Trying to Understand

As a conservative in both personal and political philosophy, I have always sought to understand the liberal mind.  Whenever there's an issue that pits the conservative point of view against the liberal point of view, I admit that I struggle to understand how anybody could take the left side of the argument.

Since I finally signed up on facebook this year, I've started to notice trends in the postings of liberal facebook "friends".  Their posts are remarkably different from those of my conservative or undertermined "friends".

Scrolling through facebook, I've noticed the liberal postings stick out like a sore thumb.  They're not overtly political, at least most of the time.  But they do reflect a completely different worldview, at least from mine.  They're terribly trite and naive.  Cute animal pictures and YouTube videos.  Posters with trite messages about loving everyone and getting along and dedicating ourselves to saving the planet.

It may not be the same as if I could do an in-depth study, but it does sort of lead me to a few generalized conclusions.

The average liberal is an idealistic thinker, who believes everyone should just try to understand each other and respect our differences.

The ordinary liberal is either an atheist or is not associated with a Christian tradition.  They seem to fall somewhere between suspicious and hostile in their attitudes toward Christianity and Christians, which for me calls into question whether they might be a little hypocritical in their formost stated philosophy.  Perhaps we can amend that idea that we should respect each other's differences to add the exception when those differences involve Christians.

The liberal holds firmly onto a belief that everyone has a "right" to quality healthcare.  They don't mind at all if that means that everyone else has to pay double for theirs.  I suspect if a liberal's health insurance bill doubles in January, they'll blame it on everything else (mainly the greedy insurance companies) before even considering the true cause.

I'm also noticing that the average liberal gets riled if the subject is raised about the waste and fraud epidemic in federal assistance programs, especially Food Stamps and Disability.  In their minds, it might be unfortunate that people might be fraudulently accessing those benefits, but it can never reach a level to justify reform.  They get highly fearful that any reform by the evil Republicans would result in the truly needy losing their benefits, therefore no changes to the programs are ever justified.

It seems that a great analogy is to a family budget.  Let's say the husband works hard to create and maintain a family budget, but his wife can't help herself and busts the budget with her overspending month after month. (Don't call me sexist, please - consider the roles reversed between husband and wife if you prefer)

So the couple has a conversation after a particulary egregious month of overspending.

"You overspent the budget by $1,000 this month", says the husband.  "We can't go on this way, because all it does is rack up debt and make it harder for us to provide the things our family needs!"

"I promise you, every penny was spent on things we needed", says the wife.

It fits perfectly with how Democrat governance differs from Conservative governance.  Notice that I used the word "Conservative" rather than "Republican", because we've learned that the two are not the same.  Most conservatives are republicans, but most republicans are not conservative.

At least Democrats have no such divisions.  In the Democratic Party, anyone who opposes Obamacare, tax and minimum wage increases, Gay Marriage, Abortion, and out-of-control deficit spending is not welcome.