So, with all the disagreement and gridlock…what are areas of broad agreement between conservatives and liberals today?
The media is awful.
The United States’ days as No. 1 are numbered.
Governmental spying on citizens and infringement on civil liberties is getting out of hand.
America needs more focus on STEM. (Whether America is actually lagging behind in STEM or not is another question; this may be like the 1960s “Missile Gap”)
Higher education has become insanely - and questionably - expensive.
There are all kinds of conservatives and all kinds of liberals, and from time to time, different wings of each side find themselves in unlikely alliances with wings from the other side.
Examples:
Both the far Left and the far Right (the “paleoconservatives” represented by guys like Pat Buchanan) are in agreement that the US should drastically cut military spending and scale back our military operations around the world.
Both the feminists of the Left and the Religious Right are strongly against pornography, for very different reasons.
Both the Left and the Pro-Business conservatives are strongly in favor of more immigration, and support amnesty for illegal aliens already in the USA.
Both the far Left and the far RIght are extremely hostile to Israel.
I think we generally agree on ends, just not on means. For instance, Obama and I agree that health care ought to be less expensive. He believes this can be done with subsidies and Obamacare. I believe it can be done with rationing. Both of us agree that global warming is an issue. He believes it can be dealt with by pushing solar energy; I think nuclear energy is more nearly practical.
Liberals and conservatives will often argue about means to a common generic objective, like a strong economy, but I think the differences are more fundamental than that. When it comes to the specifics of enacting policy, there are always conflicts between opposing rights and priorities, and that’s where the more fundamental differences lie. Employers and employees both have rights, for instance, as do businesses and consumers, parents and children, and so on. There are always conflicts between individual freedoms and the larger public interest, and that one is the elephant in the room. There are conflicts between economic growth and many other priorities, including social order and the environment. Different positions on the political spectrum are largely defined by how one prefers to balance those conflicting interests in accordance with one’s intrinsic values. I think in a sense liberals and conservatives have quite different ideals of the kind of society they would like to live in.
Out of curiosity, when you read that Obama’s means are achieving your ends, does that make you reconsider your beliefs about means or do you just discount his?
Health care cost increases were the lowest in 2013 since they started tracking them in 1960:
Freer trade initiatives produce bipartisanship both in favor and opposed. Both parties have elements that oppose them out of differing protectionist urges. Both sides also have elements that can see the long term benefits to the country as a whole. The Trans Pacific Partnership is a great example of pending work that can produce bipartisanship in the last years of Obama’s time. NAFTA was a prime example that got implemented. Bush took the lead in getting it negotiated but it likely took Clinton to form the coalition that eventually got it ratified.
In fairness to Shodan, he and I agree that lower taxes are a good thing, and he could quite easily demonstrate the Republican policies lead to lower taxes than Democratic policies. That’s not going to get me voting republican, though, because the means by which they achieve an end I like includes doing a lot of things to the social safety net that I think are worse than high taxes.
As for the OP, I think left and right can agree that those ISIS guys are dicks, and Ebola is pretty nasty.
I think you may be getting your means and your ends a little mixed up in that example.
As for me, if lowering taxes had positive effects, I’d be all for it. As you say, the consequences are poor for the social net, AND lower taxes are bad for the economy, employment, the stock market, and so forth.
I started a slightly more whimsical version of this thread a while back, about things that the stereotypical left and right would like but for different reasons. My example was Mythbusters. The right loves it for all the guns and explosions, the left loves it because it’s set in San Francisco and very clearly respects science. Someone else suggested national parks and the outdoors, which the right love for hunting, isolation and hardcore survivalism; and the left love for conservation and environmental reasons.
