About Politics

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We have two major political parties – the Democratic Party and the Republican Party and their mission is to get their candidates elected. In doing this they select principles, information and misinformation to maximize their chance for victory. Once elected, governing is a different matter, and the opposing sides are Liberals (also called Progressives) versus Conservatives. The progressive movement began in the late 1800s, and its founding is attributed to three presidents of that era – two Republican and one Democrat. Today, Democrat officials tend to be liberal and Republican officials tend to be conservative, but there are exceptions. Here is a concise insight into the principles involved:

“Liberals believe in government action to achieve equal opportunity and equality for all. It is the duty of the government to alleviate social ills and to protect civil liberties and individual and human rights. Believe the role of the government should be to guarantee that no one is in need. Liberal policies generally emphasize the need for the government to solve problems.
“Conservatives believe in personal responsibility, limited government, free markets, individual liberty, traditional American values and a strong national defense. Believe the role of government should be to provide people the freedom necessary to pursue their own goals. Conservative policies generally emphasize empowerment of the individual to solve problems.”

For a good, concise understanding of liberal and conservative positions on today’s issues. Read more…

Conservatism Versus Liberalism: Does Philosophy Really Matter?

“The foundational belief system you hold determines your views on specific issues. You then have strong opinions you feel are right. If you look at the core beliefs of Conservatism and Liberalism, you can understand and explain the different stands taken on specific issues and the vision each has for our country. These beliefs are opposites in every area and diametrically opposed.” For a good, concise understanding: Read more…

Kevin Williamson has a very insightful article in National Review, in which he points out that cities “are the places in which the progressive vision of government has reached its fullest expressions. They are the hopeless reality that results from wishful thinking.” He begins with the “headline-city-of-the-month”, Ferguson, Missouri:

“Ferguson was hardly a happy suburban garden spot until the shooting of Michael Brown. Ferguson is about two-thirds black, and 28 percent of those black residents live below the poverty line. The median income is well below the Missouri average, and Missouri is hardly the nation’s runaway leader in economic matters. More than 60 percent of the births in the city of St. Louis (and about 40 percent in St. Louis County) are out of wedlock.
“My reporting over the past few years has taken me to Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, St. Louis and the nearby community of East St. Louis, Ill., Philadelphia, Detroit, Stockton, San Francisco, and a great many other cities, and the Reverend Jackson is undoubtedly correct in identifying “a national crisis of urban abandonment and repression.” He neglects to point out that he is an important enabler of it…
“For years, our major cities were undermined by a confluence of four unhappy factors: 1. higher taxes; 2. defective schools; 3. crime; 4. declining economic opportunity…
“Progressives spent a generation imposing taxes and other expenses on urban populations as though the taxpaying middle class would not relocate. They protected the defective cartel system of public education, and the union money and votes associated with it, as though middle-class parents would not move to places that had better schools. They imposed burdens on businesses, in exchange for more union money and votes, as though businesses would not shift production elsewhere. They imposed policies that disincentivized stable family arrangements as though doing so would have no social cost.
“And they did so while adhering to a political philosophy that holds that the state, not the family or the market, is the central actor in our lives, that the interests of private parties — be they taxpayers or businesses — can and indeed must be subordinated to the state’s interests, as though individuals and families were nothing more than gears in the great machine of politics…
“The more progressive the city, the worse a place it is to be poor and/or black. The most pronounced economic inequality in the United States is not in some Republican redoubt in Texas but in San Francisco, an extraordinarily expensive city in which half of all black households make do with less than $25,000 a year. Blacks in San Francisco are arrested on drug felonies at ten times their share of the general population. At 6 percent of the population, they represent 40 percent of those arrested for homicides. Whether you believe that that is the result of a racially biased criminal-justice system or the result of higher crime incidence related to socioeconomic conditions within black communities (or some combination of those factors) what is undeniable is that results for black Americans are far worse in our most progressive, Democrat-dominated cities than they are elsewhere. The progressives have had the run of things for a generation in these cities, and the results are precisely what you see…”

Read the entire article.

You can check on the voting record for your Sen. or Congressman at Heritage Action For America.


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