Do you think the liberal/conservative stuff is BS?

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i personally do. what even IS a liberal or conservative anymore, just anyone who accepts the dogma of a certain party?

i think Bipartisanshit, as I call it, is preventing any real progress in government in America and really we don't even have a true republic anymore.

I think power is to centralized so that everyone has to jump in the political ring in Washington. This is a big country with many different regions and states that should be allowed to pursue their own social agendas.

i find the whole partisan thinking i encounter here on wp to be completely ridicoulous, all it does is push people to behave like idiots when they otherwise wouldnt.
it shapes how people think to fit a lens so extreme no reconciliation is possible for the devout follower.

I don't think you ever hear a conservative make a call for dropping ideological labels.

Call's for unity are nonsensical because it is in an essence asking the opposition to drop their objections, and jump on board your sound, logical, and objective bandwagon.


http://www.constitution.org/wj/meow.htm

William James and other progressives have pushed that we can have a moral equivalent of war, the idea is that - if we can have a war other then actual war, that we can get people to rally around the state, to get people to drop their individual pursuits, to drop their free associations.

The conservative opinion is that all of these in one way or another are just more ways for the state to claim authority over another aspect of life. You have to behave as if we are in a war, we are being invaded by a common enemy. Climate change is one, there's the war on drugs, heterosexual aids is another, there's the war on smoking. (The war on terror doesn't count because that's an actual war, the war on drugs qualifies domestically though.)

Whether these issues are real or valid is not the point, they are wars in which is sold as affecting everyone, and require us to drop our free associations and our ideological labels so that we can all unite and move forward with pragmatic and constructive action.

That is the reason we keep ideological labels is because we actually believe in the things we stand behind. Make the case for us dropping these associations to unite behind some issue, and if it is a good case that appeals to the oppositions values and beliefs, then we'll join.

Depends on what part of the world you are from.

In Australia a "big L" Liberal is a conservative. A small l liberal is labour (or represents the working class).
Thus our Liberal Party is the equivalent of the republican party or the British Tories.

Most conservatives I know are nice people and mind their own business. There are of course the chardonnay sipping yuppies (young upwardly mobile executive class) who are skilled arbiters of BS.

The problem with the political arena in the US (I can't say what it's like for the rest of the world) is that the most active/vocal components aren't liberal or conservative, at all. People assume that a conservative is a person who is opposed to change, but that's not the case. A conservative is a person who thinks change should only come if it is absolutely necessary, or that change should be allowed to happen naturally and need not be compulsory. Conservatives also tend to be highly critical of social policies that they see as futile or wasteful. The movement to end the War on Drugs was originally proposed by conservatives. A person who is fervently opposed to change is called a reactionary.

Likewise, a lot of people see liberals as those who want to subvert the status quo and implement radical changes that they believe will benefit the greater good of society, at the cost of our personal freedoms. That's not a liberal, that's an idealist. Liberals view change as a social experiment that is constantly happening, and are willing to abandon their policies if they cause more harm than good, or if they can come up with better solutions than the ones they already have. The establishment of public education was a liberal movement. Both liberals and conservatives aim to maximize personal freedom and the best quality of life people can enjoy, it's just that they don't always agree on how to do so. What makes liberals and conservatives different from idealists and reactionaries is that the former are capable of compromise and rational discourse, while the latter are extremely partisan and chauvinistic.

Now, about the reactionaries and the idealists: the problem with them is their ideas only have their interests in mind (or their children's interests), and nobody else matters. Their ideas are often simplistic and almost never based upon reality. The reactionary mindset assumes that if any social change comes about, their whole way of life will be destroyed (i.e. saying allowing gays to marry will cause society to spiral down into moral decadence). The idealist mindset assumes that imposing certain changes will automatically solve certain social problems (i.e. gun control will lead to less crime). They cling to their ideas with an almost religious devotion.

But in spite of the fact that reactionary and idealistic factions tend to be the most vocal components of the political arena, the actual policymakers (at least the ones in Washington) tend to be neither--because they're plutocrats that only represent the interests of their campaign financiers.

I don't think, at least in the US, at the federal level, there is much of a difference between the two.

They are both beholden to business.

And we don't really have liberals here anyway. Just conservatives and crazy conservatives.

American politics - don't know any other, know as little as I can help of ours - is televized professional wrestling.. It is footbal team jackets and cheerleaders.

Unfortunately whoever they choose to put in plays with my - our - money and lives.

Parties is simply do you back the Yankees or the Red Sox, with a bit of the old wordld courtesy of the Rangers and Celtics mixed in for fun.

I don't like it, but the powers that bee think it entertains the plebs.

Economically Dems and Reps are pretty much the same. Expand the scale of government and spend like crazy.

My problem with liberal/conservative is that it's a false dichotomy. It's a mistake to place them on the same access, to begin with. But if we force them there, we'd have conservative on one end, progressive on the other, with liberal roughly in the middle. Conservatives have been very cunning in painting the middle of the spectrum as their polar opposite... everyone has had the wool pulled over their eyes. The political center in the USA has shifted dramatically to the right as a result.

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The differences between liberal and conservative are the differences between cyan and sky blue. The loud pundits obscure the fact that it's all the same bourgeois-democratic ideology. For a real difference, look to Aspergo-fascism!