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How about putting a copy of your final essay on this thread?
well it's already been submitted so I don't want to hear people's critiques and then get worried about my grade. No doubt, I'm interested in others constructive criticism but maybe I will post it after I get my grade back.
It certainly doesn't have anything to do with liberty and freedom anymore.
The term liberal has been hacked to the point of being unrecognizable. The less vocal traditional liberals (moderates) have been hijacked by the looney left (radicals) and progressives (socialists) These are the people who religiously follow Alinsky, Marx, Mao, and openly promote communism/marxism disguised as socialism.
Liberals were once true reformers called Republicans. We dared to want the slaves freed and emancipated. Republican states were the first to give women the right to vote. The Democrat states in the east took nearly 10 years to catch up.
The only moderates left are Independents and Libertarians. I don't believe conservatives, or liberals, even know what the fundamental meanings are anymore. Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan wouldn't recognize their own parties anymore.
I pray that we'll get a true libertarian into office within the next three cycles. Then, maybe liberalism will come back to its origin.
Libertarians on the political scale if you look at it as a box where republicans are to the right, liberals to the left, authoritarianism is to the top, and anarchism is to the bottom, libertarians would be in the middle and down.
They essentially are their own breed where they have some policies that could be considered very liberal such as wanting to legalize all drugs, ending all wars, shutting down every US military base around the world, ending handouts to the rich etc,... However also have policies that could be considered hard right such as ending social security, ending assistance programs to the poor like food stamps, medical care, housing assistance, etc,..
That's just not true. Again, we have the views of a few dictating the image of the whole.
The one area most libertarians can't find agreement is on foreign affairs. We certainly want to protect our world interests; however, we don't want to use our military to dictate and steer world events (except to prevent war). It would be a huge mistake to close our strategic bases, and we all understand this. We can no longer afford to be the police of the world, when we can't even police our own borders.
Legalize all drugs - check
Smaller government - check
Less over-reaching small business crushing regulation - check
Audit the FED - check
Wean ourselves off of monopoly money - check
Read the Constitution as it was written, rather than as it is interpreted - check
Social programs should be a last resort rather than a way of life. We don't want social nets removed, just brought back to sane levels. People need to be responsible for themselves at least to some degree. There are generations of families who have been raised to expect a check from the government every month. I know, because a few of my friends were in such households. Most of them supplemented their incomes doing shady deals. So we have a welfare state, filled with welfare babies, raised to be on welfare with a prison option.
Bringing social programs back into reality isn't negotiable, and just like SS, it all has to be revamped to meet the real world.
Around 1920 people like Eugene Debs openly called themselves "socialist." But socialism proved to be a losing proposition in US politics, so around the time of FDR, they started trying out the term "liberal." The original liberals, people like Locke and Smith, and been individualists/libertarians, almost the polar opposite of collectivism/socialism, hence they became known as "classical liberals."
But anyway, "liberal" was adopted in lieu of "socialist" and it stuck. In the 1960's, personal freedom was prized among groups like the hippies, so the idea of "liberalism" was naturally appealing. "If it feels good, do it," was a motto of the day. But slowly people woke up to the fact that collectivism and personal freedom were diametrically opposed, so "liberal," like "socialist" before it, came to be seen as a dirty word.
By the prez election of 1988 HW Bush expended a lot of effort to tag his opponent Mike Dukakis as a "liberal." And around that time, many liberals began to drop the term, rebranding themselves as "progressive." An interesting side note: Pres. Obama rarely applies any of these labels to himself. He has used "progressive" a few times, but he mostly avoids any label.
The latest trend I've noticed is for some brave lefties to return to the roots, openly calling themselves "socialist." Most often this resembles people dipping their toes into a cold pool; every now and then a brazen Bernie Sanders jumps in full-body. Time will tell where this goes.
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