Are Conservatives Mean-Spirited?
You've Heard it Before...
"Conservatives only care about themselves, business, and money."
and if that's not bad enough...
Conservatives "don't believe in International Aid," or "whether kids have health benefits," and they "don't care about the poor."
I am troubled that the (slightly) more Conservative of of our country's two viable parties sees fit to pander to the middle in order to get candidates elected, rather than be unapologetically Conservative. No, that does not mean that I wish the party would force people to pray in school. If that's you're concept of Conservatism, then you have been led to believe that by a slanted and very shallow mainstream media.
What is Conservatism, then?: Conservatism means that we are "conservative" about how much government we want to have. Our Founders feared big government, and for good reason. But all governments (like all other institutions) inevitably tend to grow (it's called beauracratic inertia) if not led properly. With governments, this happens because people look more and more to it to solve all of their problems for them.
A conservative is bothered by that trend, and says so, and a Conservative politician enacts policies that SHRINK government. The reason that most people have been duped into thinking that conservatives are a bunch of fat cat "meanies" who want to pull the rug out from under the "little guy" is that the process of shrinking the government means reducing benefits to those who take advantage of the system. To people who don't understand that government can only "give" to someone if they first forcibly confiscate from someone else (via taxes), the reduction of Christmas presents seems "mean-spirited." Conservative are people who realize that true "mean-spiritedness" is found in a government that plunders the productive people so that they can use that tax money to buy votes from other folks to whom they have promised "stuff." In doing that, they tell us that there is a limit to how productive we will be allowed to become before they come after our families' money. Hardly compassionate...it keeps us down. America is supposed to be the land of capitalism / opportunity.
Winston Churchill said that: "The worst thing you can say about Capitalism is that it is the unequal sharing of the blessings; but the best thing you can say about socialism is that is the equal sharing of the misery."
Conservatives are far more liberal than a modern liberal will ever be...because they believe in getting the government out of your life so that you can be truly free - with the unlimited opportunity to prosper. I wish Senator McCain - or someone else - would get out there (like Reagan did) and articulate that. Because the republicans have shown themselves incompetent at defining Conservatism, the media have been able to define it for them....and they have gotten it exactly backwards. I think the main reason republicans don't try any harder to actually be conservatives is because all politicians get elected these days by promising to give voters "stuff" from the government. Thus, even the ones who do little more than wear the Conservative patch on their sleeve end up trying to play Santa Claus with our hard-won tax money, just as much as any Socialist-Democrat. McCain is no different, and that trend will eventually bankrupt our country the way it has all societies in history that degenerate from true freedom into democracy.
We only have three rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Everything else (like education, health care, food etc) are not entitlements but things we are supposed to work for, not plunder our neighbor to obtain.
This is one of my favorite quotes. It's from Alexander Tyler, who
was writing about the fall of the Athenian Republic. This quote is well over 100
years old and a succinct explanation of why our Founders feared democracy
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist
until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public
treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates
promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a
democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years.
These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to
spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty,
from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to
complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from
dependency back to bondage."