A Drag, on Life, the Universe, and Everything 2
Rick Perlstein explains why he is proudly a “liberal” (emphasis added):
Each and every time, the people at the forefront of advancing those reforms—often putting their lives on the line—called themselves liberals.
Each and every time, people who called themselves conservatives announced that those reforms would unravel civilization.
Then—each and every time—once the reform was achieved and taken for granted, and civilization didn’t collapse, conservatives claimed to have always been for it, even holding themselves up as the best people to preserve it.
Read the rest.
It’s all the explanation you need for why, as Stephen Colbert says, “the facts lean left.”
And the explanation for why “conservatism” is continually fighting a rearguard action to take things–retirement, pensions, safety, health care, security, rights and freedoms–away.
Via Will Bunch.
January 12, 2013 at 5:47 pm
Interesting because he brought in Walmart. In “The Predator State,” Jamie Galbreath devotes a chapter to explaining what conservatives really mean when they jabber about “freedom.” They mean “freedom to shop,” and nothing else. “Freedom to shop” for guns, freedom to get whatever you want from stores if you have the dough. No other freedom, like freedom from health worries, freedom from rapacity in the US system, etc… It’s why they don’t get along with science. Science works on the freedom of ideas and that requires adherence to standards, supposedly, aren’t to be breached (buying scientific research is another matter). So conservatives can’t deal with science and scientists because the work can’t be beaten down by opinions, and results often collide with freedom to shop, as in freedom to buy whatever weapons, freedom for only the wealthy to have health services, freedom to mine and burn as much fossil fuel as needed…
January 12, 2013 at 11:16 pm
When I worked in the security industry, I knew persons who worked for Walmart suppliers. Walmart is not nice people.