The real difference between Democrats and Republicans
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The Republican party wants to tell you how to live your personal life while they systematically remove all government cooperation in ameliorating the risks this fast paced world creates.The Democrats want the government to leave you to make your own personal decisions while having it help you mitigate the social and economic risk our fast paced world creates.
I might add that both parties would frame this as a belief in freedom. But they have different ways of promoting freedom. It’s the Democrats that want to help you be free, whereas the Republicans are more concerned with punishing you after you screw up.
One party believes in prevention, while the other one believes in punishment.
Think about foreign policy and national security — the Republicans disdain diplomacy, they disdain foreign aid, they sneer at nation-building (until they have first destroyed a nation’s infrastructure), they disdain the idea that we should lead by example (e.g., freedom of speech, separation of church and state).
And the Democrats? Well, if it were up to me, we would be aggressively promoting the conditions under which democracy can flourish. Look at Hezbollah — they have succeeded in capturing the hearts and minds of their constituencies because (by day) they build roads, hospitals and schools. But by night, they are murderous thugs and terrorists. Not surprising — I understand that Al Capone was the most beloved personality in Chicago at one time.
Obviously, America is capable of far, far better than that. But here’s the thing: if we’re going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars re-building a country after we’ve destroyed it, why not spend a fraction of that to promote the conditions of democracy before we declare war in the first place?
