Liberals and Conservatives

We hear terms such as Liberal and Conservative all the time. In fact, I use them all the time myself, but how often do we think about what those words actually mean? Well, I've been giving that some thought and so I'll go ahead and share it here today.

Liberalism, basically, is ideological system of thought. What it says is that in a perfect world things would be thus and such, and so we have to make things be that way. A lot of the things that Liberals push for sound really good when you hear about them, in fact, a lot of them are very laudable goals, that's not where the problem comes in. Where we run into problems with liberalism is that there is absolutely no room left for Liberal programs not working, and in fact many of them can never work in the real world. But that doesn't stop the liberal. You see, when liberals do get programs pushed through, and they have disastrous results, which they nearly always do, the answer, given by the liberal, is never to rethink the program, and figure out if it was really a good idea to begin with, the answer given by the liberal is always that the program wasn't big enough and didn't get enough support, so we have to grow government and expand the program, and this will solve the problems that the program caused in the first place.

As to growing government, this is important to the liberal because they do understand that the public at large will not fall in line with the liberal agenda, because it always ends up costing them, both in monetary terms and in terms of personal liberties. So, in order to get these programs in place, they must be imposed by a large and powerful government, which is able to force it's will on everyone, and they can make it appear that the programs are working regardless of the truth.

Conservatism on the other hand, that is true conservatism, is a system for dealing with reality. Conservatives are interested in doing what works, and what is right. Real conservatives generally don't want to implement any government programs, or, at least very few, because history has taught us the truth of the words of Thomas Paine, "That government is best which governs least." That's not to say that Government has no role, in fact it has a very important role, but but it still needs to be kept small and in check, otherwise it takes away liberties, and controls aspects of our everyday lives that it has no business getting involved with.

The biggest problem with Conservatism is that there are too many false conservatives. That's not a problem with liberals, oh sure, some people are more liberal than others, or committed to the ideology of liberalism to greater or lesser degrees, but they don't really have to worry about fakes they way Conservatives do. There are many who claim conservatism, while at the same time, commit themselves to some sort of ideology, and refuse to admit mistakes just as bad as committed leftists, and these certainly don't help the cause of true conservatism at all.

Two of the biggest examples of fake conservatives at the moment are George W. Bush and John McCain... but that's a discussion for a different day.