Why I don't consider myself conservative anymore
Hmm. You know, this would probably be better served being moved to another thread, just because of just how off-topic it is. But what I'll do is answer your question, and then if you feel compelled to respond, we should probably start a whole different thread for that discussion. And I'll toss it in spoilers to make it less distracting.Originally Posted by xcorps
First off, let me just say this isn't a recruiting message. There are plenty of reasons to vote Republican, especially if you have:
1. Much higher income than the rest of us
2. Very conservative social views
3. Are a true believer in the "free market solves everything" philosophy
4. Think the Democrats don't know how to govern effectively and are simply the lesser of two evils
, I was a Republican not a few short years ago. Considered myself very conservative, too. I was listening only to one side of the issue... I got all my information from talk radio. I heard Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Ingraham, Beck, all the major players. I bought all kinds of right-wing books, etc.
However, I realized what I was doing, which was getting all my information from one source. Which is precisely why I thought people were liberal; spending all their time reading/watching left-wing viewpoints and not fully understanding the conservative philosophy. In my view, of the two ideologies, one is clearly better for the United States. It either will bring about more employment, more prosperity, more happiness, and more security, or it will not. People can still cling religiously to their viewpoint, but one view will actually be better for the country.
So, realizing that I was only getting my information from right-wing sources, I began adding liberal and moderate reading materials to my routine. I also sat down and forced myself to watch MSNBC to see if I couldn't pick apart all their arguments. Initially, I didn't like it, because a lot of what was being attacked on MSNBC were... people I knew from Fox. So, first reaction was: How rude.
But I began to understand just what the liberal point of view was. So, I wanted to see what the conservative reaction to it was. I thought that the titans of right-wing radio would be able to easily crush those ideas, but then I saw what they did whenever a liberal was on the air. They would cut them off, shout them down, belittle them, or not give them much air time.
It's one thing to have a pointed, adversarial interview, it's another thing to pull a Bill O'Reilly and cut the other person's mic, tell them to shut up, and shout them down. (Or, to be fair, cut off and talk over someone like Chris Matthews of MSNBC does... god I hate that guy, liberal or not)
So, "titans" of right-wing radio ended up being paper tigers. They shout and they use bitterly partisan, hyperbolic rhetoric, but they can't actually sit down and have a conversation with anyone they disagree with for any extended period of time. They carefully screen the calls and have mostly conservative people call in. And of course they all sound polite and brilliant, and then they let one "wacko" liberal on to show the narrative, that liberals are unhinged and just downright rude. And then they are rude to the liberal and cut them off and man, it feels good, doesn't it?
So, I started spending more time in the backrooms and off-topics of websites, (like this one!) as it seemed clear that all you would ever get from right or left media is people cutting others off, shouting them down, belittling them, or not responding to each other's points. I sought out left-wingers and attempted to convince them through reason why they were wrong.
But, it turns out, if you let people speak, and listen with an open mind, you find that they're not all wacky and they're not all rude and they're not all dumb. I was slowly convinced to be a moderate, and become less partisan. Then I started looking at many of the things the right-wing advocates, and one by one I realized none of those things were actually all that good for society, and certainly not pressing.
Lower taxes for example.... we've already had a decade of lower taxes. It's not a cure-all. Taxes have been historically much higher, much much higher, especially during times of war or military build-up. We haven't always covered our budget deficits (In fact as a percentage of our GDP, it's been worse before) but we have had higher taxes before.
The fact is that we've sat through 2 of the longest wars in the history of our country, and have had a build-up of our armed forces and intelligence services and security at our airports, and none of that was funded. The fact is, we have a sunk economy which is temporarily lowering our federal revenue, and we have higher unemployment which is causing more people to need help, because they have families that need to be fed and sheltered and sorry to say, charities don't take in enough money or distribute the money evenly or on a consistent, monthly basis, to cover everyone. Expenses are up, income is down, and people are hurting.
The one consistent thing we've seen, however, is that the rich have made out like a bandit. Buying up foreclosed properties at record low prices, so they can sell them again later when the market improves. Selling bad loans to people who can't afford to pay, and then selling the ownership of those loans to their clients, and then betting those loans will fail. Raising interest rates for no reason whatsoever. Entire corporations folding due to fraud and corruption. Our entire automobile and banking industries nearly failed. But at the same time, the rich keep getting richer.
And some of them are saying what everyone else is thinking: after 10 years of lower taxes, and a shrinking middle class and high unemployment, the only people left we can/should actually tax are the rich. So, we need to let those tax cuts expire. It makes good fiscal sense, and these people aren't going to be affected one bit by even a 5% tax hike.
Pre-emptive wars.... the logic behind them was to prevent catastrophe, prevent us from being attacked first.
It didn't pan out that way. Not only do terrorists just spread to another area and attack us from there (look at Yemen, Pakistan) so we can't invade every country that has terrorist cells (sometimes we get attacked from terrorist cells located in allied countries....) but the cost in human lives... is unfathomable. An entire society was severely disrupted and tens of thousands of innocent civilians lost their lives, and the remainder are sitting under a power vacuum where there's no electricity, very little in the way of utilities, no jobs, and the only people who can offer protection are warlords and terrorist organizations.
Meanwhile, attacks are being lobbed at us all the time, and some are still getting past our security. We only got lucky just recently as our intelligence services tracked and then misplaced the bomb that could have detonated on board a plane, but lucky for us, failed to do so.
The odds of being killed in a terrorist attack are less than being struck by lightning. And yet, we spend a very large percentage of our budget and thousands upon thousands of troops trying to prevent that. The two are very different, but there is such a thing as overkill. It is using a chainsaw to slice a pea in half. A small knife could do a better job. A surgical, precise operation that risks fewer of our own lives and has more intelligence behind it is vastly superior to sending our entire military to chase down a thousand or so idiots who are the equivalent of the Columbine murderers. Even if you kill them all (unlikely) there are hundreds of other terrorist groups around the world, and like I said, they are even in allied countries. There are terrorists in our own borders who attack us and are American citizens. How do we deal with those people? The same way we deal with any criminal, with the FBI watching them and gathering evidence, stopping the attack, and tossing them in prison. I don't see the need to occupy Oklahoma City with troops to stop a dude with a bomb. That's police work.
In the meanwhile, we are using a chainsaw to split a pea, and we've torn several middle eastern nations apart and accidentally slaughtered more innocent people, and I mean WAY more innocent people, than 9/11 caused. And, I should mention that was in a country that had zero to do with 9/11, who had a military dictator who posed zero threat to us. Was he a bad man? Yes. But there are lots and lots of bad men, perhaps worse men (Mugabe of Zimbabwe?) who we leave alone because there's no political will to remove them.
The whole thing smacks of irresponsibility and hypocrisy. Pre-emptive strikes make sense: Send a missile to blow up a facility that we know could end up making nuclear weapons, like in Syria. End of conflict. No invasion, no war. Pre-emptive war doesn't make sense. It starts a war to prevent a war. That's called lacking a cause for war and going anyway. Pre-emptive wars is not a conservative value, but many conservatives agree with it, especially Neo-conservatives. That's the doctrine of neo-conservatism, and I fully disagree with it.
And, if I mention I disagree, other people will suggest I have no right to be second-guessing our military. But our military functions under a civilian leadership who tells them what to do, and our civilian leadership is elected, and I have a right to second-guess our elected civilian leadership. Not questioning our military, like it is some sacred cow, is dangerous to a free society. It's not the soldiers that are the problem, it is the apathetic public allowing a civilian leadership to go haywire. The fault lies with the public who can be persuaded to accept bad cases for war, and those who argued those bad cases.
Building a border fence... It can reduce the number of border crossings, yes. The lazy people.
However, every fence can and has been penetrated before, especially one that is incomplete and covers so much territory that we cannot afford to man every section of it. They just go around, under, or are smuggled in.
But it all ignores the real problem, which is: Many of these people, illegal immigrants, were in our country legally, and we invited them here. We invite them into our country and give them work visas, and when they expire, they just disappear.... and they're in our country.
A fence doesn't stop that. A fence doesn't keep out the trespasser that lives in your attic. They're already in the house. Especially if YOU invited that person to stay in your attic, and then complaining that they're here. It's okay to want them to leave, but you CANNOT blame the lack of a fence for the problem.
Campaigning to "protect marriage"....
A Republican talking point, though like I said, not necessarily "conservative" though it is popular among conservatives and some moderates. I won't turn this into a gay marriage debate, but the bottom line is, there is no rational case against gay people having the same rights as the rest of us, at all, ever, anywhere, by anyone. The only thing remaining is some scaremongering tactic to make us think they're all perverted and after our children, so we can't have them adopt, so we must deny them marriage.
Which totally ignores the fact that gay people can and do biologically reproduce (artificial means, or by natural means.... it happens, especially when you're trying to have a baby, or trying to fit in with the hetero-normative culture), and they are allowed to raise their own children, and it's also already legal in many places for gay people to adopt, and here's the real punchline:
You cannot tell if someone is gay. They can fool you. That is why there are so many gay people in our military who blend in perfectly and serve our country. So they can pretend to be straight and they can enter into sham marriages and raise children and get divorced and retain custody of the children, through the already existing processes we put in place. They can get their equal rights by simply taking what is theirs, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop them. What they want is to not to have to lie in order to be considered equal. Not to have to lie to serve this country, not to have to lie to get married, not to have to tell lies their whole life.
Proponents of morality should consider not wanting to have to lie to people a good thing. Since the situation is already checkmate, gays can get what they want and legally, and there was never any reason to deny them their rights in the first place, it's time to let this backwards, neanderthal homophobia go.
Campaigning to "protect life"....
I don't approve, generally, of using medical means to terminate a pregnancy just because you forgot to put a condom on. I don't think it should be used in place of condoms.
That said, I can't approve of a young girl being forced to bear the child of a rapist, especially in cases where it threatens her life. That is the equivalent of a homeless person breaking into your house, beating you half to death, and sleeping in your bed, and the police saying "sorry, you must take care of this homeless person for the next 18 years."
That's a crime. A child may be innocent but it is still not something that you can force onto/into someone unwillingly. If a person breaks into my house, even if they are unarmed, and maybe they are otherwise a nice person, if I think they're a murdering rapist trying to get at my kids, and I shoot them, that's legal.
Terminating a pregnancy before the sack of cells even touches the uterine wall isn't murder. And it isn't murder several days after when the cells touch the uterine wall. It is, in my opinion, your right to say no, you don't want it, and it is not the state's right to tell you that you must have it.
Limited government? Conservative value? Are we being consistent?
I don't approve of partial-birth abortion, but there is a gray area in the middle which rational people can disagree on, and only the most wingnut among us believe that you can never use condoms and you can't ever use the morning after pill.
Conservatives can agree on this, and many of them do. But the Republican Party has a platform which does not agree, and many party members would seek to overturn this delicate balance of individual freedom versus state regulation, and I find it ironic that the very people advocating this are the people who fear government the most. I can't think of a more private, personal, get-your-hands-off-my situation than a child not wanting to raise a rapists' child.
Reducing medicare, medicaid, social security, unemployment compensation.... on the premise that government is wasteful.
Well yeah, we leave piles of money sitting for anyone to take over in Afghanistan, spend money propping up all kinds of governments, we have all kinds of pork projects that do nothing for almost everyone, we have too many redundant departments of homeland security and intelligence, we spend money of military contracts we don't need, and the military doesn't want, we give tax breaks to corporations and rich people that don't need them, we subsidize oil and corn and many other things that make money for themselves and are private industries, and there's all kinds of little examples of waste, fraud, and embezzlement everywhere.
But you know what? You want to trim the budget, why exactly are you going directly to the spending that the poor, sick, and old people need to survive, first?
I'm all for reducing waste and fraud, and nothing is sacred there. But increasing the age you can get those benefits, reducing those benefits, that we paid into the system and we were promised we would get, at a time when we need those benefits the most, is callous and stupid.
And I already balanced the budget without touching any of those things. It can be done, and it is REALLY easy. And then you can still fight corruption and waste in those systems without the phony argument that we need to reduce spending there.
The first thing you do is let temporary tax cuts expire, not take money from the unemployed.
That's just for starters. But there's more.... the stuff that isn't even a real issue, but it's half of what you'd hear on Fox News.
Phony controversies: War on Christmas, gay people destroying marriage, "ACORN helping pimps and prostitutes", Muslim terrorists threatening to take over America and impose Sharia law, birther conspiracies, death panels, "socialism", "terrorist fist bumps", moderate people building a community center on their own property, Obama's "ties to terrorism", and his "Muslim extremist past", and other election-year distractions and outright lies like Shirley Sherrod's "hateful bigotry".
None of these things were real. None of these things are true. None of these things actually happened. I haven't heard one apology from Fox News about any of these things.
Half of what Fox reports on is fake (literally) fake news. The other half is their opinion. Anything factual they actually say can be found on other news channels.
Fox News is 0% original, real content. All of it is fake, opinion, or recycled, and it has one purpose: Misinforming the public and getting Republican votes. And they don't hide the fact that they have Republican candidates for president on their payroll, and they don't hide the fact that they organize and hold rallies for conservative causes and then report on those rallies and then mis-report and distort the size of those rallies. And they don't hide the fact that the put the wrong clips to show a totally different crowd. And they don't hide the fact that they openly donate to Republicans all the time without consequence. Other networks, have journalistic standards which prohibit ALL OF THE ABOVE.
Dumb arguments: We need a pro-business agenda, so let's reduce oversight and regulation for businesses like oil drilling companies, coal mines, and so forth. Let's make already unsafe industries who cause major accidents due to not following protocols and bribing officials to look the other way even LESS regulated. And taxes are lower than they were in the booming 90's, so you can't say that taxes are causing our economy to suffer. Who broke the economy? Was it the government? Or was it businesses engaging in widespread, systematic, completely unethical and often illegal behavior? Does the free market really regulate itself and solve everything? You'd have to be daft to believe that, considering how businesses have been involved in nothing but scandalous and idiotic behavior over the past decade or so.
Even George Bush and the Republicans immediately went back on their "free market solves everything" principles the instant the economy started to tank. They immediately went to bailing out their big business allies, which means they are NO DIFFERENT than the Democrats, except one thing: Democrats are honest about their principles of government intervention.
Having seen both sides, advocated for both sides, I've come to conclude one position is correct and clearly better.
Some of it stays with you though. I'm still all about reducing waste, because waste in government is no better for society than corruption in business. The budget needs to be slashed, these wars need to end, defense and intelligence spending needs to be hacked apart with a machete, and some welfare programs need a lot more oversight. Train and hire some of these unemployed people to give oversight to government waste, and you'll find enough money to pay these people.
It's like government can... solve itself. All you need is... smarter government.
One of the mantras of the right: smarter government.
But seeing what happens when there's no regulation or oversight on commerce and industry, the idea that less government is always good, I have to conclude, is a pipe dream. More is not always better, or necessary, but less is definitely not always better.
Smaller government is not always smarter government. A completely unregulated market is not the same as a free market. Even big business sometimes needs a safety net to get back on its feet.
Some people lost jobs because of those big businesses messing up the economy. Those people don't deserve to be unemployed, and their children have to eat.
Charity does not cover all these people.
These people need a safety net. And the people who are arguing that those people DON'T need a safety net are the same people who just got bailed out to the tune of billions and billions and billions of dollars.
That makes me sick.
The viewpoint which most accurately matches my views, at this point, is moderate liberal. There are some points that the right has which make sense, but it gets drowned out by the needless partisanship (Republicans in Congress in the last 2 years were nothing but obstructionist and abused the filibuster more than any Congress in history), hyperbolic rhetoric (Fox News), distortion of facts for political gain (Fox News, electoral politics) and concern for oneself over the national good (Lower taxes for the richest among us more after 10 years of lower taxes with two unfunded wars and a bailed-out economy).
That's why I used to be opposed to the positions I have now, but I am now a moderate liberal. I believe that the government needs to keep out of social issues and stop persecuting gay people, and I also believe that everyone needs a smart, strong, safety net, and I believe that those who have benefited greatly from our capitalistic economy and also our interventionist economy have no right to tell the poor that they cannot benefit from either.
If you're a big business, either hire them back, or don't touch the unemployment benefits. You're making plenty in profits and taxes are low, so you have no right to complain about being forced to choose between either one. And if you dream about fixing the budget by reducing what little a poor person has to look forward to in his life, which is FINALLY being able to see a doctor when I am 60 years old (I can't afford an operation that I need right now) and that's your solution to the budget crisis is to remove that benefit while you're wallowing in lower taxes and big profits, I have an issue with your values.
I have family values of my own. No American left behind. We're all a family, and if we don't help some among our family, they are going to end up in prison, because when the situation gets this bad, some people have no choice but to rob banks to feed themselves, because most government benefits for the poor expire after a few short months. I think our prisons have enough people already in them, and I also think the solutions to keeping them from such dire straits are as simple as making sure they aren't hungry, and I know we can afford it, because apparently we can afford to fight wars at will for no legitimate reason, without paying for them, while also bailing out billionaires.
I know we can afford to keep the poor from being hungry. But it may require letting tax cuts expire for the rich, and actually paying for this government. And that's why I am no longer conservative.
Feel free, if anyone cares, to debate me on these points, but this is not the place to do that. Invite me to debate in another thread, or take this private.
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