Thread: Liberalism vs Conservatives

Subject: Mankind and the development of Liberalism and Conservatives


Humans existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunter/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer & would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in winter. The 2 most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer.

These were the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into 2 distinct subgroups: Liberals and Conservatives. Once beer was discovered it required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early human ancestors were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That's how villages were formed.

Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to B-B-Q at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as "the Conservative movement." Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting learned to live off the conservatives by showing up for the nightly B-B-Q's and doing the sewing, fetching and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement. Some of these liberal men eventually evolved into women. The rest became known as 'girliemen.'

Some noteworthy liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, the invention of group therapy and group hugs and the concept of Democratic voting to decide how to divide the meat and beer that conservatives provided. Over the years conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most powerful land animal on earth, the elephant. Liberals are symbolized by the jackass.

Modern liberals like imported beer (with lime added), but most prefer white wine or imported bottled water. They eat raw fish but like their beef well done. Sushi, tofu, and French food are standard liberal fare. Another interesting revolutionary side note: most of their women have higher testosterone levels than their men. Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, dreamers in Hollywood and group therapists are liberals. Liberals invented the designated hitter rule because it wasn't "fair" to make the pitcher also bat.

Conservatives drink domestic beer. They eat red meat and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, firemen, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, Marines, athletes and generally anyone who works productively. Conservatives who own companies hire other conservatives who want to work for a living.

Liberals produce little or nothing. They like to "govern" the producers and decide what to do with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the liberals remained in Europe when conservatives were coming to America. They crept in after the Wild West was tame and created a business of trying to get MORE for nothing

Originally Posted by ForemanRules

Liberalism has spent the last twenty years under constant attack... which is puzzling, since it has been right in all its principles and has won all its battles.

Government regulation. People flirt with lunatic libertarianism... but the Fed, the FDIC, and the FDA are still in business. Laissez-faire capitalism is great for making a few people rich and the rest of the country miserable; if 1890s America is hazy in your mind, you can see the results today in Russia.
Liberal capitalism-- with government regulation of banks, financial markets, and product safety, and social nets and progressive taxation to prevent excessive concentration of wealth-- is simply the most successful economic system yet invented.

Conservatives feel most comfortable in an aristocracy. But aristocratic nations are poor nations. (The conservatives who realize this don't mind it, because they are or feel they should be part of the elite.)

A luminous exception: Henry Ford, who doubled the wages of his assembly-line workers-- earning the scorn of the 1920s business community. Ford, however, saw the potential of a huge class of consumers rich enough to buy automobiles. Liberal capitalism thrives because a huge middle class, as in the U.S., is a better market than a small wealthy elite, as in Brazil.


Middle-class welfare. Republicans have belatedly learned that people love their Social Security. Now instead of attacking this little sweetmeat of socialism, they argue with the Democrats over who holds it dearer to their hearts.

Civil rights. Almost everyone today accepts the ideal of a color-blind society-- even conservatives, who enjoy sporting a few blacks among their number. "Racist" is one of the few political terms that anyone on the political spectrum can use as an insult. But conservatives fought the civil rights movement every step of the way. They still hate affirmative action, but their very grounds for opposing it-- that it favors particular segments of society and that color should not be a factor-- is borrowed from '50s liberalism.

Feminism. Gender equality is not quite as accepted; but women are in the workforce to stay, and today's young women grow up expecting to be treated equally in school, at work, and increasingly in relationships; and the sight of women in positions of power and prestige is becoming unremarkable. Again, conservatives opposed everything from giving the vote to women to letting them into "male" jobs to giving them equal pay for equal work.

The environment. In order to discredit environmentalism, conservatives are now reduced to finding the dippiest activists they can dig up (PETA is a good source); they can no longer directly defend belching smokestacks, dead lakes, and toxic waste dumps. The need to protect the planet is one of those things that almost everyone agrees on.

Gay rights. Here no consensus has been reached, but it's another area where conservatives are simply wrong, and what was formerly considered troublingly radical-- acceptance of homosexuality-- now seems like mere human decency. You don't have to like gays and lesbians, but that's no reason to jail them, fire them, beat them up, or deny their civil rights. This battle is not yet won, but it's too late to put the toothpaste back in the tube. We're not going back to classifying homosexuality as a mental illness or a crime.
The left, as opposed to liberalism per se, has happily extended the civil rights model, and found oppressed groups in the elderly, in children, Native Americans, illegal aliens, the handicapped, consumers, bisexuals, the transgendered, sex workers, people with fragrance allergies, people without good looks, people with various diseases, nudists, fetishists, various ethnic groups, various non-Western nations, linguistic or religious minorities, believers in alternative medicine, pagans, atheists, pets, and farm animals. You could probably map out how far to the left someone is by finding out which of these groups they consider to be oppressed. I'd maintain that none of these are core parts of liberalism, however.