Small Poxes (Fred Reed)
A Penetrating Study Of Left And Right
I am trying to understand Liberals and Conservatives. It isn't easy. I think I've about got it, though.
Conservatives believe in the wisdom of common Americans to manage their affairs and make decisions for themselves. Exceptions to this are the half of the public who regularly vote Democratic. These common Americans are unfit to run their affairs and make decisions for themselves. It is because they been deluded by liberal propaganda.
Liberals also believe in the inherent wisdom of common Americans, especially those who don't have any. They think that the mother lode of wisdom lies on the low side of the bell curve. They discern qualities in the stupid, ignorant, and shiftless that engender a capacity to govern a country they can't spell. Coincidentally, these people vote Democratic.
Liberals do not believe in the wisdom of the half of the country who vote Republican, as these are all CEOs of major corporations. The Left knows that CEOs, unlike welfare recipients, are motivated by economic interest.
Conservatives believe that it is not the business of government to legislate morality, and thus want laws against abortion, pornography, sex education, and marijuana. Liberals don't want to legislate morality either. They want to eliminate it, along with learning, thought, civility, and other impediments to the undisturbed enjoyment of uniform mental darkness.
(A third point of view is held by Libertarians, but I'm not sure what it is. I have never been able to distinguish Libertarianism from a bull session in a sophomore dorm.)
The Right believes passionately in freedom, particularly economic freedom. The conservative therefore cherishes his right to strip-mine Appalachia. He does not, however, believe in your right to build a hog-rendering plant next to his house. That would violate zoning laws.
The Left believes in economic freedom too, specifically the unalienable right of the shiftless to be supported by someone else. Oddly, the someone else is usually a conservative businessman.
Now, confusion is essential to politics. Just as third-world countries regularly mistake incompetence for socialism, liberals mistake peasantry for equality. Thus they promote the decline of civilization with the enthusiasm of Crusaders sacking Jerusalem, making us into dim comfortable serfs ungrammatically grunting.
Conservatives also are subject to confusion. They regard unrestricted rapacity as a virile expression of freedom, like being in George Washington's army, and so favor reproductive incontinence, overbuilding, and the making of anything slow enough to be caught into dog food.
In short, Left and Right both strain to make the world unlivable, with liberals degrading the human world and conservatives, the natural. We can work together if only we try.
Economically, conservatives say that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Liberals say that if it ain't broke, tax it till it is. The economic philosophy of conservatives is to take what they can get. The liberal philosophy is also to take what conservatives can get, and use it to buy votes. This is a form of trickle-down. Consequently liberals are seen to be Reaganites. The study of politics is endlessly enlightening.
Race is a major divide between Left and Right. Conservatives don't give a wan emaciated damn about blacks, whom they regard in electoral terms as the equivalent of a golf handicap. This distinguishes them from liberals, who don't give a damn about blacks, but find it useful to pretend. Blacks don't give a damn about blacks either, or they would cause their children to do their homework. In this tripartite agreement we may have the seeds of national accord.
Racially, the underlying difference between Left and Right is that the liberal policy is active, the conservative passive. Conservatives are content to do nothing and let blacks rot. So, usually, are blacks. Liberals make sure that blacks rot by promoting bastardy as a birthright and illiteracy as a credential of cultural authenticity. Otherwise blacks might make money and vote Republican.
However, liberals and conservatives agree on one thing. When their first child reaches school age, they head for the white suburbs. The difference is that while conservatives admit to each other that they are avoiding black schools, liberals say that they seek the wide open spaces or want their little boy to be near the hockey rink.
The Right opposes abortion as being murder when someone else's sixteen-year-old is pregnant by a tattooed drifter with a guitar and a vanishing IQ. This is why Roe-vs.-Wade will never be repealed: Conservatives also have daughters. Conservatives do think that abortion should be legal in cases of rape and incest, making it acceptable to murder children whose fathers behaved badly.
While conservatives see abortion as murder, liberals see murder as convenience. If a woman changes her mind twelve seconds before giving birth to a perfectly healthy baby, liberals want a doctor to kill it for her. Presumably it takes a curious sort of doctor, but that is another matter.
Left and Right differ in social consciousness. Liberals oppose elitism, and send their children to Harvard to avoid it. Conservatives support elitism, and send their children to Harvard to practice it. By elitism, the liberal elite mean that everyone but themselves should live in a uniform state of social and moral degradation. The conservative means by elitism the view that the better is preferable to the worse. He dislikes degradation, in part because it invariably produces Democrats.
Liberals like government because it enables them to misbehave. Conservatives believe that the best government is the least government. The perfect government is therefore no government. Thus conservatives are seen to be anarchists, like Bakunin.
Conservatives oppose the intrusion of government into the private life, which explains why a Republican administration is rapidly turning the United States into a surveillance state. Yet the leftist American Civil Liberties Union opposes the creeping advance of the unblinking eye. This might seem puzzling. Actually we are witnessing the formation of a hybrid system: The wretched political aims of communist regimes pursued by efficient capitalist means. No communist state could make computers good enough for the new watched hive. (I think of this convergence as Bimeddlism.)
Left and Right work together more often than you might think. Hollywood, the home of freewheeling unprincipled capitalism, is also the wellhead of the socially destructive social agendas of the left. The movie industry grows rich by promoting promiscuity, violence, and the use of drugs. Then its denizens appear on television to denounce the chaos they have engendered, blaming it on capitalism and conservatives.
OK. I've understood all the politics I can handle today. I need a drink, or maybe anesthesia. I know a bartender who has knockout drops.
http://www.fredoneverything.net/LeftRightLeft.shtml
