Why am I Conservative?

Discussion in 'Political Discussions' started by Phdtobe, Feb 14, 2019.

Loading...
  1. Phdtobe

    Phdtobe Well-Known Member

  2. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    I have conservative views on abortion, but not for the same reasons as most conservatives. I'm not a very religious person, and religion seems to be driving most of social conservatism. I just haven't heard a good argument for why it's morally okay to kill unborn children if the mother's health isn't at risk. I believe there are better ways to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and some of those ways can also prevent the spread of STDs and HIV.

    I'm not a fiscal conservative, but I understand why they take the positions they take. They believe in every man for himself and that people should pull themselves up by the bootstraps. They say that they believe in private charities over government welfare programs, but conservatives mostly donate to churches. Most of that money that goes to churches doesn't help anyone. It pays for the church leader's salary and the operation of the church. After that, not a lot of churches have enough money left over to help many people. At the wealthy churches with large congregations, a lot of that money goes to buy luxury items for the church leader i.e. private jets. I will give credit to Catholic churches, though. If you can ignore all the child molestation, they are reliable places to go to for help.
     
    Phdtobe likes this.
  3. Ted Heiks

    Ted Heiks Moderator and Distinguished Senior Member

    It has been said that anyone under 30 who is not a liberal has no heart and anyone over 30 who is not a conservative has no brain.
     
    Phdtobe likes this.
  4. Filmmaker2Be

    Filmmaker2Be Active Member

    I don't know what I am. I'm against abortion unless the life of the mother is in danger or prenatal tests show catastrophic birth defects in utero. I am a religious person and that does affect the way I view many things. I'm also a disciplined person and have a deep disdain for people who use abortion as a form of birth control because of their lack of self control. That's a pet peeve and has nothing to do with my religious beliefs. I also don't need religion to tell me how horrific late term abortions and partial birth abortions are. For me, those are right up there with child sacrifice to Molech. In a word, Satanic. There is literally going to be hell to pay for this.

    All that said, I am not of the mindset that the abortion issue is singularly more important than anything and everything else. I happen to believe that more than one thing can be of utmost importance at the same time. This country is so morally wicked and debased that we have many social problems just as important as abortion that need to be brought to the fore and dealt with. I have my own theory about why Conservatives are so obsessed with abortion and immigration.

    Where I stand where the fiscal issue is concerned is in the middle. I don't believe in giving away everything to everybody indiscriminately. However, at the same time, I believe that the "every man for himself" ethos of the Conservatives is cruel and is not of Yahweh. It vexes my soul how people who claim to believe in and love Yahshua can demand that the poor literally manifest miracles for themselves, when they didn't have to do the same thing. How dare they. Somebody helped them get started, and other people helped them keep going. And, they couldn't be successful in their businesses without their customers or clients; so whether they want to believe it or not, their success is owed to people other than themselves. Nobody "makes it" by themselves, with no help from anyone else, so they need to quit lying. But, they won't. They're literally arrogant enough to think that they're the exception to every rule. Man's rules maybe, but not Elohim's. They're going to rue the day.

    For the record, I hate politics. Both political parties are equally corrupt and equally defiled by racism and white supremacy - they're just corrupted and defiled in different ways. I don't trust any politicians, and before you ask yes, that includes (or included) Barack Obama. Politicians don't do what we want them to do, they do what they want to do thinking they know better than us what we want or need. They are masters of deception and only look out for themselves and their cronies. The only difference between our two major political parties is that sometimes Democrats will throw the less fortunate a bone. But, while they're giving something with one hand, they're taking something more important away with the other hand. Our voting system is messed up and our country being a democracy is a lie. I'm done with American politics and politicians. I quit. I almost didn't vote in the last presidential election (and I didn't vote for Hillary; she is an evil, wicked woman who belongs in prison) and I'm not voting in any future ones. Yahweh is faithful to those who keep his commandments. He is my Provider and I'll be fine no matter what happens in this country politically.
     
    Last edited: Feb 17, 2019
    Maniac Craniac and Phdtobe like this.
  5. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    We're a Republic. At most, we're at representative democracy. The laws that Democrats and Republicans have passed to make it almost impossible for independents and third party candidates to win should be unconstitutional.
     
    Filmmaker2Be and Phdtobe like this.
  6. ITJD

    ITJD Active Member

    The issue with the government we have at present in the United States is that we've essentially forgotten our roots.

    - Separation of Church and State needs to be strongly enforced at all levels of government.
    - Separation of Corporation and State should have been enforced from the beginning as a logical extension of the first point.
    - Politics is not a career, it's volunteer work.

    You can be moral without faith in a higher power. You can only govern fairly without outside interests. Only by being a volunteer with the ability to care for yourself can you be expected to care for others. Stride a middle ground that stands for nothing and you become nothing.

    Take away these principles and your government becomes unprincipled. It's really not that hard to understand.
     
  7. dlbb

    dlbb Active Member

    The problem with volunteers is sometimes you get ignorant hicks who try to turn their hatreds and bigotries into law to punish different categories of people, and if there is enough of them, it can be hard for them to be stopped. Of course, on the other hand, sometimes you get professional politicians that try to cater to them. So relying on volunteers can create new problems as well, as seen in some state legislatures where their pay is minimal to the extent that they are effectively volunteers.
     
  8. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Maybe they should, but ultimately the constitution is whatever five Supreme Court justices decide it is, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
     
    Maniac Craniac and Filmmaker2Be like this.
  9. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    I believe in term limits, but I don't like the part-time, low pay system that some governments have. The State of Texas has that system. The legislature only works every two years, and their pay is low. So, most of the people in state government are wealthy doctors, attorneys, and business people with flexible schedules. A regular person who needs to work five days per week and can't take off for three months every two years won't bother with running. It's also been found that, when judges aren't paid well, they're more susceptible to corruption.
     
  10. ITJD

    ITJD Active Member

    So what you're saying is "the problem with people, is that they're people".
     
  11. ITJD

    ITJD Active Member

    Everyone who isn't paid well is susceptible to corruption, and personally I'd rather have successful people making the decisions. Truth is they may still be susceptible to corruption at massive scale; but at least they won't be taking as many bribes from their basic constituents.

    Now granted, the definition of success has varied from generation to generation. In the early days of the republic you wouldn't have wanted the average person in the government. Education level and such was not suitable. These days many more people are able to contribute but all you need to see is the spectacle that certain folks are making of their positions to know that they're not the right choice either.
     
  12. dlbb

    dlbb Active Member

    Those are your words.
    Some element of quality control can go a long ways.
     
  13. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    Instead, they take bribes from wealthy organizations that don't have the people's interests in mind.

    I see no reason why a middle class person shouldn't be in politics. As we've seen, people who are born rich are often disconnected from the realities of their constituents. Besides, a lot of our politicians with Ivy League degrees wouldn't be millionaires without the business connections they've made while in office.
     
    Filmmaker2Be and Phdtobe like this.
  14. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    I think the biggest flaw in fiscal conservatism is the idea that because the government can be unwieldy, slow and inefficient, the private sector is better able to respond to people's needs. What we have seen however is that when taxes are lowered on the rich, corporations, etc. they simply keep the money and do little or nothing to help people in need. Jobs are moved overseas without a care for the impact on US workers. Wages are not increased, not even enough to match inflation rates. Money is spent on things like emission standards, pollution restrictions, only when forced by law. The "trickle down theory" or whatever it's currently called, does not work because of the basic greed of the people at the top.
     
    Maniac Craniac likes this.
  15. Ted Heiks

    Ted Heiks Moderator and Distinguished Senior Member

    A republic and a representative democracy are the same thing.
     
    ITJD and SteveFoerster like this.
  16. ITJD

    ITJD Active Member

    There is no reason why "a middle class person" shouldn't be in politics if politics is an accepted career path in society.
    The problems arise from "specific middle class people" and the fact that elected positions should not be a career path.

    Go back to what the founders intended and you'll end up with something that either isn't sustainable now (change it) or is better for the country than what we may have now.

    TBH - My real issue is corporations. If you go back to the initial case law that created our corporate system you'll see exactly how corrupt that approach was and why it's a problem that should have been snuffed out then.

    Be well
    ITJD
     
  17. ITJD

    ITJD Active Member

    I was abstracting to make a point.

    The issue with quality control is that it's a slippery slope. You could argue that the path to racism is quality control and it goes too far.
     
  18. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    I guess that I'm something of a conservative. Certainly not a conservative in the old establishment Republican, Weekly Standard mold. But a conservative of some sort, perhaps what the media attacks as "Far Right". More of a Populist, Trumpian sort of conservatism, more of an adherent of what I think of as the Alternative Right ('Alt.Right').

    The basic foundational principle is what I take to be the founding principle of the United States, that sovereignty resides in the People, not in a monarch (old Britain), parliament (new Britain), an aristocracy (whether hereditary, celebrities, the rich, journalists or a self-styled 'intelligentsia' -- our new America), or a faceless government administrative bureaucracy (the deep state -- new America as well).

    That implies a belief in Liberty and Democracy. Within limits consistent with public safety and order, people need to be able to steer the course of their own personal lives and to believe and speak as they please. Not only that, they need to be able to decide what the broad course of the nation should be.

    I most emphatically don't believe that America's most pressing problem is lowering taxes on the rich. (The establishment conservative agenda.) Within reason, I don't oppose taxing the rich even more. (So I'm more in tune with the Democrats on that.) I live in Silicon Valley and I see the growing income disparities every day, the destruction of the Middle Class that was once the strong backbone of this country, the source of its stability, the reason why we were never really torn apart by the class-struggles that were so apparent in Europe.

    I'm a huge supporter of the market system. It's economic democracy in action, with each dollar we spend a vote on the allocation of resources.

    We all have unmet desires that we can't meet by ourselves. We need the assistance of others. But why should a stranger assist me when that stranger has unmet desires of his/her own? Because I make it worth their while by paying them money. And where do I get my money? By being of use to others. Far from being the root of all evil, money is the social glue that holds large societies of strangers together, after they have outgrown the reach of family, tribe and clan loyalties. The invention of money is what allowed the first Sumerian cities to form and civilization itself to evolve.

    But having praised the market system, I don't follow the libertarians in advocating total laissez-faire. The economy isn't always a self-regulating system guided towards the best ends by benevolent invisible hands. I think that there's a place for regulating those whose pursuit of their own desires has too much negative impact on everyone else.

    And perhaps most importantly to my politics, I'm a Nationalist, even what the media derisively calls a "Nativist". The future direction of each particular nation should be decided by the people of that particular nation. (Not by self-appointed elites who believe that they are somehow superior to the 'common herd'.) I most emphatically don't believe that all people are the same, that they are all interchangeable and can be moved around the world like game-pieces to suit the desires of multi-national business.

    I'm inclined to believe what academics preach every day about how social mores and ethical beliefs really are "socially constructed". How we treat women, homosexuals, the rights of the individual, religious liberty, and all the rest of it aren't just self-evident and God-given. They are ideas and beliefs that evolved out of a particular social context in Europe primarily, and more recently here in America too. They aren't the only visions of society out there. There's Islam obviously, there's the Chinese Marxist-Confucian synthesis, and many others.

    Social, cultural and moral views, being socially constructed, exist in societies. Societies aren't all the same and beliefs and values aren't all the same. Celebrating "open borders" and mass-migrations that promise to swamp the Western tradition or at the very least to mix everyone up in a homogenized mass of individual social atoms is a recipe for the destruction of society. (The European-Union vision, seemingly.)

    And if culture and ethics are socially-constructed, it's a recipe for nihilism as well.

    So I'm inclined to agree with the Democrats on the value of "diversity", but differ from them in perceiving it more as cultural diversity, not always individual diversity and not always in terms of race and gender. (Except when it's Muslims.) Individual social atoms don't have cultures. Social groups do. So I value the continued existence and diversity of social groups. Which in turn implies that I value the existence of nations and national groups that share important and definitive traits in common with one another.

    That in turn suggests an opposition to the stereo-typical "neoconservative" vision of America as the world's moral enforcer, intervening in other countries' affairs in order to make those countries "good" (by our lights). Other societies have a right to be different, even if we don't happen to like it.

    But having said that, we must be prepared to defend ourselves. If other societies threaten us, we have a responsibility to defend our own interests. Our own survival.

    I don't oppose immigration. I live in one of the most culturally diverse regions of the entire planet and meet people from other countries every day. Great people, most of them.

    But it's vital that immigrants arrive legally. If immigration law becomes simply optional, something that can be violated by anyone who wants to, then why shouldn't environmental laws, labor laws, tax laws, business laws, criminal laws and civil-rights laws be treated exactly the same way? As merely optional? Is any attempt to enforce any law a violation of people's 'civil rights'?

    And I'm a huge believer in the proverbial "melting pot". If people want to move to a different society, they have to be willing to assimilate, to fit in. They can't just form little foreign colonies in another country's midst. That in turn implies that countries have both the right and the responsibility to control the rate of immigration so that it doesn't exceed the rate at which assimilation can occur.

    Finally, I think that contemporary society is far too moralized. It's a weird kind of neo-puritanism, where every political issue turns into finger-wagging and moral condemnation: Bad! Bad! Bad! Evil! Evil! Evil! And as much as the "Religious Right" has that stereotype, I think that it's the left that's the biggest offender in that regard, in today's 'brave new world'.
     
    Phdtobe likes this.
  19. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    They are used interchangeably similar to how criminal justice and criminology are used interchangeably, but they aren't exactly the same.

    The word "democracy" assumes that the majority rules, but we have minority protection in the U.S. Plus, our electoral college gives disproportionate representation to the minority.

    There are republics in which the representatives aren't truly elected democratically. One example would be an oligarchic republic in which a small group of elites are the only ones able to get in a position to "represent" the people.
     
    Phdtobe likes this.
  20. Phdtobe

    Phdtobe Well-Known Member

    Deep thoughts as always! I would not classify your writing as far-right but reasoned pragmaticism.
     

Share This Page