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Segami

(14,923 posts)
Thu Nov 29, 2012, 11:31 AM Nov 2012

Why Conservatives Are WRONG When They Say Liberalism Will Fail





Liberalism saved Western civilization from the tyranny of the church. Liberalism freed us from superstition and its sequelae, like burning people who said “no” to the dominant power; and it gave us freedom and democracy and science, leading to a world where people were free to make their own decisions and to pursue individual happiness rather than a path bound on all sides by damnation, dictated for them by religious authorities.



Conservatives have never quite gotten over this rejection of the past and with it, of their ultimate, capital-T Truth. We have seen them convince themselves in recent years of liberalism’s essential illigitimacy as a political ideology, leaving liberalism’s success, let alone its continued existence, to confound them. Earlier this month, William Bennett admitted conservatives have lost the culture war, but he managed to do so without really acknowledging the reasons conservatives lost, or even accepting for conservatives any responsibility for their own defeat.




At the time, Bennett whined (there is no other word for it) that,


To women they said: Republicans are waging a “war on women,” trying to outlaw abortion and contraception and would take them back to their rights in the 1950s. To minorities they said: Republicans are anti-government services, cold-blooded individualists, and cannot represent minority communities. To middle and low income Americans they said: Republicans are the party of the rich, who will slash taxes for only the richest Americans and cut social safety nets for the poor.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/14/opinion/bennett-gop-election/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7




What Bennett catastrophically failed to see is that the Republicans were guilty of all these things. What he was essentially complaining about was that the Democrats told the truth about what the Republicans were planning. Now he has convinced himself that liberalism will ultimately fail, and he explains his thinking in an opinion piece on CNN. To make his argument, he pulls out some old Republican fantasies, showing at the outset that he is not prepared to have this conversation; that this will be another piece of conservative apologia rather than an honest political analysis based on the facts on the ground.



He says that diversity is bad – it is a long-term weakness, not a strength for the Democratic Party, despite liberalism’s short-term success in fashioning a union of disparate factions (gosh, it sounds a lot like liberalism’s success in fashioning a union out of thirteen disprate colonies too, doesn’t it?). Then out comes conservative economics 101, based not on evidence but wishful thinking:


Rather than waiting on free markets to correct themselves and start creating wealth again, liberalism’s cure is immediate, and so are the political payoffs. This explains partly why many voters feel liberals care about them more than conservatives.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/28/opinion/bennett-liberalism/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7







cont'

http://www.politicususa.com/conservatives-wrong-liberalism-fail.html
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