Ever wonder why Republicans and Democrats yell at each other so much? Sometimes, the positions these two sides take on various issues seem pretty arbitrary. There just doesn’t seem to be any consistent philosophy underlying each political party, and so it becomes – well, politics. However, I believe that there are consistent philosophies to be discovered on each side, and since I had to teach political philosophy last semester, I was forced to examine them for myself. In the coming weeks, I want to lay bare those differences, and also argue the liberal position on several of the specific issues.
A Liberal society (in the sense of Liberal v. Communist, Islamist, etc., not the small “l” liberal v. conservative) has three distinguishing values that make it unique among all other societies: the value of private property, the value of equality, and the value of individual freedom (especially the freedom to make a choice in the form of voting). When it comes to individual freedom, both parties succeed and fail in various ways, and so it is difficult to develop differences in this area. However, the conservative and liberal ideologies begin to contrast in terms of the first two values.
These differences first arise when private property and equality come into conflict. The conflict is actually fairly common because, as John Locke observed, money is the most common form of private property. And hence we get conservative Republicans always pushing tax cuts (because that means more private property), and the liberal Democrats working to repeal tax cuts on the wealthy (because that allows the government to afford various programs for the lower and middles classes, and so enhances the value of equality). So the conservative mantra is “Equality is important, but what really makes a Liberal society great is private property”, while the liberal motto is just the opposite: “Private property is important, but what really makes a Liberal society great is equality”. Sometimes this difference is expressed in terms of the size of government, where the conservatives promote more private property as so favor “small government”, and the liberals favor the government having a larger role to play is making society equal, and so is the party of “big government”. In these terms, I wish to explain and argue for the various liberal positions on particular issues in contemporary American politics.
