Liberal vs. Conservative, Again
The following I wrote in the first instance as a comment at SWAnderson's blog, in response to a comment by RightSaidFred that "You two [i.e., me and SW] seem to carry an unshakable faith that the human condition can be perfected by government action."
Since it came out rather longer than the pithy epigram I had hoped for, I'll include it here to pad out the blog.
Living as a social animal, humans can interact with their society in one of three ways:
- By ignoring it;
- By banding people together in order to exploit them; or
- By banding people together to improve their collective lot.
The first are sociopaths and often come to bad ends. The second lot become Republicans and sooner or later come to bad ends. The third lot are Liberals; sometimes things get better for them all, but usually no one reaches quite the excesses that the second kind can obtain temporarily.
Necessarily, the Liberals actually believe that our lives can be improved and that it's honorable to improve the lives of others' as we improve our own. The cynicism of Republicans, who see people as mere rungs on their climb up the ladder of power and personal wealth, do not believe they have any place in improving anyone else's lot because they believe it is at the cost of their own power and wealth.
Liberals believe that government can do good, because they see government as the best management option for getting groups together to accomplish what they cannot accomplish on their own. Republicans, not surprisingly, detest government because it stands in their way of their glorious rise to power and wealth if they do so. Readily created abundance versus a pie with limited slices.
In order to suppress government success, Republicans slander it whenever possible by labeling it according to Reagan's odd fantasy of claiming Liberals think government is the agent to solving all problems that people perceive. Liberals know quite well that government is not the solution to all problems, just that it can assist at times in solving some problems, particularly those that are larger than any individual's capabilities to solve alone.
Thus it comes about that Liberals try to make government work efficiently and accountably, while Republicans try their best to discredit and dismantle government whenever possible; during the Bush II years they have found that corruption, mendacity, and incompetence are remarkably successful in scuttling the smooth and useful operating of government, at least in the short term. It is now our place to discover just how successful they have been at government destruction. (Of course, this is why Republicans seem so bad at government administration: they simply don't believe in it as a thing worth doing, let along worth doing well.)
It seems unlikely, however, that Republicans have successfully destroyed our government in total, mostly because most people understand that government can help to solve some problems that would otherwise be intractable.
[originally: comment to "Impeachment might be deserved, but that’s not enough", Oh!pinion, 12 April 2007.]
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on Thursday, 12 April 2007 at 21.50
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And an exceptionally good comment it was!