A very telling article about how liberals and conservatives view government

[OnePimpTiger]

Why do people vote against their own interests?

This whole article needs to be read to fully understand my point, but here are a few key excerpts:

But it is striking that the people who most dislike the whole idea of healthcare reform - the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state - are often the ones it seems designed to help.

Instead, to many of those who lose out under the existing system, reform still seems like the ultimate betrayal.

Why are so many American voters enraged by attempts to change a horribly inefficient system that leaves them with premiums they often cannot afford?

Why are they manning the barricades to defend insurance companies that routinely deny claims and cancel policies?

It might be tempting to put the whole thing down to what the historian Richard Hofstadter back in the 1960s called "the paranoid style" of American politics, in which God, guns and race get mixed into a toxic stew of resentment at anything coming out of Washington.

But that would be a mistake.

They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best.

There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots.

For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: "One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious.

He believes that the voters' preference for emotional engagement over reasonable argument has allowed the Republican Party to blind them to their own real interests.

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronising liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking.

Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America's poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.

A relatively in-depth article that takes into account several opinions of the reasoning behind the conservative mindset and provides a few reasons behind the liberal mindset. But notice not once does it address the (apparently crazy) possibility that conservatives are against increased government involvement because it goes against the Constitution and everything our government was founded on.

To these people (the authors and subjects of this story, but I'm sure it applies to many liberals as well), the only reasoning behind the conservative mindset is either they ignore logic for emotional appeals or believe what they believe because they've always been told to believe that. There's no possibility that someone has looked at the state of affairs, done their research, and logically come to a different conclusion than the liberal one...that's impossible! There's no way they base their beliefs on things like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights...they just repeat whatever Fox News tells them to. How ignorant, condescending, and completely narrow-minded.

And as a related point, notice the only reasoning provided for the liberal opinions is they'll get something out of it. Self-serving, what's in it for me. It has nothing to do with "does this go against the Constitution," "does this coincide with the form of government the country was founded on," or even something as simple as "can we afford it?" It's only about serving their own interests, getting something from the government for free (often ignoring the fact that nothing is free).

Obviously these observations don't apply to everyone, nothing ever does. But I have noticed the same concepts in many conversations I've had here and elsewhere. Conservatives are more based in principles, while liberals focus more on getting something out of it. That's not always a bad thing, either. Most liberals that I've met genuinely want to help others...but often it's at the expense of the founding principles that made the United States the greatest country in the world. I understand you want to help people, everyone does (despite how conservatives are painted, they truly do want to help others as well), but helping people and fundamentally changing the role of government in a direction contrary to the Constitution is crossing a line.

As a completely unrelated aside:

"Obama's administration made a tremendous mistake by not immediately branding the economic collapse that we had just had as the Republicans' Depression, caused by the Bush administration's ideology of unregulated greed. The result is that now people blame him."

Are you kidding me? Seriously? The Obamastration didn't blame the economic collapse on Bush? He couldn't have said that with a straight face, it's impossible.

[gatorboymike]

What a load of unnecessary verbosity. Everyone views government the same way, which can be summed up in a single sentence: "If Senator Hockenflocker hates the same things and the same people that I hate, I'm gon' vote fer him, and if he don't, then I ain't!"