Hi, all.
As should be news to no one, polarization and animosity between conservatives and liberals is at one of its all-time highs in America right now. There’s even talk of a second civil war looming. Obviously, there are strong passions and convictions on both sides, and people on both sides have claimed that the other is a grave threat to the integrity of the nation itself. I’m familiar with the views and concerns of my own side: we view Donald Trump’s (and his allies’ and supporters’) statements and actions as being an attack on the democratic process that defines our nation, and are worried that the strategies and tactics he and they are employing will make future elections farcical, paving the way for an authoritarian state (a dictatorship). I am less familiar with why conservatives feel Democrats and liberals are a threat to the nation and its integrity in similar fashion. My best guess is that conservatives buy Trump’s assertions that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, and thus might have similar fears as liberals do, but I also get the sense conservatives have deeper, older concerns than this, and that Trump was/is viewed as a solution to them.
Can you please try to articulate here what those fears are? And, to any liberals reading this, please refrain from answering in conservatives’ stead. I’m interested in their opinions, not your opinions of their opinions.
I was a lifelong conservative until I developed a chronic illness and realized that conservatives have nothing but cruelty to offer in this regard. It broadened my empathy for others and made me more liberal. For instance when you talk about people failing or succeeding on their own merits, I realize that it is indeed possible for the scales of failure and success to be so drastically skewed so as to almost guarantee a particular result. If one person for example is spending more than half their time managing an illness which creates profound life limitations and another doesn’t have to deal with that, who is more likely to find success?
Why then should that person’s maximal prosperity be favored over the other person’s ability to do anything more than scrape along in poverty? Why shouldn’t that person prefer a political philosophy which still treats them like a human being and not simply a loser, a failure or whatever other word one might want to put to it? And to be clear, I’ve been doing the bootstrap thing for a long time. I’ve built businesses to try to create opportunities for myself when everything else was closed off. It’s not laziness or apathy or anything of the sort. It is however clear to me that conservatives don’t think about people in my situation at all and they see me as having no place in society.