Right Lets in the Light While the Left Closes the Blinds

If liberals get their way, our lives change

I tell my liberal friends that if I get my way, they get to live their lives the way they choose, but if they get their way, my life changes according to their view of how I should live. The liberals passed Obamacare, and my life changed. Now, I’m a criminal if I don’t purchase a product as prescribed and defined by the federal government. In the United States of America?

Where has socialism worked?

There exists another similar example of the left-right difference. The more people learn about progressivism and socialism the more they reject them. To the contrary, the more people learn about the U. S. Constitution and individual liberty the more they realize it is the best way for the most people to experience human flourishing—to pursue their happiness.

Here’s an example from the left:

Left says Americans are stupid

Do you remember when the now infamous MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber said, “Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically, that was really, really critical for the thing [Obamacare] to pass?” He also lauded the lack of transparency during the process of passing the misnamed, Affordable Care Act, for being essential to it become law.

And now, an example from the right:

Right says Americans are smart

From the Federalist Papers Project, “The founders knew that only an educated populace, jealous of their rights, would be strong enough to resist the usurpation of their liberties by government. Today many people know nothing of our true history, or the source of our rights.” One of those founders, James Madison, wrote, “a people who mean to be their own governors must be armed with the power that knowledge gives.” And Democracy in America author, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that Americans (in the mid-19^th Century), in general, knew far more about government and political issues than did their European cousins (and, I’d argue, than their progeny in the 21st Century).

Battle disagreeable speech with more speech, not less

To sum it up, the left seems to be okay with weaponizing ignorance (or stupidity) in the war against liberty while the right tends to encourage enlightenment. The left seeks to shut down speech it doesn’t agree with by calling it “hate speech” while the right urges more speech to combat speech with which they disagree. Which of these approaches seems more quintessentially American? Then again, the right is not out to fundamentally change the United States of America; they’re out to change it back.