Quote:
Originally Posted by James Bond 007
Every single one.
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“If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people-their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties-someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal", then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal.”
At the time he said this, the "new ideas" he was referring to were still new ideas.
Since then, most of those "new ideas" have been implemented and subsequently failed to one degree or another.
Today, to look "ahead and not behind" is to ignore all the "new ideas" that did not deliver on what they promised and to fail to learn what their failure should teach us.
The first lesson we ought to learn from past governmental interventions is that the state, though created by the people, tends to seek its own interests.
For this reason, problems that involve government solutions often create a situation that is worse than the one that was supposed to be corrected by the government's intervention.
Our political parties also seek their own interests.
The Democratic Party, in Kennedy's time, was the party of working America.
After the civil rights era, Democrats were less in love with their white working class base because they were, according to the theory, the cause of black voter's problems.
Moreover, men, according to the Democrat's emerging wing of radical feminists, became the cause of most or all of women's problems.
For an organization that depends on votes for its very existence, the low-hanging fruit of the growing disgruntled classes, already in the Democrat's corner, became an end to itself.
The inherent conflict between the disgruntled classes and white males was easily resolved by simply rejecting all non-apologetic, non-self-loathing white males.
Working white-males and the women that married them no longer had a political home, and while not wealthy, they nevertheless settled into the Republican Party, the rich man's party, because they had nowhere else to go.
Over time, the working-class Republicans became a more influential voice within the Republican ranks.
Reagan successfully ran against the party from within in 1976 and 1980 and established a trend that would repeat with the Perot candidacy, the Tea Party movement and the election of Donald J. Trump.
We now have two political parties in this country.
One is the anti-white-male party and the other is the white-male tolerant party.
It's hard to say if JFK would have remained a Democrat once it became obvious that their only reason for continuing to exist was to exist for its own benefit.