Without defining ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, it’s still difficult to make meaningful points, especially the further back in time the policies are.
Not to mention resistance from granola-worshippers, who generally identify with liberals. Fruitbat-hood knows no political affiliation.
Bill Clinton fought tooth and nail against welfare reform, until it was clear it was going to pass over his veto. He then attempted to steal the credit for it.
Regards,
Shodan
When I was a kid, every other phrase at a Republican National Convention was “Party of Lincoln.” I don’t remember hearing that once in 2012. The party is now dominated by those who would have cheered John Wilkes Booth.
I pretty much support just about everything that progressives and liberals have brought to the table.
Progressive politics challenged the status quo, which was that people could be legally owned as property. People who were concerned with self/greed hid behind conservative principles like “state’s rights” and “tradition” to support slavery.
Progressive politics challenged the status quo again, which was that women couldn’t vote. People who were concerned with self/greed hid behind conservative principles like “tradition” and “gender roles” to support the continued lack of women’s suffrage.
Progressive politics challenged the status quo again, which was that workers in factories had no right to unionize or demand better pay or working conditions. People who were concerned with self/greed hid behind conservative principles like “tradition” and “free market magic” solving everything, which solved nothing. When pay and working conditions improved, the USA started to have something called a “middle class”.
Progressive politics challenged the status quo again, which was that the elderly could just starve to death and get no medical care if they had no money. It’s called Social Security and Medicare, two of the most wildly popular programs that have ever existed. They’re so popular and successful, even the most conservative people in the nation would complain without end if their benefits were taken away, when they were old enough to qualify for them. Keep government out of my medicare, indeed.
Progressive politics included women’s liberation, the sexual revolution, and the civil rights movement. I don’t think these things were mistakes, unless you think it’s proper for women to work only as secretaries, who get slapped on the ass, and if they happened to be black, never get hired anywhere at all. Those who supported the status quo were conservatives and traditionalists who were, as always, afraid of change, and claimed that society would go to hell in a handbasket if women didn’t keep their proper place, being subservient to men. And desegregation and laws protecting minorities from discrimination, why, that impeded upon state’s rights, and the rights of businessmen to be hardcore racists. Once again, progressives were on the correct side of history, and regressive conservatives were on the wrong side, stuck in the idyllic past, where everything was wonderful- for them.
I don’t think you can say that conservatives have been on the leading edge of such movements as ending sodomy laws. Laws that can get you thrown in jail if you give oral sex to your husband, for example. Silly laws where the morality police can literally imprison you for having consenting sex with another adult. The morality police are, and always have been, conservative religious nutballs. Progressives have been the voice of reason that says hey, sex is not a crime. Small-government conservatives have shown throughout history that they don’t really believe in small government, because they believe the government should be policing bedroom activities, and fought to enact laws banning types of sex they disapprove of. Progressives fought back and ended such silliness, in many cases. However, there are still some stupid laws on the books in places which need to be removed, and what’s holding us back from doing so are traditionalists and conservatives in elected office, in largely Republican states.
How about warnings on cigarettes? Sounds like progress, once again held back and fought tooth-and-nail by big business conservatives who felt that putting warning labels on things was an attack on free enterprise. Somehow, the cigarette industry survived, even if their customers didn’t. Fortunately for them, new people pick up the habit of smoking every day, keeps them in business. And we have a lot more doctors getting paid to treat cancer patients. Free enterprise is alive and well. Corporations are people, and those people are quite healthy indeed. The actual people, however, somewhat less healthy. But at least they’re aware of the risks. Somehow, freedom didn’t come to an end, and America didn’t turn into communist China. It’s amazing!
About the only conservative principle I’d agree with at this point is the principle that we should have a balanced budget, where spending is on par with the money coming in.
However, if conservatives were really that concerned with the budget imbalance, they wouldn’t keep giving away billion-dollar tax reductions to people who can literally swim in their own thousand dollar bills. So all that conservative yakkety-yak about fiscal prudence? They can shove it up their ass. Especially when they decide to cut unemployment benefits to needy families in the middle of the biggest recession since the 1920s, while voting themselves Congressional raises and shipping crates of cash overseas without oversight and funding the production of fighter jets and tanks that the military has repeatedly said they don’t need more of, but they fund anyway because it’s pork spending for their home district.
Progressives- bringing progress to the nation as a whole, while conservatives bring you traditions and principles which have only ever, and will only ever, benefit themselves.
Are you serious? They said it a bunch. I mean, yes, it was partly to steal away Obama’s thunder, but they TOTALLY played up the “Party of Lincoln” thing lately.
The Republican Party is definitely making their case that they’re a party for African Americans, by pointing to such contemporary, modern champions of minority rights as Abraham Lincoln. If that’s their most recent contribution to racial equality, one wonders why more black people don’t vote Republican. It’s the obvious choice!
It seems to me that where conservative policies have had success, it was most often in response to progressive policies that had failed: cartelization of industry, such as under the NRA or CAB; public housing projects; pre-reform welfare; and bilingual education, to name a few. Thus, the value of conservative thought hasn’t been so much in new policies they’ve innovated, but rather as a check on progressive policies on those occasions where they’ve been a bad idea (the batting average, so to speak, for progressives is still impressively high).
The problem I see here is the categorization of certain policies as failures when what happens to many of these policies is they are reformed or improved.
Improving a progressive idea, or ridding it of corrupt influences, isn’t necessarily a conservative thing.
Give you an example: Obamacare.
What did the progressives actually want? Single payer healthcare. Would have been wildly simpler and less corrupt than what we’re going to end up with, which is, essentially, a way of forcing people to participate in the for-profit insurance scam.
It basically says that insurers will never go out of business because their customers don’t have a choice not to shop there.
On the whole, society will be better off, because the poor will get healthcare, amongst much groaning from such troglodytes as Papa John who claim he’ll slash all his worker’s hours because they won’t be able to make money on pizza anymore, even though the actual increase in cost to his business could be offset by raising the price of the pizza by a few pennies. But that’s too much, he’ll go out of business if he doesn’t cut hours. Keep in mind he gave away a million pizzas for a promotion recently, and they frequently slash the prices of these pizzas by several dollars and they still make a profit. It’s called marketing. But a few additional pennies for pizzas, that’s crazy. Employees don’t need to see a doctor that badly. But I digress.
It’s another instance where the system was changed, conservatives whined and complained that society would come crashing to a halt, and such a thing did not happen, and society benefited.
Is it perfect? Or can it be improved? Are progressives actually happy with the result?
Progressives are not happy with the result and wish to improve it. Conservatives want to do away with it altogether, de-fund it, repeal, and replace. Replace it with what?
Dead silence
Keeping in mind Obamacare is, essentially, Romneycare… the same stuff they did in Massachusetts, which the Rominee supported before he was against it, a lot of the bad policies that progressives have put in place were what’s known as “compromises”. Which is apt, because these reforms were *definitely *compromised by adding conservative input.
Many of these reforms are what progressives were able to manage while dealing with the minority party, whose primary goal is to block, obstruct, and de-fund the entire government. It’s amazing anything gets done at all with Republicans in office.
Obamacare is just one example of progressive policies being watered-down, distorted, and rendered vulnerable to rampant corruption, by conservative elected officials. What’s truly shameful is that even after getting almost everything they wanted, the conservatives in question still voted against it… their own ideas. The ideas they put forward as an alternative to Hillarycare. The ideas Romney “supported” in his own state, but thought were just bad ideas for the country.
If you want a Republican idea to pass, you can count on Democrats voting for it, and Republicans voting against it. If you want a Democratic idea to pass, you can count on it not getting passed for decades, after the Republican idea has been shown to be flawed and in dire need of much reform.
I am not surprised that certain ideas like public housing projects needed to be reformed. However, public housing projects are infinitely superior to thousands of people either in prison, or sleeping in gutters, which is what the conservatives in government would have preferred, over public housing. And in order to get conservatives to support such legislation, they’ve got to make it terrible legislation, that allows certain corrupt parties to get filthy rich off. Only then is it allowed to become law.
It’s not at all surprising that the idea needs to be fixed in order to be more effective. But conservatives are hardly the panacea for the pain, they are the very pain in the ass that needs to be medicated.
If you got a group of progressives together and passed legislation written wholly by them, you’d get a much better public housing system.
Improving progressive ideas does not mean progressive ideas are flawed, it means the implementation could be done better. The conservative alternative is to do nothing while people suffer.
Oh, certainly. But, it can be a conservative thing, and in the examples I selected, I argue that it was:
Cartelization of industry was a result of the progressive idea that a centrally-planned, cooperative economy would outperform an unplanned, competitive one. The dismantling of the various cartel programs in favor of greater competition was a conservative idea.
Public housing projects were a result of the progressive idea that the government building and managing low-cost housing was the best way to provide housing for the poor. It largely gave way to Section 8, which, being market-based, was a conservative idea.
Pre-reform welfare was a result of the progressive idea that people in dire straits need a helping hand, not judgment or strings attached. The reform was a conservative idea, and absolutely beneficial to the recipients.
Bilingual education was a result of the progressive identity-politics movement, that non-English speaking cultures had value and shouldn’t be forced to adopt English at the start of schooling. The backlash against it, which showed that structured English immersion actually did benefit students more than bilingual education did, was a conservative idea.
In all four cases, the intentions of the progressives were pure and noble. Regardless of what motives you attribute to the conservatives who fought against these four programs, the fact is they did more to benefit the nation by dismantling them then the progressives did in fighting to install and keep them. This is not universally true, but progressives are just people like anyone else, both apt to make mistakes and slow to recognize them without a push from outside. This is where conservative ideas can be beneficial: not all that often, mind, but sometimes.
[QUOTE=Askthepizzaguy]
Give you an example: Obamacare.
What did the progressives actually want? Single payer healthcare. Would have been wildly simpler and less corrupt than what we’re going to end up with, which is, essentially, a way of forcing people to participate in the for-profit insurance scam.
It basically says that insurers will never go out of business because their customers don’t have a choice not to shop there.
On the whole, society will be better off, because the poor will get healthcare, amongst much groaning from such troglodytes as Papa John who claim he’ll slash all his worker’s hours because they won’t be able to make money on pizza anymore, even though the actual increase in cost to his business could be offset by raising the price of the pizza by a few pennies. But that’s too much, he’ll go out of business if he doesn’t cut hours. Keep in mind he gave away a million pizzas for a promotion recently, and they frequently slash the prices of these pizzas by several dollars and they still make a profit. It’s called marketing. But a few additional pennies for pizzas, that’s crazy. Employees don’t need to see a doctor that badly. But I digress.
It’s another instance where the system was changed, conservatives whined and complained that society would come crashing to a halt, and such a thing did not happen, and society benefited.
Is it perfect? Or can it be improved? Are progressives actually happy with the result?
Progressives are not happy with the result and wish to improve it. Conservatives want to do away with it altogether, de-fund it, repeal, and replace. Replace it with what?
Dead silence
Keeping in mind Obamacare is, essentially, Romneycare… the same stuff they did in Massachusetts, which the Rominee supported before he was against it, a lot of the bad policies that progressives have put in place were what’s known as “compromises”. Which is apt, because these reforms were *definitely *compromised by adding conservative input.
[/quote]
I don’t disagree with your take here, except to not that the Republican party as it exists right now is not interchangeable with conservatism.
That doesn’t apply to any of my examples, I don’t think, as one is from FDR’s political dominance in the '30s, the others from Johnson’s Great Society. The Republican tactis you mentioned are far more recent than that.
[quote=AskthepizzaguyIf you got a group of progressives together and passed legislation written wholly by them, you’d get a much better public housing system. [/quote]
Maybe, maybe not. The progressives had a great deal of power in the New Deal era, and some of their policies worked and others didn’t. Progressives aren’t infallible.
Not axiomatically, now, but it can mean the progressive ideas are flawed, and the conservative alternative is not always to do nothing.
I guess I’m confused. Are the Republicans evil because they don’t mention Lincoln enough? Or because they mention him too much?
:rolleyes:
askthepizzaguy was being sarcastic . That should help you figure it out.
No, that does mean those particular Progressive ideas are flawed. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The only thing that really matters is how effective a particular solution is executed to solve a specific problem.
It is also not universally true that the conservative alternative ‘is to do nothing while people suffer’. Liberals/Progressives and conservatives often agree that something is a problem but disagree what should be done about it. Almost no one likes to see people literally starving in the streets for example. They may have different reasons to oppose it but every side agrees that isn’t a good thing. Liberals/Progressives may want to build a housing project and give people money so that they have a place to live and can buy some food. Conservatives might see the solution as having a low minimum wage so that lesser paying jobs are abundant and people can earn at least enough to feed themselves if not much else or they may favor a large military so that younger people can always enlist if they have no other options.
Those are simplistic examples but it is much more common for the different sides to disagree on plans for a solution rather than deny that something is a problem at all. The only thing that matters in the end is how effective that solution proves out in the real world and not what the original intentions were.
No shit.
We’re here to help.
Because they claim him without, any more, actually representing him.
No, Republicans are oblivious to the irony of pulling Abraham Lincoln out of mothballs to demonstrate their commitment to the rights of minorities. Given that he died almost 150 years ago. They’re stupid for calling themselves the “Party of Lincoln”. The Republican party of 1860 doesn’t even resemble the modern Republican party. They were the progressive party. Social activism, liberal activism, progressive policies? The Republican party of that era is analogous to the modern Democratic party, in as much as it could be, considering the issues of the day were quite different from today.
The Republican and Democratic parties essentially traded places. Democrats were once the party of Jim Crow and segregation. The Democratic party was hostile to the rights of minorities.
These are not the Republican and Democratic parties of today. The African-American population votes 90% Democratic today for a reason- it in no way resembles the Dixiecrats. The southern states are largely reliable Republican strongholds, and the liberal, progressive party is the Democrats, and the conservative, regressive party is the Republicans.
Calling oneself the “Party of Lincoln” is basically harking back to a time when the Republican party was, essentially, the Democratic party. When their political positions in no way resemble the modern Republican party.
It’s a dumb slogan, meant to appeal to people who have absolutely no sense of history, or irony. Of course, much of what the Republican party does today is to appeal to dumb people, ignore history, and be ironic. Or is it moronic? Hey, let’s be fair here… it’s probably both.
You argue your points quite well. I’m speaking axiomatically, and I’m wrong about it being axiomatic.
People with good intentions do err. Your examples are valid.
Just like the other thread, this one boils down to the definition of “liberal” and “success.” Either side can “no true Scotsman” this thing to death.
A real liberal wouldn’t do any such thing. A real liberal will debate with himself, admit he was wrong, and apologize.