Influences
Ellroon of Rants from the Rookery had a two-part post [part one, part two] asking people what [books, movies, music, etc.] influenced their decision to be liberals.
I thought about it a long time and came to the conclusion that conservatives don’t want to do anything. conservatives didn’t want a revolution, they didn’t want to buy Louisiana or Alaska, they didn’t want to settle the West, they didn’t want to build canals, roads. railroads; they wanted to stay as 13 British colonies and have been fighting changes ever since.
If you read American history, there are no great successes for conservatives, and a number of major disasters that could have been ameliorated or avoided if action were taken.
Now I tend to be an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kind of person, but if something is wrong, you have to correct it. It doesn’t make sense to slough off all of the hard jobs to the people who replace you.
I don’t like paying taxes, but I benefited from the taxes that my parents and grandparents paid, so I have an obligation to the people who follow. Part of what being a country is all about is the continuity of rewards and obligation that tie together the generations. When a generation decides not to do their share, they weaken the ties, and the nation.
I’m a liberal because of the American Revolution – I think it was a good idea.
7 comments
Nobody likes to pay taxes, but few if any appreciate potholes, dirt roads, trash piling up, or lack of utilities. But you can’t tell conservatives there is no Great Public Services Fairy waving a wand somewhere; they refuse to believe otherwise.
I was born liberal, but coming of age in the 60’s was a huge eye-opener.
I don’t think it’s a proper question. Like being gay, I never woke up one day and said “I think I’ll be a liberal.” It just happened. Maybe it was growing up in a college town, maybe it was the influence of my mother, maybe it’s a logical concatenation of a lot of other beliefs and ideologies I hold or respect. But I can’t point to any one thing or time when I “decided” to be a liberal.
Well-said, Bryan.
The conservative notion that government is intrinsically evil and private enterprise intrinsically virtuous is the concept that absolutely prevents me from ever being a conservative. The nearest thing to a correction I can offer is that large, powerful institutions (public or private) and powerful people (whether or not they are large) are intrinsically self-serving, and society requires protection against them. That involves checks and balances in government (as I am afraid a lot of Americans are about to find out the hard way) and sensible regulations applied to essential industries (e.g., what’s on your plate?).
Then there’s the positive side of liberalism. I have this radical notion that no one in a society as wealthy as ours should ever have to starve, or live in the street, or die of preventable or curable diseases. Individual responsibility is great, and I am an advocate of hard work (even if I’m the one doing it), but there are circumstances in which, and people for whom, it is simply not enough, and society is morally obliged… and should be legally obliged… to help out in those times, and to pay taxes to make that help possible. Promoting the general welfare (a concept our founders did not disdain as today’s conservatives appear to) is a central objective to me… and inevitably in a society of more than, say, 10 people, the government is necessarily involved in doing so.
Like andante, I think I was born liberal. That wasn’t difficult in a household where my parents lived through both the Great Depression and W.W. II as ordinary individuals without great wealth. Thanks to liberals of at least three generations in our nation’s government, my parents lived the second half of their lives in what may prove to have been America’s greatest era, past or future. It’s inconceivable to me that anyone fails to respect a philosophy which, applied to the whole of our great nation, can have such an outcome. Let me put it this way:
If you’re not wealthy… and you’re not liberal… what are you, anyway?
Afterthought: I see I successfully dodged the original question about influential books, movies and music. And I see Michael was posting at the same time. With no disrespect to the question, I agree with Michael that I’m not sure there is a direct connection between what one consumes and what one becomes (other than, perhaps, “melamine” and “dead”). Most of us read, viewed and listened to many kinds of things on the way to becoming who we are today.
I intended to include the fact that when I was in about fifth grade, the D.A.R. held an anti-Communism essay contest. I entered and won; I still have the medal. But I don’t consider the essays we all wrote to be political statements of conservatism: they were propaganda, pure and simple. And the D.A.R. was not conservative in any reasonable meaning of the term, any more than the Bush cabal is conservative: all of them are demagogues. Such demagoguery is one of the things genuine liberals must combat daily.
Exactly, Andante, they want the service, but they don’t want to pay for it. They think they should only pay for those services they receive. I think everyone can understand that you only pay firemen for the number of fires they put out, there will probably be a major increase in fires.
Michael, frankly I think the arts influence people when they clarify or enhance the conclusions that those people have already reached, rather than creating the idea. I would think the fact that you are an historian and know what really happened, rather than what people say happened, reinforces your feelings about the world and your place it. Each of us creates our own path to our world view, but arts can provide sign posts.
Weeeeellllllll….the “professional historian” part of me is wincing right now at the idea that even professional historians can know “what really happened.” The discipline has moved away from the Rankean ideal in the last century precisely because if it was ever true that we could figure out wie es eigentlich gewesen [ist], “the way it really happened” (and I and most other historians have my doubts on that front), the world has gotten a lot more complex, and the evidence a lot thicker on the ground–which, ironically, serves to muddy the waters more than it does to clarify them.
Case in point: my research project. I’ve been trying, for the last three years at least, to figure out how and why the French government did something that none of the other occupying forces in Germany after World War II did–namely, take in the babies, if their mothers didn’t want them anymore, fathered by the members of their occupying forces and support staff. I’ve looked at literally thousands of documents in hundreds of files–and I’m still scratching my head trying to puzzle out an answer to that basic question. (I’m hoping I might be zooming in on the hiding place of a few leads to that answer–will depend on what the archivist in charge of the files tells me tomorrow.)
But even if we assume for the sake of argument that my being an historian gives me a clearer perspective on how some part of the world worked at some point in time, it’s still not clear to me how that contributes to making me a liberal. Given the nature of what I study (the two world wars and the interwar years, with particular attention to Nazi atrocities and the Holocaust), my academic work has certainly enhanced my horror at the idea of war. But it did not engender it. That I almost certainly either inherited from my mother (who was already planning how to get me across the border into Canada even though I was only 11 years old or thereabouts when the Vietnam War ended) or absorbed subliminally because of the time and the place where I grew up.
My mom worked at the same university where I work and now go to graduate school. In my youth, she used to eke out her salary by taking in theses and dissertations to type for graduate students during her off hours. Many’s the night I remember going to bed as a young child and listening to the clatter of the typewriter in the kitchen, over the sound of The Carpenters, or Engelbert Humperdinck, or Tom Jones, or Shirley Bassey on the stereo. As a consequence of that sideline, we always had graduate students hanging around the place, bringing over new chapters or corrections, and generally unloading their anxieties on my mom (she’s always been a good listener). One of my earliest memories–must have been before I was in the second grade, since I remember the location being the apartment where we lived until I started second grade–was hearing one of the “body counts” from Vietnam on the morning news report and asking, anxiously, if that meant one of the graduate student’s I’d become especially fond of, and who had lost his deferment when he finished his degree.
But even that isn’t necessarily a liberal position. You can be a conservative and opposed to wars, too–though likely for different reasons.
Steve, expanding on what I wrote to Michael, I think the choices we make as to what we read, listen to, watch, etc. is based on what we already believe. I don’t see it as a major factor in anyone’s political views.