The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(04-15-2020, 05:16 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(04-15-2020, 03:57 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(04-15-2020, 12:20 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(04-14-2020, 10:52 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(04-14-2020, 06:05 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: ... Do you have a moral advantage over me? Do you REALLY have any advantage over me at all?

I won’t answer all of those questions, but the one about moral difference stands out.  Are you able to sense other’s peoples problems, have sympathy, and try to do something about it?  If not, there is a lack.  If you look at the rural - urban divide, it would seem the people in the middle of the country have a lack in spades.

I don’t think it an absolute lack, but attribute it to tribal thinking.  They care, but only about people like them.  They are ready to throw people with skin pigmentation differences, people who immigrated more recently, or minorities in general, to the wolves.

I see it as one aspect of the red blue divide.  It seems to be part of the S&H theory.  The Unraveling is a time of maximum selfishness, of minimum commitment to the country, to the common good.  Things change after the Trigger.

H-m-m-m.  I live in very Red country, so I know many folks with that philosophical bent.  I find my Red friends, and I do have them, very generous on a one-to-one basis.  They're always ready and more than willing to help those they feel are deserving -- which tends to limit the extent of their sympathy to (1) friends and relatives (2) people they know through church (3) people they hear about through (1) or (2).  The idea of abstract generosity to the vast many is like a fish riding a bicycle -- more or less inconceivable.  Make it communal (i.e. tax based), and it becomes theft.

And yet the preamble to the Constitution says the government would and should "promote the general Welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity".  The conservatives as tribal thinkers have traditionally fought this aspect of what it means to be American.

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You won't find that (tenet) written in the Constitution. It may be the preamble of the liberal version of the Constitution that liberals want or prefer instead of the one that's currently  in place. I do pay attention to what liberals write and say about all the Constitutional changes that they want to make these days.

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At a risk of seeming excessively and vehemently arrogant, you are completely wrong. 

First there is no "liberal" or "conservative" version of the Constitution, as the Constitution was written before the liberal-conservative divide existed. There is but one Preamble. What constitutes the "general Welfare" has changed over time as technology and morals change; at one time the "general Welfare" implied that was good for the slave-owning Southern agrarians (non-interference in slavery) was the practice. It used to be moral to send small children into mines and factories to do dangerous, life-shortening work to supplement the meager pay of parents who had gotten much the same start in their careers and were wrecks by age 35 and dead by 45; we would never see such as moral again.

Hunger, infectious diseases, and workplace deaths are not freedom. Ronald Reagan may have compromised workers' freedoms on behalf of corporate profits with the best of intentions, but Donald Trump has taken such to a preposterous conclusion. We are discovering the hard way the flawed virtue of working while sick with infectious, communicable diseases. With a President as callow as Trump, something is likely to go horribly wrong.  

I look at the conduct of the President and his assertions of despotic power. The Constitution clearly separates powers. The President is not the boss of Congress -- House or Senate -- or of the Supreme Court. He cannot order State governors or state legislatures about. He cannot censor the media -- and effectively you and I have become part of the media. If you want the President to have such powers, then maybe you want a dictatorship. The President does not have unlimited powers as President and as the boss of an increasingly-totalitarian political party.   

If you want to see what our Founding Fathers believed about power, then check this out.