Liberal/Conservative a False Dichotomy
By Richard K. Moore | Aletho News | April 7, 2010
Between left and right there’s lots of ranting but little dialog. If only people would listen to one another they’d find there are real people on both sides.
I was raised as a liberal. I remember how pleased I was when Kennedy sent in troops to protect black students, and when the Civil Rights Bill was passed. It took me many years to realize that the net result was the centralization of power in Washington, while blacks continue to be treated as second-class citizens. I believe Kennedy was well-intentioned, but we know where good intentions can lead. I no longer identify with any political faction.
I’d like to suggest another perspective on liberalism. The fact is that the majority of the population in North America and Europe are liberal in their thinking. The dream of the liberal is a government that serves the people, balances the budget, promotes prosperity, avoids wars, and protects our rights. They think it is possible, if only the right people get in power. They don’t think too much about the fact that whenever you ask the government to do something for you, you’re giving them power to do that — plus whatever else they decide to use the power for. And liberals can’t bring themselves to see that government is basically a conspiracy against the people — they reject that along with all other ‘conspiracy theories’.
Since liberals are the majority, the mainstream propaganda is aimed at liberals, and phrased in liberal language. Conservatives are quite right to call it the ‘liberal media’. The healthcare bill, for example, was sold by the media in liberal terms — ‘helping’ people who are not currently insured. The media also told people that Obama’s attempt to ‘help’ was being thwarted by ‘heartless’ Republicans.
So we get a situation where liberals are celebrating the passage of the healthcare bill, even when most of them don’t have a clue about what the bill really means. They were seeing the whole thing as a battle between good and evil, between ‘caring’ Obama and ‘heartless’ Republicans. They’ll accept ‘defects’ in the bill because they think it was ‘the best Obama could get’.
The whole thing was theater, a scam. The healthcare bill was settled in its fundamentals many months ago, written by insurance companies, and rubber-stamped by party leaders of both sides and by Obama. Then we had months of fake debate, giving Obama an excuse to ‘back down’ on major promises, so he’d look good to liberals. Meanwhile Republicans could point out how bad the bill is, so they can look like heroes when the shit hits the fan in the healthcare system, as it will. And on both sides of the aisle, campaign accounts had been boosted by contributions from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
The point I’m making is that the healthcare bill has nothing to do with liberal or conservative. It’s theft by insurance companies, abetted by corrupt politicians, and sold as ‘liberal’ by the corporate-owned media.
It isn’t that liberals ‘want things’, and then the government ‘gives it to them’. Rather, the wealthy elites that run the country decide what they want, and then they sell it in the media using liberal language. From a conservative perspective it might look like liberals are running things, but it’s an illusion. An illusion that many liberals buy into as well.
One practical political alternative is to work toward restoring the Constitution, and I support that. However, most liberals will oppose it, if it’s proposed by Republicans. Not because liberals dislike the Constitution, but because they don’t trust Republicans. And because the media will tell them that ‘Constitutionalism’ is fake, that it’s a cover for eroding civil rights, etc. etc. Whichever lie that works — to be discovered in focus groups.
As long as liberals see conservatives as ‘the problem’, and conservatives see liberals as ‘the problem’, then we’re never going to get anywhere. We’ll be played off against one another, and nobody will get what they really want. When the government wants to sell more ‘security’, they’ll use conservative language. When they want to sell more spending, they’ll use liberal language.
I believe that we need to start talking to people on the ‘other side’, rather than circling our wagons in opposition to one another. I don’t propose this as a political strategy, but rather as a pre-condition for developing an effective strategy. We won’t convert anyone to change sides, but we’ll learn that underneath our labels we all have similar concerns and hopes.
A Constitutional republic is supposed to operate by the consent of the governed. If the governed are divided against themselves, then government is free to do what it wants. If the governed can develop mutual understanding, they can stand as one voice and demand accountability.
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Spot on my friend, spot on. I am a Christian traditionalist conservative and I could not agree more.
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Let’s not forget the conservative Hatred against the Liberals. Fox news, anyone? Or how about avowed Liberal basher O’ Reily? How about those Tea-partiers that call congressmen the N`word.
Yeah it’s true, we got’ta get along. But humility must run both directions, I remind you.
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[…] Liberal/Conservative a False Dichotomy « Aletho News. April 9th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments are closed | […]
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Pingback by The Progressive Mind » Liberal/Conservative a False Dichotomy « Aletho News | April 9, 2010 |
Thanks for sharing that personal insight. The newspaper business certainly shaped my politics. A liberal one had a strong union and its employees often made no qualms about screwing over their employer. It never dawned on them that if the business totters, so will their pensions and benefits until it was too late.
The conservative one filled up meaningful positions with mooching friends and relatives. While being the vanguard of responsible capitalistic values, gang prison raping their shareholders was pretty much par for the course. A virtual shell now rallies ’round the flag. Mores the pity for their everyday non-union workers.
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You took the words right out of my mouth. If I didn’t know any better, I might have thought I wrote this.
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From where do you derive your liberal majority?
40% of Americans interviewed in national Gallup Poll surveys describe their political views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal.
Conservatives (in the media) often promote the myth that the U.S. media are liberal. This myth serves several purposes: it raises public skepticism about so-called liberal news stories, hides conservative bias when it appears, and goads the media to the right. GOP strategist William Kristol also reveals another reason: “I admit it: the liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.”
So what’s the real story? The fact is that any right wing agenda has powerful friends in the media: the corporations that own them, and the corporations that pay for their advertising. These giant firms (now dwindled down to 6 owning the vast majority) have been increasingly successful in bending the media’s message to suit their self-interests, which include a pro-corporate agenda. Studies show that the media are eerily silent on the issues adversely affected by corporate behavior. Critics respond to these charges with (old) polls showing that most journalists are personally liberal, but these polls are outdated. New polls show the majority of journalists are centrists. And of those who are not centrists, there are more conservatives than liberals on economic issues.
So, I basically agree with your view that we are divided in the media by a false liberal vs. conservative dichotomy. For example, family members might find they are split along the lines of liberal and conservative, and many individuals change from liberal to conservative within their lifetime. People often have liberal ideas when they are young and their ideas often become conservative with age. So we should be able to relate to both sides of the equasion. But the false dichotomy distracts us from a much more serious split with real consequences. That is the split between rich and poor.
Here is how wealth is divided in America today:
Top 10% own 70.9% of all US assets (top 1% owns half of that)
And the bottom 40% of population owns a measly 0.2% of all wealth!
19.1% is shared by the 50% in between.
So when we argue liberal vs. conservative. We’re often arguing over nuanced and philosophical disputes sometimes barely relevant to our pocketbooks (the Terri Schaivo case for example), but in the mean time BOTH the Obama and the Bush administration pour billions and trillions of our dollars into the military industrial complex and bank bailouts.
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Actually, my government book in college said the same thing. Americans don’t realize they have an intrinsically liberal society, and that Conservative and Liberal in the US means Right and Left of classical liberalism, not right and left of the whole spectrum.
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Your title is an effective ‘hook’ and also deceptive. None of the content explained the falseness of the dichotomy. The terms themselves have become practically useless in that the level of ambiguity is high enough to require the terms to be explicitly defined with every use. Additionally, the widespread pejorative use of ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ reflects the excessive emotion we attach to the terms. Use of these blanket terms is great for ad hominem or propaganda but not so great for civil discourse that adheres to reason.
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