DarkHelmet wrote:ajax18 wrote:Split the country. There is no way we are going to be able to get along.
You sound like the southern secessionists leading up to the Civil War. This country has been divided since before the revolution - elites vs commoners, bankers vs. farmers, urban vs. rural, north vs. south, industry vs. agriculture. While we will probably always be divided, the trend over time is social, technological, and scientific progress. We don't regress or even stand still. Even the most conservative standards today would be considered progressive just a few decades ago. If we did divide the country, your side of the wall would always be about 20 - 30 years behind the other side of the wall. It' not that you won't have gay rights on your side, it's just that it won't be until about 2050.
This is an important point. It is remarkable how oblivious conservatives are to the fact that mainstream opinion has always been generally moving to what is usually regarded as the left. Much of what is mainstream conservatism now, was once regarded as dangerously radical to conservatives of yesteryear. Conservatism is, almost by default, the repository of things that work or once seemed to work well in the past.
Liberals are the ones are the ones who are open to the possibility that there might actually be better ways of doing things than we now use or are no longer effective. When any new concepts manage to be accepted and survive conservative opposition long enough to demonstrate that they work better than what we had, they tend to be added to the repository of things that work, of which conservatives claim custodianship, and eventually become part of what future generations will regard as mainstream conservatism.
This is why we need both conservatives and liberals: conservatives to preserve things from the past that still work well, and liberals to explore and promote better and more just ways of doing things, and push to abandon what no longer works well or never really did work, however cherished they may be to current mainstream conservatives.
