Quote from: CindyJames
What constitutes an American? Not colour nor race nor religion. Not the pedigree of his family nor the place of his birth. Not the coincidence of his citizenship. Not his social status nor his bank account. Not his trade nor his profession. An American is one who loves justice and believes in the dignity of man. An American is one who will fight for his freedom and that of his neighbour. An American is one who will sacrifice property, ease and security in order that he and his children may retain the rights of free men. An American is one in whose heart is engraved the immortal second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.
The whole speech is fanatastic, and has never been listened to by any members of the Bush Dynasty.
You know, there's a truckload of stuff I didn't like about W (and even more about his daddy) and the last thing i want to do is carry a brief for those guys....and it's certainly true one can dispute the rational i'm about to refer to BUT:
One of the MAJOR defense of the unpoipular (on the left) war in Iraq was that Bush's argument that the iraqi people were just as entitled to freedom as Americans and it was America's responsibility to spread freedom wherever she could.
For all intents and purposes his argument was exactly the same as Ickies' in that speech.
Quote
Who and what are Democrats and Republicans? I thought they were just two political parties.
They are really. To understand the dynamic that divides then you really have to ask "what is conservative and liberal?" in the modern American sense. Neither word carries the same connotation it carried in the 19th century (in fact, some make a sound argument that the 19th century liberal is pretty much the same as the 21st century conservative.
And then within each group there are subtler divisions. Old school Conservatives lean heavily towards a mix of libertarian-ish thinking on personal liberties and a belief in as unrestrained a free market as is possible given the human tendency towards corruption (that's what I am, by the way)
there's also a school of thought called "neo-conservatism" which is in ascendancy in the Republican party which is a more "aggressive" twist on conservatism (more prone to flexing international muscles, more active in pushing moralistic policies at home)
All that said, conservatism isn't JUST "let's be slow to change" anymore. It is, to a greater or lesser extent, basically a thought system that begins with the individual - a bottom-up philosophy. Yes, they will grudgingly concede there are some things you need a government to do, mostly to curb the natural excesses of the individual, but that - as Reagan famously said (quoting someone else i believe) "That government is best which governs least"
Liberalism - broadly speaking - takes the opposite tack. There are real human needs that must be addressed and it's the responsibility of government to "fix" everything. Whatever might be lost in terms of personal liberties is more than made up for by the resulting equality and fairness.
there are of course minor counter examples (the liberal would argue, for instance, that restrictions on abortion are impositions on personal liberty) but in a general sense, this is the divide in America - and be sure I do not intend to minimize either instinct here, I think the liberal instinct that everyone be taken care of and treated fairly is just as noble as the conservative instinct for personal liberty. The trick is how you balance those two noble instincts to get the best outcome.
The stereotype is that conservatives are business oriented and the liberal is labor oriented but that's not really anything but a platitude. One might note that prominent Democrats enjoy HUGE support from HUGE corporations (GE for instance is welded to the hip of Obama). Part of that arises from the fact that Unions proport to speak for all labor and they are married to the Democrat party but there is way more non-union labor in America and a lot of union members are not Democrats.
All that said, what the two major parties have descended to is essentially knee jerk "Teh other side is teh EEEVil!" thought processes most of the time. Far too often the choice of what governmental action to take has as much to do with electability and casting the opposition in a bad light than about what's actually good for the country or consistent with your professed political philosophy.
But that too, I assume, is pretty much part and parcel of politics. I just have a lower tolerance for it than I used to.
The problems you, and our Canadian and European friends, will always have in processing American politics are 2.
first, the "left" in the U.S. is only slightly left-of-center on the world scale. If you put the whole political world on a (very simplistic) 1-10 scale, with 10 being most right wing and 1 being most left wing - our MUST left wing mainstream politician is probably a 3.5-4.5
Likewise, your most right wing mainstream politician (in the Western world - not speaking of some Muslim totalitarian here) is maybe a 6 on our scale. So when you hear "left and right" about y\our guys it doesn't translate too well.
The second thing is much more confusing - and something I expect a few folks here will come along and argue strenuously against but it's nevertheless true. Of the major news outlets - the major networks, cable networks, major newspapers, and newsmagazines, almost all of them are staffed by VERY left wing people.
(for instance, in 1994 - before Fox got going good - their was a survey of American newsrooms and 91% of news professionals had voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. He didn't get 91% of the vote in our most liberal state, for comparison. Other surveys show that some 60+% identify themselves as liberal which is more than double the percentage in the general population)
The exceptions are Fox News, the Washington Times, the editorial page of the WSJ and some right wing news mags like the National Review.
The result of this is that almost all of the news people outside our shores receive is created, produced, and reported by very left of center people (often further left than the left wing politicians) and so you get news that is VERY friendly to the American left and VERY hostile to the American right. They claim, falsely, that their views do not affect their reporting but such a thing is impossible. A person cannot help but speak favorably of that which seems logical and reasonable to them and speak derisively of that which seems irrational to them.
And it's not just in the content of what they say, but in what they choose to cover and what they chose to ignore.
If you notice anything said about the media in left-leaning communities like this one, it's the mocking derision directed at Fox news. Why? Because the mindset of all other broadcast media is so far to the left that Fox looks freakishly knuckle-dragging right wing. they ARE right of center but they are a lot closer to the center than, for instance, MSNBC is. The ironic thing is, the same people who SWEAR Fox News is a right wing Republican house organ are the same people who insist to the last breath that every other news outlet is completely unbiased and that no reporter in America would ever slant their stories to the left.
Ah....but I digress heavily. The point in bringing that up is to say that, though you say you have spent a good bit of time here, for the average non-American who hasn't - that person has almost no chance of getting a real objective view of what's going on here politically. Truth be told, we have a huge number of people who've lived here all their lives who have no real clue.
Anyway, I must agree with your assessment of this conversation. It's so refreshing to really talk to someone without exchanging hostilities.
(by the way, I like the compulsory voting on the surface but I have to ask - how would we ever insure every vote is an INFORMED vote? What troubles me more than non-voters is the voter who votes though he can't even name his own senators let alone know what he stands for)
Post Merge: September 22, 2009, 01:50:57 PM
tekla's historical review of "how we got here" is well done and I agree in large part. There might be some points I'd amend a bit (for instance, saying we never had free markets is true, but the degree to which they are more free or less free is still a relevant thing to conservatives) but in the main, it's a good review.
The one place perhaps that wasn't covered as well is that in the early 20th century, the nation was much more "progressive/liberal" in the halls of power than it was after WW@ up until the shift in the 60's.
Teddy Roosevelt is considered a hero by many Republicans (McCain for instance) but he was a pretty progressive guy - even though he was mildly right of center among his contemporaries. Outside of the nonsensical Prohibition movement (which was largely a grassroots thing) most of the major political ideals in the first few decades were solidly left wing - and this is the cauldron in which FDR's views were shaped. Both Wilson and FDR were WAY over to the left compared to most of the politicians that came after them (JFK for instance was not nearly as liberal as FDR was)
We are only now seeing an American government that's as far to the left as what we had in the 1930's.
Still, on the whole that was a solid analysis.
