It’s been a good while since I’ve thought of conservatism without all of the special interest and neo-conservative crap attached to it. I pretty much gave up on saying I have a political philosophy because I take a good deal from all of them.
After watching the handling of the debt by our last two presidents, I realized I can’t vote for them to quit endlessly driving us into debt. Sometime later, I realized nobody in politics even cares about the debt. The government borrows at a lower interest rate than inflation, and so technically, the money doesn’t cost anything. Of course, we eat the inflation, but they don’t tell us that part.
I was in high school for the first Iraq war. I wondered back then why they didn’t topple Saddam when they had the chance. I wouldn’t learn until years later how power vacuums work and who usually fills them.
It’s pretty obvious in neo-con policy papers that they were looking for an excuse to destabilize the middle east and militarize everything. I’m not a Truther, but I don’t think that group of people was disappointed by 9/11. Before 9/11, I didn’t think of my government as ominous. Lately, I just take for granted they may very well read, listen to, and store everything. I read some articles where people posit that just that people are made to feel that way is a chilling effect and a violation of the 1st Amendment. There’s no way to know the extent of it. That submissive position when getting scanned to get on a plane…I wonder if people in other free countries think of their government this way.
So, voting Republican meant getting on board with all this. And then, they grafted all the religious stuff on to get a stable voting block from the religious groups. And the war on drugs. The trust between police and our inner city communities has been thoroughly destroyed. I sometimes watch the police shows where police walk up to people out of the blue and ask if they’d mind being searched. I think, “yeah, I would.” That thinking can be quite dangerous. I’ve talked to a number of white people who fear getting killed in a police encounter. When did we get here?
How can small government people advocate jailing people for years based on their choice of substances? When I hear people saying we need to do more research to decide on marijuana legalization, I wonder when I lost the right to kill myself slowly if I choose. I’ve seen first hand what funding government with taxes on unapproved vices is doing to people. Poor people don’t stop smoking with the higher taxes; they stop eating or putting a roof over their heads.
I realized I wasn’t Republican if I ever was. I was a young kid in a relatively rich household under Reagan. I looked back like those were glory days and just kind of inherited being Republican.
I just read an article that posited that one of the things that could save the Republican party would be a financial collapse under Hillary. I thought back to Mitch McConnell saying his sole task was making Obama a one-term president. Reading that article made me realize the opposition has been doing nothing in the last 8 years but trying to sink the ship to try to get themselves full power in government. Our lives be damned. We haven’t been able to fix anything like Obamacare because they’ve been dug in making sure it fails so they could completely eliminate it. We fail in the process.
All of what I’ve mentioned isn’t Conservative. It’s Republican.
And what do we have available in answer? The contents of Hillary’s speeches that have recently been leaked are verification that while she tells the people she’s working for them, she’s taking $250,000 per speech telling the corporate globalists she’s working for them.
Trump showing us what he’s willing to do to his party and those around them because he’s backed into a corner is all we need to know about his temperament.
Maybe the choice is between getting into a war quickly because our president felt wronged or continuing to be financially bled to death slowly.
Someone just last night was trying to convince me not to throw away my vote on a 3rd party. I think I’d be throwing away my vote by giving my endorsement to either of these parties. They’re corrupt to the core.
We had the “financial crisis” and how many people ended up in jail? Literally tens of thousands of court documents certified as accurate, forgeries, zombie mortgages, etc. Wall Street got bailed out. This government represents us?
Not voting 3rd party when it most represents you is like not going to a bar you really like because nobody’s there. It’s always a life or death choice in these elections. It’s been the last chance to save our country since well before I was here. The inevitability of one of those two winning is the result of us believing it’s inevitable.
I think we’re finding ourselves in a position where neither of the old guards has the answer. We’re getting automated and globalized and consolidated out of our ways of life. I have to give Trump one thing: he’s absolutely right on trade deficits. These trade deals are killing us. We need to quit accepting the shit end of the stick to trade at all. They need us too.
It amazes me when there’s, say, a bacterial outbreak on some food and they list 25 brands that are affected. It makes me realize just how consolidated everything’s become. We don’t even have much choice when we buy different brands.
It’s pretty obvious that business ownership is becoming rarer and rarer. We’re by virtue of this system working for others instead. We have the capability now to take care of the needs of everyone in ways we never dreamed of, but the system is instead sucking the resources away from everyone. How do we find a way to make the system work again?
