[quote]forensic91 wrote:
Now I don’t wanna turn this into a heated political debate.
At school I have a politics class and I seem to be the only one who seems to be more to the right. If I say anything that is right winged everyone else in the class seems to think i’m “mean and heartless” and don’t “care about the poor.” which is simply not true. The teacher tries to remain neutral but it is obvious he is more left wing. It seems like everyone in my entourage is left wing and it seems like any slight right wing ideology is “uncaring” and frowned upon. [/quote]
WTF. Srsly W-T-F.
A liberal is someone who believes in limited, representational government and equality of all before the law. The American Revolution, people, was a liberal one. The US “conservatives” would be considered liberals everywhere else on Earth. We don’t have actual conservatives (don’t believe me? How many monarchists do you know?) The failure of the Republican Party is precisely the failure to explain this. Since the majority of Americans are some form of liberal, effectively the Republicans have ended the debate before it even starts.
The problem as I see it is partly sheer ignorance of the public. Most of what counts as “liberal” these days is recycled Euro-socialism from the 1970’s, confounded with a very consumer approach to thinking that paying taxes is like forking over money to a company for goods.
Want fun with your left leaning friends? Give them a dose of history. Of the 170 million people killed by their own governments in the last century, about 95% have been done in by Socialists/Communists who were pursuing various Leftist social agendas. Pol Pot, the Kims, Stalin, Mao and the Cultural Revolution are the institutional aftermath of these systems. They were not aberrations. That it is conventional wisdom Communism or some such is “better” than the US is just because it is entrenched in the universities (yes, I work at one on faculty) and in the parallel universe of academia it is endlessly recycled. Those countries that tried these have roundly denounced them as being inhuman.
Oh and the most heavily persecuted religion in the last century? Christianity (I’m an atheist, but an honest one). It is estimated that 45 million Christians (such as 2/3 of the Polish clergy in one horrific pogrom right after WW II) died at the hands of various Communist and Socialist states. When someone in your classes takes Christians to task for something, they have every much the same obligation to explain why they aren’t going to dabble in mass murder every bit as much as a neo Nazi talking to some Jews would. If your classmates sort of look at you funny when you bring it up, you might point out to them that anyone in Eastern Europe would put them in precisely the same league as a Holocaust denier for shrugging this off.
Have them read von Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” as a start. He was there. He knew.
And as always, I might just be full of shit…
– jj