I have the rumblings of a question with no positive answers. Based upon the desires, actions, and attitudes of the Liberal Left, I have a question that is deeper than first glance: why do they champion the policies they do? Let’s dig.
Not too long ago, Conservatives and Liberals had common end goals: prosperity and success for as many people as possible, with as little detrimental impact on the environment as possible. They differed greatly on how to accomplish those goals, but I thought their adversarial nature was limited to method, not to outcome. Now, I question that entire premise.
In prior decades, Liberals had a common focal point: anyone they saw as disadvantaged or disenfranchised by the System. Minorities of any type, poor folks, common laborers, outcasts and exclusions of traditional society, were all the supposed bedrock of their constituency. The Little People, who needed the Liberals to speak for them against their abusers and ignorers: Big Business, land owners, the ‘bosses’ of society, that purposely kept the Little People in their subservient place. The Man kept them Down. The purpose of government, for Liberals, was to equalize that dynamic: use common tax dollars (redistribution) to raise the underprivileged to the level of the privileged.
Liberal’s adversary, Conservatives, saw things differently. Conservatives thought that each person should live their lives according to their particular traits: education, work ethic, planning, investing (both personal and economical). That their individual goals were just that—individual. You do whatever is in your best interest to achieve whatever station in life you feel aligns with your own capabilities. Successful people became so not by stomping on those under them, but by creating goods and services that the buying public wants or needs, at a price they are willing to pay. This approach led to enormous job creation, giving those earners the ability to meet their priorities. With little or no obstacles to company creation, all types of minorities have the ability to prosper like anyone else. To the Conservatives, the purpose of government was to referee commerce, to make sure rulebreakers were punished, as well as provide services that no individual or business could provide themselves (roads, schools, military, court systems, etc.).
These two methods are quite at odds with each other: if successful people are NOT the bad guys, Liberals have no basis for existence; if the Big Guys can selfishly keep all of the power for themselves, the Conservatives approach simply does not work. My take: prior to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, Liberals were mostly correct. Conservative methods were always correct, but to the exclusion of many people. For example, someone from a terrible school district simply did not have the tools to compete with those from a great system, and so on.
But I think a large part of the above discussion was window dressing. I now think, based upon current events, that Liberals really didn’t give a damn about any disadvantaged groups at all. They just saw those groups as voting blocs, as a method to obtain and keep power. Note the decades-long results of Liberals: not a single improvement for those that they ‘represented’, even when Liberals have controlled the House of Representatives for nearly all of the last 100 years, along with Senate control many of those years, and several Presidents. Those that were poor in 1965…most are still poor. And if a voting bloc starts trending more Conservative, Liberals drop them like a proverbial hot potato! Are they still not disadvantaged, or has their usefulness just ended? And now there are as many super-wealthy Liberals, so the Big guy vs Little guy dynamic isn’t relevant at all–if it ever was.
I look at the 47 Executive Orders signed by President Joe Biden since January 20, 2021, and I can not see an upside for normal Americans in any of them. I can see their potential positive impact on Democrats, as the unrestrained immigration policies may import an entirely new voting bloc. This is especially true when counting illegals the same as citizens in the 2020 National Census, retaining Representatives and Electoral College delegates in California, even as their citizen population decreases. Many of the other EOs simply defy explanation, unless the goal is to bring the US down to the level of second- or third-tier nations. If Liberals feel they are ‘citizens of the world,’ rather than US citizens, that makes some sense. But weakening the US shouldn’t be a goal of government figures elected to improve and represent the US. Put the closure of the Keystone XL Pipeline into this category. It literally increases the price of petroleum products, with no possible upside, as that crude will get to refineries in TX and LA, but by riskier and less environmentally safe methods. Raising energy prices hurts ALL Americans, maybe the lower economic brackets more than the well-off, as gas and food prices are bigger percentages of their incomes.
It is as if Biden’s administration wants to erase the successes of the prior administration, even if it damages Americans as a whole. If the ‘why’ is to consolidate and retain power for as long as possible, I fail to see how harming citizen’s lives achieves that goal. And if harming citizen’s lives is just unimportant collateral damage to achieving power, it is a solid reason to never allow them governing power ever again.
