I recently visited a family in Boulder, Colorado whose 8-year-old son has figured out which way the political winds blow in that town: “I hate Trump.” Mom was in full accord with the child, but the father was unwilling to devote a large amount of brain space to righteous hatred. “Our neighbors find out that we’ve gone to Colorado Springs and they’ll say ‘How could you do that? I would never spend any time with people there.’ But if aliens visited Boulder and Colorado Springs they would say that people lived in exactly the same way in the two towns. They drive SUVs. They shop at Whole Foods. Hardly anyone walks or bikes. Maybe the Colorado Springs SUV has a ‘Focus on the Family’ bumper sticker and the Boulder SUV has a ‘Free Tibet,’ bumper sticker, but there is no practical difference in lifestyle.”
What about folks in Boulder? Don’t they spend more time and money helping the vulnerable? “No,” the father said. “Probably the Colorado Springs residents do more because they work through their churches instead of just posting on Facebook.”
How about the climate change alarmists at NCAR? Do they practice what they preach regarding CO2 reduction, at least when they’re not jetting off to climate change conferences? “I bike up that hill all the time for exercise. Most of the traffic on that road is SUVs occupied by one person.”
The liberal pathogen that leads to TDS (trump derangement syndrome) would most likely be invisible to aliens. Illegal aliens on the other hand might have a better shot of figuring out who is affected.
“Probably the Colorado Springs residents do more because they work through their churches instead of just posting on Facebook.”
This is a regular argument pro-Republicans and against-Democrats. At face value, yes, you could say this is in fact negative aspect of liberals, who act as hypocrites, or don’t get their butts off their chairs to do anything.
However, liberals and progressives do support a more extended social safety net, with health, employment, educational and housing support coming from governmental institutions (not exclusively).
This prevents relying on randomness of individual charity actions or patronage – there’s nothing wrong with them, and one should encourage it, as well as the strengthening of local communities, through individual and collective actions. Yet, the social-democrat goal is to have a society-wide safety net.
This support comes about through contributions to government, fiscal and political, and to base organisations. Again, no one should discourage individual actions of philanthropy or charity, nor Facebook alone is enough. However, if you’re the right-wing equivalent of the SJW because you help at your local church soup kitchen, but then vote to remove health aid, while it’s more visible, in my opinion is no reason for claiming moral high ground.
Francisco: “liberals and progressives do support a more extended social safety net, with health, employment, educational and housing support coming from governmental institutions”
What makes you think that folks in Colorado Springs don’t support this safety net? Republicans have controlled Congress and the White House at various times. They did not use those periods to tear down the $1 trillion welfare state.
https://ballotpedia.org/Colorado_General_Assembly says that Republicans (presumably supported by at least some folks in Colorado Springs) controlled the state legislature at various points, yet the state of Colorado runs its own comprehensive welfare system (see http://www.welfareinfo.org/co/ ).
Maybe some of the nominally “conservative” folks in Colorado Springs have proposed some tweaks to the welfare state that nominally “liberal” folks in Boulder oppose, but it isn’t fair to call those tweaks a serious attack on the $1 trillion welfare state. The folks who call themselves “liberals” don’t support or provide unlimited welfare. They accept multi-year (and/or infinite) waiting lists for free housing. If they are serious about housing as a “right” then anyone with a zero income should be able to get an immediate free house in Boulder, not a place on a waiting list. If they are serious about helping the “vulnerable,” why do they accept limitations on welfare for non-residents of the U.S.? Why isn’t a poor person who stays in Venezuela entitled to U.S. taxpayer-funded housing, food, health care, and smartphone if the same poor person who migrates to the U.S. and claims asylum or refugee status is entitled to these things? Is the poor person in Venezuela less “vulnerable”?
If folks in Boulder and Colorado Springs agree that non-residents of the U.S. are not entitled to welfare then they agree on about 95% of the big items and are arguing only about some details.
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/american-welfare-state-how-we-spend-nearly-%241-trillion-year-fighting-poverty-fail is from 2012, describing the $1 trillion U.S. welfare system and the libertarian opposition to it (it seems unlikely that more than a tiny percentage of Coloradans are libertarian!).