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1) Republicans often mention personal freedom as something to cherish and protect above all else, that this is the main idea behind the constitution. They oppose government intervention in peoples' personal lives. Why then do they oppose gay rights, legalizing marijuana, and abortion? Doesn't forbidding those cause government to interfere in other peoples lives?
2) Another common theme in the Republican Party is that they all seem to want to reduce spending to balance the budget. Why then do they fume at the mention of targeting military spending for a portion of these cuts? Military spending accounts for 4.7 % of GDP, second highest percentage in the world and by far the highest in dollars among all other countries. You'd think that being such a high figure it would receive proportional attention in cost cutting, but instead Republican leaders want to strengthen the military by protecting it from spending cuts. It's counter-intuitive.
1) Republicans often mention personal freedom as something to cherish and protect above all else, that this is the main idea behind the constitution. They oppose government intervention in peoples' personal lives. Why then do they oppose gay rights, legalizing marijuana, and abortion? Doesn't forbidding those cause government to interfere in other peoples lives?
2) Another common theme in the Republican Party is that they all seem to want to reduce spending to balance the budget. Why then do they fume at the mention of targeting military spending for a portion of these cuts? Military spending accounts for 4.7 % of GDP, second highest percentage in the world and by far the highest in dollars among all other countries. You'd think that being such a high figure it would receive proportional attention in cost cutting, but instead Republican leaders want to strengthen the military by protecting it from spending cuts. It's counter-intuitive.
Lots of good people agree with you....
They white knuckle the Gun's and Bible's when you start talking about taking the guns and call em stupid for believing the Bible...
Oh yea "Spread the Wealth" isn't well received ether...
Location: On the "Left Coast", somewhere in "the Land of Fruits & Nuts"
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Originally Posted by padcrusher
1) Republicans often mention personal freedom as something to cherish and protect above all else, that this is the main idea behind the constitution. They oppose government intervention in peoples' personal lives. Why then do they oppose gay rights, legalizing marijuana, and abortion? Doesn't forbidding those cause government to interfere in other peoples lives?
2) Another common theme in the Republican Party is that they all seem to want to reduce spending to balance the budget. Why then do they fume at the mention of targeting military spending for a portion of these cuts? Military spending accounts for 4.7 % of GDP, second highest percentage in the world and by far the highest in dollars among all other countries. You'd think that being such a high figure it would receive proportional attention in cost cutting, but instead Republican leaders want to strengthen the military by protecting it from spending cuts. It's counter-intuitive.
That's because talk is cheap, and when all is said and done, the only things Republicans really care about might be summed up in the old Warren Zevon song... "Lawyers, Guns, and Money!"
That's because talk is cheap, and when all is said and done, the only things Republicans really care about might be summed up in the old Warren Zevon song... "Lawyers, Guns, and Money!"
You realize most lawyers are overwhelmingly liberal?
1) Republicans often mention personal freedom as something to cherish and protect above all else, that this is the main idea behind the constitution. They oppose government intervention in peoples' personal lives. Why then do they oppose gay rights, legalizing marijuana, and abortion? Doesn't forbidding those cause government to interfere in other peoples lives?
2) Another common theme in the Republican Party is that they all seem to want to reduce spending to balance the budget. Why then do they fume at the mention of targeting military spending for a portion of these cuts? Military spending accounts for 4.7 % of GDP, second highest percentage in the world and by far the highest in dollars among all other countries. You'd think that being such a high figure it would receive proportional attention in cost cutting, but instead Republican leaders want to strengthen the military by protecting it from spending cuts. It's counter-intuitive.
The modern day Republican Party is a broad coalition of interests that includes various factions such as East Coast industrialists/old-money elites, centrist libertarians and individualists, American traditionalists and anticommunists, and the Moral Majority. This coalition of various factions with similar political interests began to congeal probably around the first few years of the New Deal (so 1930s), but it really began to coalesce beginning in the 1950s when the Republican Party got on board with the Democrats in regard to waging a global war against communism. For many Republicans at that time, the conflict with communism was most important on the home front (and the Democrats were on board with this at that time as well).
In the 1950s and early 1960s, few American religionists fused their religiosity with party politics partly because just about every American and especially those in politics were religious. The religionists got involved in politics more because of what they perceived was a chipping away at religious rights as contained in the 1st Amendment. These involved the battle in the southern states, for the most part, over segregation--whether that was God-instituted or not. Southern conservatives (not the same thing always as "Republicans") rebuffed criticism for maintaining segregated churches. One rebuffer was Jerry Falwell, who got his start in Va. around this time, and he began telling folks that it was their duty as Christians to get into politics. But more important nationally were several Supreme Court cases that virtually outlawed official teaching of Christian religion in schools, such as the Engel v. Vitale ruling, and many others during the late 50s and early 60s. Now this doesn't mean that there can be no religion in schools, but these cases basically required schools to jettison religious instruction as a requirement for graduation (and only applies to public schools). It's interesting to note that in Abington v. Schempp, another of these so-called religion-in-schools cases that the plaintiffs were a coalition of right-leaning and left-leaning parents who basically opposed local government's meddling in the spiritual lives of their kids--among the plaintiffs were Jews, Catholics, and Congregationalists. So it's not like this was the "atheism" case that "outlawed" God in school.
But it got conservatives to be a little more politically active. Anticommunists and traditionalists opposing the reforms of the 1960s, Civil Rights reform, the antiwar movement, the various "power" movements like Black Power, Red Power, Gay Power, feminism, etc, brought the ire of many conservatives and brought these coalitions together--fusing East Coast old money elites with the so-called Moral Majority or American religionists and traditionalists. Westerners also joined the coalition, believing that the mainstream Democratic Party was one of social control and experimentation at the expense of rugged individualism, that brought together libertarians who eschewed the expansive national government inherent in the liberals' platforms of the 1960s.
A few figures are important in this coalition "building" or congealing. Namely, William F. Buckley, the founder of the National Review, served as the intellectual progenitor of the modern-day Republican Party. He found that using terms like liberty and freedom, based on Hayekian political philosophy, resonated with people. Others joined his cause, namely Barry Goldwater who outlined the contours of conservative thought as centered upon economic freedom, arguing that if we don't have control of our money--and if we give it to the government--then the government is no longer protecting people's property, but redistributing it. It should be noted that Buckley's brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell actually wrote Goldwater's famous book.
How does the military fit into this? For many of the westerners in the coalition, they arrived out west thanks in part to big government military industrial complex that got started during WWII, but continued in the 1950s because of the American rivalry with the Soviets. Conservatives and nascent modern day Republicans needed massive defense spending because it paid the bills, especially for conservatives living in places like Orange County, Californy.
A couple of other figures are important in the conservative coalition during the 50s and 60s and that's Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Nixon was the compromise candidate among conservatives in the 1968 election cycle. A Californian, he mostly represented the more moderate wings of the Party at that time--and he stayed true to his East Coast elite conservative roots. Yet he took a much more hard line approach to the Vietnam War--a more uncompromising approach--which resonated with other conservatives. He also is famous for starting the war on drugs and scaling back the Great Society programs of his predecessor.
Ronald Reagan was the figure who firmly connected all of these wings of conservatism. He spoke out to all members of the factions, and brought southern conservative Democrats on board by remaining recalcitrant in his position on Civil Rights laws (1964 and 1965) linking these with big government and the erosion of Americans' personal freedoms. He like many politicians before and after him connected drug use to communism and hippy-ism (which is either communism in disguise or worse than communism) and reinvigorated the war on drugs, to the chagrin of many individualist libertarians. In the Reagan-esque mold, to advocate drug legalization or treatment for addicts became antithetical to American values and was downright unpatriotic.
Yet there were many in the Party and still are who oppose the drug war, yet chest thumping shibboleths in opposition of drugs gets people elected--especially those who identify drug use with Woodstock--free love--nakedness--and beatnik pretension.
But back to Reagan, he really brought the Moral Majority or Religious Right on board despite the fact that Reagan wasn't really that religious. He did this out of political expediency. Reagan went into office after Jimmy Carter, who was truly religious--so religious that I believe it impeded his ability to do a good job as president--because presidents have to be shrewd political players, domestically and internationally. But Reagan got the stamp of a religious president because he didn't miss many opportunities in the 1980 campaign to cloak himself in religiosity, using various religious political machines for photo-ops.
Moreover, Reagan has been attributed with single-handedly bringing down the Soviet Empire. A spurious claim in and of itself that's reductionist, Reagan used the military-industrial complex to outspend and out-position the Soviet military machine. Hence, the connection between the GOP and the military elite.
Probably a much longer answer than you wanted, but I tried to condense quite a few books on the subject in this post. Here's the short of it: starting with money and property, take anticommunism and mix it with individuality and religion=modern day GOP. I'm sure there's a few things I've left out and I don't intend for this post to be a comprehensive treatment of the topic.
I don't but the constant in your face activists get tiresome, I don't go around making it a point to tell people I'm straight.
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legalizing marijuana,
Legalize away......
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and abortion? Doesn't forbidding those cause government to interfere in other peoples lives?
I have no definitive opinion on this that I'm going to give but I'm sure you can agree that at some point in time the unborn is a life and it would be the mother interfering with the life of the unborn depending on what point you want to determine the unborn is a life.
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2) Another common theme in the Republican Party is that they all seem to want to reduce spending to balance the budget.
For starters this is one thing our federal government has been tasked with and is first mentioned in the the preamble of the Constitution.
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We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Having said that I could agree military spending can be reduced to some degree. I think you start by targeting the waste.
Yes , do we realy need troops in Japan? Time to let s korea gaurd their own border.As we should be gaurding our own.
And Germany, the Netherlands, and a couple of other places in Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands, and the Middle East.
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