to accept that the rich should not be required to pay more? If liberals are able to convince conservatives that the Federal government is the ONLY viable entity to address a particular social program, will conservatives be able to give up ambitions of privatizing that program?

 

[Modbert]

Conservatives want the Federal Government to secure their rights via their constitutionally mandated responsibilities and then leave the people free to form whatever sort of society they wish to have. How do you translate that to wanting to deny others their rights?

More utopian ideal bullshit, plain and simple. You have forgotten the most important factor of any ideology, the fact is the believer of these ideologies are human beings. As I showed previously, majority of Conservatives would not vote for Atheists or Homosexuals. So what if these Conservatives decide Homosexuals and Atheists can't run for public office in the first place. Using your logic, since it's the people locally deciding that are, it's okay for their rights to be denied.

The Constitution is going to clash early and often with a society that people are left up to their own devices to make on their own in such a manner that you're using.

 

[Foxfyre]

Fine Modbert. If you want to stereotype instead of debate the thesis go right ahead. I would be sooooooo grateful if you would do it someplace other than this thread. I'm just not up to a 'who's is blackest' schoolyard defamation league session today. I will confess that I was unable to help you understand what the thesis of this thread is and therefore I confess I failed. Thank you soooo much for understanding.

 

[Modbert]

Fine Modbert. If you want to stereotype instead of debate the thesis go right ahead. I would be sooooooo grateful if you would do it someplace other than this thread. I'm just not up to a 'who's is blackest' schoolyard defamation league session today. I will confess that I was unable to help you understand what the thesis of this thread is and therefore I confess I failed. Thank you soooo much for understanding.

I'm not stereotyping, I'm merely making a observation about human behavior. It would be the same way in a "Liberal" society where you would have elements that would want to get rid of guns in general. That would clash with the Constitution, specifically the 2nd Amendment.

However, using your logic, that's okay.

If anything, I've been trying to have a logical and intelligent discussion on this. You're the one bringing it down several notches with each passing post because you don't want to face some harsh facts. It's sad really.

If you like, I can move all of our posts between me and you to a whole new thread. That way, all of USMB can judge for themselves what you're putting forth.

 

[Foxfyre]

No, I have confidence in most in our USMB community to be able to read and understand what people post. I do not want this to become yet another "Conservatives are racist. Conservatives are homophobic. Conservatives are religious fanatics. Liberals want to control everybody else's lives. Liberals hate America. Liberals want to rewrite the Constitution" thread.

And I am not going to have a discussion about those things with anybody incapable of looking at it in any other way. If you want to do that, please start your own thread about the evils of conservatism and knock yourself out.

But I don't trust you to represent my point of view correctly or honestly on that since you haven't done so on this thread yet.

 

[nraforlife]

Using any historic definition of cpnservative the only real conservatives in America are that tiny minority referred to as paleocon. Everybody else is a liberal of one sort or another disagreeing only on which faction the State should favor economically and whose PC should be enforce at State gunpoint.

 

[Modbert]

No, I have confidence in most in our USMB community to be able to read and understand what people post. I do not want this to become yet another "Conservatives are racist. Conservatives are homophobic. Conservatives are religious fanatics. Liberals want to control everybody else's lives. Liberals hate America. Liberals want to rewrite the Constitution" thread.

And I am not going to have a discussion about those things with anybody incapable of looking at it in any other way. If you want to do that, please start your own thread about the evils of conservatism and knock yourself out.

But I don't trust you to represent my point of view correctly or honestly on that since you haven't done so on this thread yet.

Then don't complain that I'm doing anything to this thread. I'm not calling Conservatives racist or homophobic. In fact, all I'm doing is using your logic and showing the inherit flaws with it. You however have made the point in your own OP that Liberals pretty much want the government to control everybody else's lives.

You have demonstrated a lack of honesty in what I'm doing in this thread, saying the opposite when I clearly said otherwise.

 

[Madeline]

foxfyre, it is not possible to separate social issues from economic theory. A clean environment doubtless does appeal to everyone. But where the rubber meets the road is, do we impose restrictions on polluters? Protect natural spaces? Force the taxpayer to help fund clean up efforts?

I'm not saying all the answers have to be the same; reasonable people can disagree as to how best to move forward on the environment. But when the audience rejects taxation, regulation and preservation as anti-job, anti-business and anti-growth, it would be less than honest to say these same people are "pro-environment".

All rights can be excercised only at the expense of one's neighbor. Someone has to be forced to shove over if someone else is going to be "free". So it has to do with a prioritization of people, causes, concerns, etc. I place the vulnerable citizen fairly high up on that list of priorities, certainly higher than I do the Fortune 500. And in doing so, I find few other conservatives share my POV.

 

[Londoner]

TO WIT:

American Liberals are more tolerant of and prefer more government control to regulate the activities and choices of the people.
American Conservatives are less tolerant of and prefer as little government control as reasonable to regulate the activities and choices of the people.

This list, when referring to 'American Conservative', seems to confuse conservatism with libertarianism (and neoliberalism).

 

[Madeline]

Well, yeah, the labels "conservative" and "liberal" lack much agreed-upon meaning. I think foxfyre tried to sketch out what she sees as "conservative" but it might be fairer to call her a libertarian.

I dunno what the hell you call someone like me.

 

[Londoner]

Well, yeah, the labels "conservative" and "liberal" lack much agreed-upon meaning. I think foxfyre tried to sketch out what she sees as "conservative" but it might be fairer to call her a libertarian.

Agreed.

[The confusion stems from the fact that the GOP has formed a coalition from radically diverse groups. The result is a kind of incoherence that thrives amongst uncritical consumers of political brands, e.g., white men clutching their steering wheel in anger, listening to paid agitators blame America's ills on everything but the corporations who control the political process]

Parts of the American Conservative movement favor heavy government intervention when it comes to morality, religion, and/or traditionalism; whereas parts of the libertarian movement simply do not. One need only look to the FCC (specifically the control over entertainment content) or the war on drugs to see where these groups differ.

The intellectual laziness of the OP's list goes even deeper. Libertarians, Neoliberals (Reagan), and Conservatives all have different feelings about the kind of intervention proposed by [say] the Cold War and War on Terrorism. Some Conservatives opposed the Marshall Plan & Truman's military machinations on the grounds that America would go bankrupt trying to make a better world based on a singularly imposed top-down model of democracy or free market capitalism, i.e., Washington can't run a Laundromat, yet you want them to police the globe, build nations, and impose market discipline all over the globe? Libertarians warned of the law of unintended consequences, e.g., every time Washington tries to do something big and control things, they make things worse. . . (eventually). Whereas neoliberals (comprised of anti-communist cold war liberals turned conservative) believed there was no part of the globe Washington should not try to "improve", e.g., see Reagan, Clinton, and Bush's policies in South America, the Caribbean theater, Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East.

SADLY: by the time Bush spoke of nation building on Arab soil, there was no longer a real Conservative party to oppose him. The old party is gone; it collapsed under the weight of all the contradictory groups that collected under the tent. This resulted in the kind of thin talking points seen in the OP's list.

Ultimately . . . the reason the U.S. is a mess is because the population no longer does the hard work of studying policy or maintaining a coherent set of political options. Special interests have drained both parties of content; they are now merely selling political brands wrapped in rhetorical garbage for the purpose of covering-up who butters their bread. They have created an army of morons who swoon and cry when Reagan talks of the "Evil Empire" or Bush's "Freedom is on the March" or Obama's empty messianic sermons of hope. They simply don't see what is happening in the back room: big money controlling the electoral, regulatory and legislative process.

Truth be told, the OP's list, on top of being incoherent, is kind of quaint and precious, that is, he seems to believe that there is an evil government which is bent on destroying freedom, which freedom is represented by the good guys, Conservatives. Everyone knows government is a fake holding of America's largest corporations... used to absorb losses.

 

[Foxfyre]

foxfyre, it is not possible to separate social issues from economic theory. A clean environment doubtless does appeal to everyone. But where the rubber meets the road is, do we impose restrictions on polluters? Protect natural spaces? Force the taxpayer to help fund clean up efforts?

Exactly!!! You've got it. Hallelujah!!! I was beginning to despair.

It isn't that evil conservatives approve of pollution or want the right to pollute. They don't. It isn't that liberals want to dictate every single movement humans can legally make. They don't. Anybody with a brain values personal freedom and anybody with a brain vaues clean air, water, soil, and aesthetic beauty.

As the Bible says, all have sinned and fallen short. Ideology does not make saints of sinners nor does it dictate who is in it for themselves or more likely to be willing to unethically hurt or disadvantage others in order to obtain it.

And the issue isn't even whether polluters should be held accountable for spoiling the air, soil, water, and/or aesthetic beauty for others. I think both conservatives and liberals agree that they should.

So the issue isn't whose is blackest as Modbert seems to want to make it. The issue is, how do we address it. Which brings us to your next comment.

I'm not saying all the answers have to be the same; reasonable people can disagree as to how best to move forward on the environment. But when the audience rejects taxation, regulation and preservation as anti-job, anti-business and anti-growth, it would be less than honest to say these same people are "pro-environment".

The issue came down to a trade off. Is it worth it to protect a rare minnow in the middle Rio Grande at the expense of people downstream losing their entire crops and sometimes their farms? We actually had such an issue here in New Mexico during a severe drought and inadequate snow melt some years ago.

Most Conservatives took the view that the people were more important than a non essential fish and the minnow might survive anyway. Most liberals took the view that crops and farms were replaceable, but the minnow was not.

How would you have ruled on that?

(They ultimate decided to sacrifice the fish, released the water, and the farms were saved. Ironically there are just as many silvery minnows now as there were before.)

The same thing happened in California. The EPA ruled that a rare rat lived in a heavily foliaged area and made it illegal to destroy that habitat even on private property. Inability to cut the brush around their homes resulted in hundreds of them burning to the ground when the next bad wild fire passed through. Was that worth protecting a rat which, incidentally, probably perished in the fire as well?

Conservatives will usually put property rights ahead of an endangered species on the theory that people who have special things on their property are far more likely to protect that thing than they are if that thing means they won't be allowed to use their property as they choose. Liberals seem to push to put the special thing as more important and look to the government to impose restrictions on private property to accomplish that.

How would you rule on that?

What do we preserve the environment for if not for us? And what does it profit us to impoverish people in order to save the environment when such will only make those same people resent and despise the effort? Conservatives know that prosperous people demand clean air, soil, water, and aesthetic beauty. Poor people are far more concerned about where their next meal will come from. So, the best way to improve and protect the environment is by helping more people become prosperous. You can't do that without jobs.

All rights can be excercised only at the expense of one's neighbor. Someone has to be forced to shove over if someone else is going to be "free". So it has to do with a prioritization of people, causes, concerns, etc. I place the vulnerable citizen fairly high up on that list of priorities, certainly higher than I do the Fortune 500. And in doing so, I find few other conservatives share my POV.

And here we hit one of those sharp divisions between the conservative and liberal perspective. The conservative says that if it requires risk, participation, and/or contribution from somebody else, it is not a right.

 

[Madeline]

I freely admit, I'm not a scientist, foxfyre. Some of the environmental issues we face are plainly just over my head. Would I shut down a whole industry to save a single species? Probably not...but I might be able to be persuaded that species was a bellweather for other less visible changes, or that it was a keystone species, etc.

It's a little easier for me to discuss industrial pollution. Drive around Cleveland, and you can see abandoned factories everywhere. All our steel mills are shuttered, as these jobs were exported to other nations. Should the owners of these joints be allowed to walk away and stick Cleveland with the eyesore/polluting decay/general hazard, or should they have been legally obligated to return that land to green space or whatnot before winding up business?

And then there are idiotic stories like this one. I had a paint company client, family owned business, over 150 years old. I helped them land a lucrative DOD contract, but the EPA "auditted" them. They had, in the past when it was legal and not known to be hazardous, dumped some waste onto their land. The EPA sent them a superfund bill so big, they had no choice but to declare bankruptcy. Now I have no client, my client has no business, its workers have no jobs and nobody is cleaning up the pollution. If this is not beserker-making bad government, I dun know what would qualify.

 

[Foxfyre]

It's sticky wickets anywhere you go on some of this stuff though. If government anti-business regulation and policy caused my business to fail and I had to close my doors, I don't know how obligated I would feel re the useless building standing there. I can't lease it to somebody else. I can't sell it to somebody else. I will have already taken a huge hit in the investment in that property. I would probably be resistant to using what reserves I had accumulated to remove all evidence of the building and industry. I think I might take the view that if the government was incapable of creating an environment that allowed business to prosper, let them worry about the stuff left over.

Conservatives put a great deal of faith in Americans to prosper if government just gets out of the way and lets them do their thing. No they should not be allowed to pollute the air, water, soil etc. that we have to share with them, but neither should there so much regulation and control that the industry is unable to prosper. So you secure the people's rights--you do not permit a business to infringe on the rights of others against their will--and then you leave them alone to do their thing.

As for your client. I don't know what the circumstances were. If he polluted illegally and unethically, I don't have much sympathy for him. But if it did it within the law and/or with overt or tacit permission of government regulators, then it would be a severe injustice to hit him with a super fund size suit.

As it is, government action shut him down and hurt you too. And nothing got cleaned up. How dumb is that?

 

[Foxfyre]

Oh, and for the record Maddie. I am a pretty solid conservative on most things, but you won't find anybody who is more passionate about or who has greater appreciation for the wonderful creatures and aesthetic beauty on our Planet Earth. I am about as dedicated an environmentalist as you're gonna find. But as a Conservative I want things to actually work and produce the intended results. Just sounding good or compassionate or caring isn't good enough for me.

 

[Micky G. Jagger]

Okay we're on the same page with most conservatives on issues of smaller government

How much smaller government do you want in the area of the common defense of the U. S?

 

[Madeline]

As to the Cleveland steel mills: the owners knew when they built them they would eventually be obsolete, foxfyre. IMO, this is no different from clawing off the top of a mountain for coal and then walking away, leaving the environment so degraded people who live there get sick. It is wrong and should be illegal.

By contrast, my paint company client did not know at the time they dumped the waste that it was hazardous. Their conduct complied with the law at the time, and when it changed, they quit dumping. Why's it all their fault and expense to clean up a site when the prevailing science did not recognize the need to act differently until later? A big fat "gotcha" that served nobody's interest.

I disagree with you that the government owed it to the American steel industry to assure profitability. What the government should have done, IMO, was run up the expense of shipping jobs off-shore so that American businesses would continue to prefer American steel.

But if you asked 1,001 Cleveland residents about it, you'd get 1,001 answers....reasonable people can disagree.

 

[Foxfyre]

Okay we're on the same page with most conservatives on issues of smaller government

How much smaller do you want the government to be involved in the common defense of the U. S?

I want it to be just large enough, well trained enough, and well equipped enough to handle anything any enemy within or outside of the USA might want to throw at us. I want it to be just large enough that nobody with any sense would dare mess with us or our peaceful allies. I want it otherwise scaled down, streamlined, cleaned up, and all waste, graft, and corruption eliminated so that we get value for every dollar we dedicate to the national defense.

 

[rdean]

Here's one I got in my email:
Father/Daughter Talk
A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. Like so many others her age, she considered herself to be a very liberal Democrat, and was very much in favor of "the redistribution of wealth."

She was deeply ashamed that her father was a rather staunch Conservative, a feeling she openly expressed. Based on the lectures that she had participated in, and the occasional chat with a professor, she felt that her father had for years harbored an evil, selfish desire to keep what he thought should be his.

One day she was challenging her father on his opposition to higher taxes on the rich and the addition of more government welfare programs. The self-professed objectivity proclaimed by her professors had to be the truth and she indicated so to her father.

He responded by asking how she was doing in school.
Taken aback, she answered rather haughtily that she had a 4.0 GPA, and let him know that it was tough to maintain, insisting that she was taking a very difficult course load and was constantly studying, which left her no time to go out and party like other people she knew. She didn't even have time for a boyfriend, and didn't really have many college friends because she spent all her time studying.
Her father listened and then asked, "How is your friend Audrey doing?"

She replied, "Audrey is barely getting by. All she takes are easy classes, she never studies, and she barely has a 2.0 GPA. She is so popular on campus; college for her is a blast. She's always invited to all the parties, and lots of times she doesn't even show up for classes because she's too hung over."

Her wise father asked his daughter, "Why don't you go to the Dean's office and ask him to deduct a 1.0 off your GPA and give it to your friend who only has a 2.0. That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA and certainly that would be a fair and equal distribution of GPA."

The daughter, visibly shocked by her father's suggestion, angrily fired back, "That wouldn't be fair! I have worked really hard for my grades! I've invested a lot of time, and a lot of hard work! Audrey has done next to nothing toward her degree. She played while I worked my tail off!"

The father slowly smiled, winked and said gently, "Welcome to the Conservative party."

VERY GOOD STORY:--and one that may hit a few of these liberals right between the eyes as to the difference between a conservative and liberal point of view.

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.
2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.
5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation.
Adrian Rogers, 1931

The right is hilarious and they don't even know it.

George Bush didn't work. He received a C minus average from Harvard. John McCain graduated 5th from the bottom out of 899.

Those are signs of "white privilege". Dads got them in and connections kept them in.

Someone like Obama, who went from food stamps to the White House is hard work.

Most scientists come from hard working middle class families. The right, being anti science, haven't a clue what hard work means. They think it's sweeping out the barn on a hot day.

Hard work it spending 10 years working full time in a factory, going to night school for an engineering degree and raising a family.

Look at Alan Keyes. He threw his gay daughter out into the streets with only the clothes on her back. One of those liberal gay groups gave her a scholarship, which they do for other gay kids, but they are required to maintain no lower than a "B" average, Not B minus, "B". Unlike McCain and Bush.

If you're white, and haven't completed military service and don't have a degree and haven't raised a family, then one has to wonder if you've worked hard.

It's harder for minorities. Their odds are greater because they don't have "white" privilege. I love whiny white people who complain no one ever helps them.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTwpBLzxe4U]YouTube - Craig T. Nelson on Government Aid[/ame]