Conservatism: The Cancer on our society
Its time we stopped playing defense with the term liberal and the negative frame that Conservatives have turned it into and start playing offense by telling the truth about Conservatism and reframing it:
Throughout history, Conservatives have always represented the worst aspects of human nature: greed, selfishness, discrimination, hatred, indifference to suffering, against fairness, against equality and compassion, and against the common good.
This can be seen in numerous examples throughout history, Where cold hearted Conservatives opposed desegregation, opposed a black person's right to be treated equally, opposed a woman's right to vote, opposed the right of working people to eight hour days and enough quality time with their families, happily allowed Big Business Elites to be paid millions to leave a company for failing - whilst at the same time opposing any and every attempt at a meager pay rise by the nation's working poor, supported Apartheid (as seen by Dick Cheney's refusal to condemn it when in Congress and John Howard's support of it) and the latest examples by American Conservatives include:
Opposing the right to health care for everyone, in the richest country in the world
http://blog.aflcio.org/[…]/
Refusing to ban discrimination against American troops and Senior Citizens/Ageism
http://americablog.blogspot[…]rom-house-floor-debate.html
Refusing to put the interests of human survival ahead of the interests of the Big Oil Elites
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/50778/
And of course, how could such a Cancer be complete without:
Supporting the 'right to hate' and fire people for being gay
http://americablog.blogspot[…]ure-go-ahead-fire-gays.html
However, perhaps the worst aspect of the Cancerous Conservative culture is their cold indifference to the American families that have been ripped apart in the never ending occupation of Iraq - not a single member of the Bush administration has a child in Iraq or enlisted in the military - yet they are more than happy to keep the sons, daughters, mums and dads over there dying, in order to keep the occupation going. This famous video demonstrates it well (if you haven't seen it already):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RKo4Rxi_pQ
In short, Conservatives for the past 30 years have genuinely been some of the worst, nastiest, hateful people modern history has ever seen, so next time they try to give you grief about being liberal, remind them of what they stand for and what they have stood for throughout modern history and how much pain and suffering they are responsible for in the world: Conservatism is a cancer.
dailyd
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http://connectthroughvalues.com
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"Its the society, stupid."
Good luck putting all that in one sentence and explaining the academic terms to average voters in a 5 second sound bite.
The frame needs to stay as simple as possible. The fact is, conservatism is, and always has been a cancer on our society and even the old cancerous conservatism under Goldwater was next to impossible to sell because it was such a cancerous, cold, unamerican way of seeing the world.
Any movement that aggressively stands against a society based on fairness, equality and compassion is a cancerous, poisonous one.
"Its the society, stupid."
dd
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http://connectthroughvalues.com
New! Cancer on Society, or Cancer on "traditional" conservatism?
I'm not sure I agree that conservatism is a cancer on society as you say.
I certainly am with you that the neocons/fascists in power are evil. But that's not the point.
I think that the
traditionalsort of conservatism, the strict father type that goes back way before the seventies, has been crowded out by the current crop of neocon leaders.So maybe a better metaphor is that neoconservatism (or fascism) is a cancer on the traditional conservative part of our society. It has taken over the discourse in the conservative parts of society where few people are willing to stand up and say "Wait a minute, this is not what I and my father and my grandfather believed in." Pete McCloskey comes to mind as one of the few who have done that.
I'm not sure where this gets us, but framing neoconservatism or fascism as a cancer on conservatism means that traditional conservatives need to be
curedof this ailment. It's a different approach than your suggested frame, which would imply that society is being taken over by the neocon/fascist mindset, which I don't really think is true.