I can be a conservative liberal — they aren’t mutually exclusive labels…

As humans, as a species we look at everything around us and instinctively put them into groups. If we see an animal, the first grouping we try to determine is if the animal is a danger to us or not. We see a house cat sitting in the window of the house we’re passing as we walk down the street — not a danger. A rabbit munching on flowers and greens in the garden — not a danger. An alligator crossing a golf course fairway between grassy ponds — likely a danger. A man walking in my direction on the same side of the street as me — it depends, we sometimes need more information… And you can bet that each of the listed critters here is also doing that assessment for themselves. Its a basic instinct intended to help each of us survive a little longer — like the fight or flight that is built into the root level coding of our nervous systems, its an uncontrollable reaction to being in proximity to another creature that triggers the survival instinct necessary for any species to survive.

Drill down a little more, beyond basic survival instincts. Let’s bring ourselves back to the person walking towards us on the same side of the street as us. What gender are they? Have I met this person before? If yes, do I have a good or bad relationship with him? How quickly is the man making his approach? What is his overall body language and what does that insinuate about potential intent? What is the expression on his face, and is he looking directly at me? What is the time of day? Where am I walking? Is he the same ethnicity or part of the same grouping as me?

Again, many of these questions we don’t really run down as a list consciously — these are learned survival behaviors that most certainly will trigger the instinctive survival mechanisms mentioned above depending on how you answer the questions above. To be sure, at least one of the questions listed above starts to get into uncomfortable territory for any of us — the implication that assessing “is this person in my clan?” is prejudiced is correct, but not for all the reasons that immediately come to mind. Consider rival factions or tribes (our ancestors all had tribes or family groups way back when) and competition for resources such as food and water. This is an assessment we make even when we see someone of our own skin color or gender and determine if this person is an immediate danger to me or not. How you react as a result of that judgment is a learned behavior especially in modern times. And also remember — the other person is also assessing you based on your appearances, the amount and tone of the pigment in your skin, the expression on your face and your body language. You see someone that sets your defense mechanism switch to on, and you start looking tense — that will trigger the other person’s defense mechanisms and so on, and so on, etc…

Now, there is a further segregation into groups that then is even more suspect — the absolute determination of if you’re a liberal or a conservative. Media assumes that and spends a lot of time communicating, and indeed pushing people to the fringes, the extremes. Fox and MSNBC to my perception are two of the more mainstream media who not only pander to the hard right and hard left, but also push ideas and opinions which confirms people’s underlying bias and further polarizes them against their opposite counterpart. It makes for good business for each of them, as their audience grows when they start to provide confirming input feeding the impulses and beliefs. When audience grows, revenues grow as advertisers are eager and anxious to take advantage of the growing audience, hoping for success by passive association. The confirmation bias helping people believe that “Company X pays for advertising and <Media Corp> is showing it, therefore they support the messaging delivered here, therefore it must have some truth in it”. There commonly is a failure to recognize that Company X is also paying for commercial time on the opposing media network — in truth, Company X doesn’t give a flying fk and is just trying to get your hard earned dollar…

Again, we identify and confirm if the group being targeted is the one I feel most comfortable being labeled as a part of. If messaging says I need to be a fully dyed in the wool believer of all the statements and policies being declared by the drivers of that group, then in order to feel like I have some commonality with the others in this group, and thereby feel safe in this group, I must believe some majority percentage of what is said here and to remain a part of this group I wont raise objections to the specifics of policy or opinion that I dont entirely believe in. To be a part of this group, I need it to be an absolute answer as a binary result to the question “Are you a <x> or not?”. And the media who feeds off of this will do everything in their power to not only get you to align with that perspective but also evangelize and bring you over to an ever more committed viewpoint matching it.

Back in 1979, Jerry Falwell Sr started a movement called “The Moral Majority” — Right aligned Christian organization that opportunistically partnered with the Republican Party to influence policy making and American Presidential elections specifically. It was a minority group when absolute numbers were tallied and compared to the total electorate — maybe 15% max — but with many of the nation’s strongly conservative evangelical and spiritual leaders onboard they became a political lobby group with a lot of power. Even though scandal and a waning interest in maintaining this formal group led to its’ dissolution in 1989, the foundation of what was built still exists today and has impacted many levels of the legislative and executive branches of governments at the federal and state levels across the USA. The financial motives to maintain the influence, along with the full propagation and additional changes to tax acts regarding religious and charitable organizations make this a very lucrative group to be involved with. They had a big hand in helping to stack the Supreme Court and indeed courts across the country with strongly conservative judges, and this eventually allowed for various rulings that affected and pulled the country from a centrist position back to the right even at the risk of infringing on the rights of the individual. Where rulings that happened over the previous 50 years since the Civil Rights Movement were setting momentum towards the left, in a short two year span the conservative majority in the Supreme Court is threatening to reverse the gains made that allow for individual rights to exist in key areas that the Christian Right has found to be offensive to their moral standing.

A long term far reaching plan that had been in the works since the 1980’s is now beginning to bear fruit, with the risk that a Constitutional Convention take place in the near future, and having a 2/3rds majority of the states being in Republican control, a resulting set of constitutional amendments that would take power away from the federal government and put it into the hands of the states — including a rewriting/redefinition of election law that would be more restrictive and result in fewer rights accorded to the individual, depending on your party affiliation of course. It would also potentially give absolute power to the states to assign electoral college delegates and not based on the popular vote. Consider the 2020 election and all the machinations that were happening in an effort to overturn the results. Even though the absolute popular vote was in Biden’s favor, given that the contested states were Republican ruled, these constitutional changes would allow Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona all to send delegates favoring the GOP candidate. I dont really care who you voted for or if you believe it was a stolen election or not (it wasn’t, lets just be clear that 81M is greater than 75M, with very little election fraud discovered in all the recounts executed) — the potential that your state’s government will be responsible for picking the next President of the USA and that it would be going completely against the popular vote is atrocious. It would no longer be 1 vote, 1 voice — you would be surrendering this in favor of a choice by proxy.

I am what I believe is called a liberal conservative, or a conservative liberal if you prefer that view. Being born in and growing up Canadian, honestly for the majority of my life in Canada (34 years) the choice between Liberal, New Democratic Party and “Progressive Conservative” parties was essentially just like two sides of the same coin, balanced on it’s edge on the pivot point of centrism. For the longest time, policies enacted by each of the parties sounded very different due to the language being used to present them, but really they were the same policies for all three parties with only minor differences in how they would be implemented. Canada has Universal Health Care, run by each of the provinces (states for those who can’t make that association) with funding contributed by the Federal Government. Roads are paid for through gasoline and vehicle licensing taxes, welfare and unemployment insurance administered by the federal government with management at the provincial level. This should all sound familiar for most Americans — Medicare may not be Universal Health Care but it is administered federally and managed at the state level. All the other things are essentially the same — just tack on toll roads to help with building new freeways. Sales tax exists in both countries, and indeed in most countries in the world. We aren’t that different…

So why do we have this effective political and idealogical polarization happening here in the USA, and actually this populist nationalist movement happening across the EU and UK as well?

Blame media, since we can literally pinpoint the moment that media began having an outsized influence on politics. Also blame corporate interests — which we can also pinpoint the exact moment when they began having an outsized influence on political views. Both moments were brought to you by the Moral Majority’s influence on the US Supreme Court as well…

The FCC Fairness Doctrine of 1949 was put in place to ensure that if one opinion was expressed in a broadcast or print media, that time was allocated to the other side to rebut and express their opinion equally. This worked amazingly well for decades — until 1987 when a Reagan appointee sponsored the abolishment (assisted by one Rupert Murdoch) of the doctrine in a 4–0 vote at the FCC level. The Federal Appeals Court heard several lawsuits, culminating in a decision upholding the action in February 1989. What this did was immediately make opinion into news reporting, with Conservative Talk Radio being the biggest beneficiary — this was exactly the beginning of the rise of Rush Limbaugh, who then led to Glenn Beck, and a huge influx of shock jock type broadcasting. Fox News began their assault (again, Rupert Murdoch) on impartial journalism, strongly aligning to conservative viewpoints and driving dialog to the right. New legislation intended to restore neutral and balanced journalism and broadcast in media was written several times over the next 25 years — and each time either failed to pass in Congress, or if it did succeed was vetoed by the GOP President at the time (ie. Reagan, Bush Sr). Ongoing efforts continue to fail, and we continue to see this polarized electorate growing in size, and growing more radical. It also leaves open the opportunity for bad actors to take advantage of this situation.

Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission 2009/10 was the next shoe that screwed the country. Until 2010, no corporate money could be used to support a candidate for any office in any election in the country. Somehow, the lawyers argued successfully that a corporation or extremely rich person should have the same rights as an individual, and be allowed to endorse and sponsor financially the campaigns of politicians that would benefit them the most. And that campaign donations or separate organizations created to support the campaigns be deregulated (i.e.: A 5–4 major­ity of the Supreme Court sided with Citizens United, ruling that corpor­a­tions and other outside groups can spend unlim­ited money on elec­tions). This resulted in the creation of PACs and Super PACs with the intent that they can purchase media airtime to promote the candidates of their choosing, outspending the ones that they felt threatened their positions by a significant margin. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United, opening the floodgates of big dark money into politics, and ensuring that your representatives and senators would be more interested in promoting the interests of their big money donors instead of any of us. After all, except for Bernie Sanders who raised a ton of money from individuals like me, no other candidate can compete without money from Exxon, Facebook, etc…

As a bonus reason added here to account for how the system is unfairly rigged — and this works for either party, not only just any one party. Gerrymandering is the bane of fair elections and effective representation in government. Every ten years, following the Census, the redistricting of voters happens. It just so happens that this is effectively run by each of the governments in each state — and they almost 100% of the time take advantage of this to stack the deck in their party’s favor. Florida and Ohio have GOP administrations at the state level, and each have presented new districts that have unfairly skewed to the GOP. Not to be outdone — New York state legislature has submitted their redistricting and it very much gave the Democrats an unfair advantage. What this means is, the ruling party have sliced up the electoral map in such a way as to get the districts divided numerically, but they have redrawn the map in extremely awkward ways so that it literally could appear on the map like a spaghetti noodle — the weirdest geometric shapes that make no sense in the real world. All to give an unfair advantage to one party over the other. Many of these maps end up being challenged in court, but if you remember from earlier — some of the courts have been stacked politically, so you can’t be certain any decision is an unbiased assessment of the work.

The unfortunate thing, and I’ve gone into extreme detail of how each of these words (conservative, liberal) have become labels identified with specific political alignments. Neither of these words, in the english language, is anything more than an adjective— a descriptor of a noun. “That is a conservative estimate of rate of return”, or “you have put on sunscreen very liberally” being proper usages of these words. Its only through artifice that both words have become nouns explicitly describing the political leanings of an individual or group, usually accompanied by other words like “woke”, “fascist”, “communist”, etc. When I describe myself using the terms I did at the beginning — conservative liberal or liberal conservative — I can do that because it describes some aspects of my ethics, morals and being are traditional, steadfast, dignified, restrained in style and expression… but as a person I am generous, open minded, willing to hear opposing viewpoints… or in the second instance — generous, humanist, interpretive, open minded version of a dignified, restrained, responsible, steadfast, dependable, traditional middle aged man. Politically I am neutral, even though I’m outraged at the outright stupidity and blindness of people who want to see something of goodness in a person where that simply doesn’t exist. But given moral and ethical people on both sides, I would be the moderate who looks at the sum total of the policies and arguments to make decisions about my choice.

The battle of heart and mind, balancing the welfare and overall benefit of everyone with the need for responsibility and accountability — I don’t think I’m very much different from the majority of individuals here and really anywhere in the world. To balance the rights of the individual against the need for responsibility in society is the one struggle that no one has come up with a correct answer to, but at the moment too many people who see too little of the big picture are the ones with the power to make decisions that affect everyone from the top to bottom.

Dont be a “one issue” voter — listen to those who have policies that span all the issues. Consider the effects of those policies and choose the person or group where the net positive impact is the greatest for everyone. Use your mind to find the data that shows where each of these differing policies lands in your responsibility graph, but use your heart to determine the intangible impacts overall on society. You might be outraged by the costs of something in the short run, but sometimes when you examine these same costs and the impacts over the medium or long run you’ll find that the benefits vastly outweigh the costs that we have to swallow right now.

This thinking applies to just about everything in life. Environment, health care, energy consumption and conservation, water rights, jobs, education, immigration… the list goes on and on. Dont pick one issue and choose based on that one thing, as you might just be making a huge sacrifice on everything else just to get that one thing you really want today.