I often can't decide which of these most accurately describes regressives when I'm listening to their insane rants. Maybe it's all of the above, in some combination or another.
The right in America loves its canned tropes, but perhaps none so much as the ˜government is evil' one. Ooooooohh! Look out. Big bad government is coming to get you.
Here's a recent example, from a regressive fellow living in the South (I know, I know " what a shocker that is!):
"Liberalism takes away freedom. Liberalism is inherently controlling over free people. Liberalism seeks to take away freedoms that have been historically rooted and guaranteed.
"I don't need you to tell me to eat my vegetables. I don't need you to tell me to buy health insurance. I don't need you to tell me to use less water when I shower. I don't need you telling me to buy a less gas guzzling vehicle. I don't need you telling me to use mass transit and live in a tiny little European-style apartment rather than the big, sprawling house I want. I don't need you requiring me to build my house with green materials.
"You really think modern American and European liberalism is about freedom? That's a joke. It is about you deciding how everyone must live. It is a hard fist of tyranny cloaked in a velvet glove.
Wow, eh? The hard fist of tyranny is haunting big cities!!
First of all, let's leave aside any observations our good friends in the field of child psychology might have about the upbringing of someone so devoted to himself that he adamantly reserves the right to sprawling houses, water-wasting showers, and big, gas-guzzling cars, regardless of the impact that might have on the environment we all must share. No wonder this guy doesn't want to be told to eat his vegetables. One gets the sense that he never was. I think he might also have been absent that day in kindergarten, when they covered that whole sharing concept.
And let's also disregard for the moment the logic that has liberalism assaulting "freedoms that have been historically rooted and guaranteed , when of course it was precisely progressives who did the fighting (and sometimes dying) to wrench racial and gender equality away from moss-backed reactionary regressives clutching "historically rooted oppressions in their conservative little hands (along with their guns, of course). And, I might add, it was progressives who also did the same to end slavery and even liberate the United States of America from British imperialism as well, all in opposition to lovely "historically rooted and even biblically sanctioned traditions.
Finally, let's also leave aside the "big-city, left-wing state slavery which I am deeply surprised to be informed that I've been living in. What's most astonishing is the degree to which the Stalinist government has so artfully hidden my chains. They don't even rattle when I drink my government-approved latte. I hardly notice them as I run to catch my mandatory subway ride to the communist indoctrination movie I'm forced to watch each and every evening. So clever! So insidious!
Hey, and how about those Wall Street slaves, too, working in Manhattan and living in Connecticut, two ultra-lefty big-city bastions of liberalism? Don't you feel bad for them, enslaved by the government, and forced to make tens of millions of dollars in financial transactions so unregulated by the government that they can crash the entire global economy? That's some real oppression, pal. And I know they weep for their lost freedom each time they climb in their helicopters for the weekend trip to the Hamptons, where they are forced by the government to live on sprawling mansions and have decadent parties all night long. If only there was an underground railroad to whisk them away to the opulence and freedom of the rural South!
But, let's leave all that aside for the moment, and just think about this notion that liberalism is the ideology of big oppressive government, and conservatism is the ideology of freedom from government repression. I dunno. Seems just a wee bit dubious if you scratch the surface a little. Ironic, even.
Is the fear of an intrusive big brother the reason why conservatives want the government to regulate women's reproductive systems, instead of allowing them to handle it themselves?
Is that why conservatives want the government to prevent people living in agony with terminal diseases from choosing to end their own lives?
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