The moral roots of liberals and conservatives

Great Debates
61

Not at all. When Terry Schiavo’s husband, acting on information from her doctors, decided that there was no hope of recovery and that she would not want her suffering prolonged, it was conservatives who tried to use the government to dictate what would happen. Liberals thought that the government should stay out of it.

What’s actually happened is that conservatives have been setting the national agenda for so long that the “role of government” is about where they want it. When liberals get voted in and have a different agenda, suddenly they’re trying to inject government into these sacrosanct areas where it doesn’t belong. But the way things are now is not the way things must be.

62

I don’t buy any of it.

Show me a peer-reviewed paper that comes to a conclusion that makes the author’s own views look morally suspect, and I might take it more seriously. There have been plenty of papers written to ‘explain’ the difference between conservatives and liberals - they generally take the form of subtly disparaging conservatives and casting liberals in the best light possible. Wasn’t there another recent paper which ‘showed’ that conservatives are motivated by fear?

As for liberals tolerating more change, I have two words for you: Precautionary Principle. Wholly embraced by liberals with an environmentalist ethic, the Precautionary Principle is the ultimate in ‘conservative’ outlook with respect to the environment.

And the degree in which liberals question authority and conservatives don’t is directly correlated to how much authority either side has at any given time. I’d say the Tea Party people are doing plenty of authority questioning right now, and the liberals have become the defenders of the established order.

The ‘neo-cons’ are certaintly not about maintaining the status quo - they’re trying to change the world.

Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich wanted to dismantle large portions of the established power base.

Conservative home-schoolers are certainly not happy with the status quo, while liberals fight to the death to maintain entrenched monopolies of the public labor unions.

As for in-groups and out-groups, there are a lot of ‘community oriented’ liberals. It takes a village, don’t you know. Protectionism also seems to be stronger among ‘liberals’, and protectionism is a pretty tribal policy - protecting your own against the ‘outsiders’.

What it comes down to is that neither conservatism or liberalism as they exist today are coherent philosophies. They’re more a reflection of the political coalitions and special interests that taken sides in a long, partisan battle. Liberals claim to be for the little guy - except when they’re supporting public labor unions that make far more money and have far better benefits than the average. Conservatives are all about keeping power in small communities - until it comes to drug wars and gay marriage. Liberals are all for change - unless it’s change away from the power vested in the special interests they like. Conservatives are all about maintaining the status quo - unless the status quo includes the media and allowing people to have abortions.

As for purity/sanctity, you’ll never meet someone as sanctimonious as a fur-hating, vegan liberal who rides a bicycle to work and wears hemp clothing, unless it’s a pious Christian conservative who thinks he’s going to heaven and all the sinners are going to hell.

This is not to disparage liberalism or conservatism. It’s to disparage the notion that you can break down the political beliefs of hundreds of millions of people into a handful of shared traits.

63

That’s about the smartest thing that’s been written in this thread.

Clearly, Sam Stone must be a liberal.

64

Right there, you did it again.

I said we should talk about the best way to achieve a goal (public or private) and you took one of the options off the table because of your preconceived notion that one of those options is forbidden.

65

Considering that they disagree with me on basic matters of morality and civil rights, of course I think many of them are evil. I don’t think that all of them are so stupid as to not know the results of their actions/policies; that leaves “evil”. I could use some sort of weasel language to avoid the “e” word, but I prefer not to.

I think torture is evil. I think forcing women to give birth is evil. I think that forbidding same sex couples marriage is evil. I think racism is evil. I think letting the poor starve is evil. And so on; I regard many common conservative positions as evil.

66

But on the other hand, there are people who wear hemp clothing and ride bicycles to work.

The horror.

67

Or people who romanticize and idolize Che Guevera or who think Hugo Chavez is a great man.

Just so we don’t do any kind of one-sided cherry-picked moral comparisons, you know.

68

Broadly I agree with this. That said I think conservatism is arguably much further away from coherence than liberalism. Witness our current Congress in the US.

Well, this is true of anyone regardless of their stripes and frankly makes sense. Who wouldn’t do that? If you (general “you”) think your side is right you will support them. That or you do not really think they are right but it is in your interests to see them gain power.

As for your shots at unions I am of two minds and I, personally, struggle with this. Overall I despise labor unions. I realize their original purpose and it was a good one (read “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair among other things). No question big business, left to itself, positively and brutally squashed the workers. Safety standards were a joke. Pay was beyond pathetic. Child labor? Why not!

I find it interesting that you ignore the power of the corporation while lambasting labor unions. Why would you be ok with such an imbalance? If corporations can lobby Congress why shouldn’t labor be able to unite workers and do the same thing (in your view)?

That said I also realize that these days labor unions largely exist for their own benefit and not the workers. They are corrupt in many cases and cause more problems than they solve usually. Even white collar unions are awful (I despise the teacher’s unions). No doubt unions are a big problem. Thing is I am not sure how you get rid of them without…wait for it…government intervention to take up the task of protecting the worker.

So how would you have it Sam? Expand government to protect workers? Live with unions to do that? Or leave workers at the mercy of corporations?

As an aside I find it odd that while unions tend to be liberal constructs most of the union members (blue collar anyway) tend to be distinctly conservative in outlook (Joe the Plumber anyone…pretty sure plumbers have unions).

Agreed but one important distinction here:

“Fur-hating, vegan liberal who rides a bicycle to work and wears hemp clothing” is not in Congress.

“Pious Christian conservative who thinks he’s going to heaven and all the sinners are going to hell” is in Congress (and a lot of them).

Again you are correct but again there is an important thing missing here.

Like it or not we are left with two parties in the US government. While every individual has differences there are distinct aspects of how the US government works that boils down to Us v. Them. As such sides are taken.

Sucks but is how it is.

69

It’s been mentioned in another thread here a few days ago, but I think it there’s a lot of truth in it:

One of the reasons a lot of people who don’t seem to be well off or even quite poor are conservative - even when proposed changes would probably be a huge benefit to them, like universal health care - is because they have a lot more to lose if it doesn’t work out. If you’re working your ass off just to make a living, you don’t want to risk making things worse. Better the devil you know, and all that.

70

These are not people who actually exist on the American left. This is a conservative media caricature, not a reality. This is a pretty liberal board. How many people here have you ever seen saying they idolized Guevera or Chavez?

71

And conservatives would say that torture is an excusable evil if it is saving lives, or that aborting unborn children is evil, or that their sacred traditions shouldn’t be fucked with, or that it is evil to take money away from hard working people and give it to others just because they “need it”. Most issues don’t break down into pure black and white like you want them to.

72

First, you have mashed up fiscal conservatives and social conservatives into “conservatives.” Nothing I say has anything to do with social conservatives (since I’m not one).

Second, you take what you see as the results of a policy and then you believe that proponents of that policy specifically intend that result. That is a ludicrous thing to do. For example, just because you believe the result of the government not providing welfare would be that the poor would starve does not mean that, by supporting that policy, fiscal conservatives specifically intend for the poor to starve. They may believe that that result would not follow from the policy at all.

73

Oh, there was quite a bit of support or at least defense of Chavez around here in the early days of his regime. But the SDMB is not representative of liberals any more than it is conservatives - it tends to get the smarter ones.

But the idolization of Che Guevera on the left is quite common. Remember the Motorcycle Diaries? Ever been to a campus protest? “Che Chic” was all the rage on campus when I was in college - it seemed like half of the earnest lefties there had Che T-shirts or wore a Che beret.

For that matter, here in Canada the left loved Castro. Pierre Trudeau considered him a close friend, and when Castro fell ill Justin Trudeau flew out to be at his bedside.

There’s been a steady stream of Hollywood lefties singing Chavez’s praise (Oliver Stone, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Torres, Danny Glover).

For that matter, back during the cold war there were plenty of people on the left still justifying Stalin and Lenin’s murderous reign, and insisting that the Soviet system was superior. Today you have people like Tom Friedman extolling the virtues of Communist China.

And we shouldn’t forget the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, international A.N.S.W.E.R, the Worker’s World party, and all the other radical groups on the left - many of whom advocated (or still advocate) violent revolution.

The left has plenty of dangerous people on its side, and plenty of people who endorse them. And more people have been killed in the name of left-wing causes than were killed by the right.

Anyone who tries to claim the mantle of morality for the left hasn’t been paying attention to what happened in the 20th century.

74

You honestly think Tom Friedman is a Leftie?

75

There is no idolization of Che on the left. Doesn’t exist. Most people wearing the T-shirts (which wasn’t that many), didn’t even know who Che was, and what does The Motorcycle Diaries have to do with the American left? That wasn’t even an American movie, it was Argentinian.

The Weather Underground? Are you serious. That was over 40 years ago, and it was a microscopic fringe group even then.

The Black Panthers? The Workers World Party? What the fuck? These are not emblematic of the American left. These are the fringiest of the fringe. The right wing fringe, by contrast, owns cable TV networks, sits in Congress and gets GOP nominations for Vice President.

WTF?

The conservatives illegally invaded Iraq and killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent people for no reason. Who did the liberals kill?

76

If you worked in the “real” world you’d know that government is just trying to imitate the private sector with this. 20 years ago I spent way too much time in meetings with change consultants, did too much brainstorming about visualizing the future, and spent hours doing mission statements. Managers in both the public and private sectors are often suckers for the latest fad. I’ve never seen a correlation with the politics of the manager.

77

How many people are like that these days, compared woth how many people support Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck?

78

I’ve noticed that the people who really like Che Guevara are college kids (usually from pretty well-to-do families) who are going through their College Radicalization Phase, which will consist of them attending some Martin Luther King Day celebrations, the National Coming-Out Day Rally, and taking some women’s studies courses, then leaving college to join their family’s business or taking a job working for someone their father knows.

How many of those Che t-shirts actually get sold to people over the age of 25?

79

Well then you’re a liberal half the time!

If I had to pick one issue that best exemplifies liberalism, it would be the condoning of premarital sex. Abstinence-only education is entirely in keeping with the basic principle of conservatism that old-fasioned taboos exist for good reasons–even if we can’t explain what these reasons are–and that it’s the government’s job to enforce these taboos.

80

I’m sure there’s no lack of irony or unseriousness in the sporting of Che t-shirts by college kids, epspecially as time goes on.