Thursday, September 25, 2008

Liberal=Communist=Anti-American

The American elections are around the corner and the conservatism vs. liberalism debate has come to the foreground again…Growing up I always thought being liberal was a good thing…All that changed when I moved the US a few years back…There I realized that a lot of people (conservatives) associate liberalism with communism and socialism…

One day I sat down to find out what the word liberal actually meant…What I found was this: it is associated with phrases like freedom of choice, tolerance, open minded and open to change…These phrases look pretty good to me so why do conservatives try to demonize liberals?

Conservatives believe in limited government, personal responsibility and merit, free markets, and traditional American values…Their policies are geared towards empowering individuals to solve their own as well economic problems…They believe that lower taxes and minimal government intervention in an unregulated market will make people work harder and achieve higher standards of living…

Liberals on the other hand believe that it is the responsibility of the government to provide equal opportunities, alleviate poverty and social ills, protect civil liberties and individual human rights…They believe that the discriminated and socio-economically weaker groups should be helped…

To me, being liberal means being open to change, having choices and equal opportunities …Americans should realize that without the extensive contributions of liberals, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Sarah Palin would not have been able to run for the highest offices in the country…If things were left entirely to the conservatives, women would still not have been able to vote let alone stand for election, segregation would still have been in existence and Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits would still have been a dream…

Some conservative ideas are illogical…They believe that they and only they know what traditional American family values are and that they are the only ones who uphold them…The majority of them are against abortion and say that since they are pro life and fetuses are living beings, they cannot be ‘murdered’…If this is so, why are they against providing pre-natal care to low-income mothers (the US has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world)? If human life is so important, why do they favour capital punishment? Does this mean that some lives are more important than others?

Conservatives believe in unregulated markets so that only the fittest survive…This means that companies will be able to use unethical business practices to push out competitors from the market place…The rich will get richer and the rest will suffer…

My understanding and interpretation of liberal and conservative ideologies may basic but from what I have read, I still can’t figure out why people who don’t agree with the conservative viewpoint are considered anti-American…