Both conservatives and liberals want the same thing, a safe place to live their lives and thrive. The difference is in approach. Conservatives want that process mediated at a local level, particularly by themselves. They want the maximum freedom to be in charge of how they conduct their lives and business so they can ensure their own safety and success, and a minimum of intervention. Liberals want the process to be mediated at the level of the state. They want the maximum control and structures and interventions to ensure a safe space for themselves. Both pursue the same end, but disagree about how best to achieve it. Socially, or individually. Freedom or control.
It’s strange that on many social and moral issues, though, their approach is almost the opposite. Liberals are highly individualistic and non-interventionalist. Although lately the left expressea it in a way that leans heavily on social pressure and legal intervention and a lot of top down moralizing (about how we shouldn’t moralize or intervene). I think maybe it’s because they see themselves as fighting convention or the establishment or some idea of a constructed nature they insist is not actual nature (which they would argue is actually libertarian and permissive). They’re very clear, when it comes to sex and pregnancy and drugs and race and gender, that we should very much be allowed to do whatever we want with our own bodies. They’re sovereign libertarians when it comes to our persons. But they want lots of intervention everywhere else, including in interactions between persons, not just as a moral code but as a legal code, so even how you react to someone’s hair is mediated by law. On a social level, they want to criminalize a lot that conservatives wouldn’t and decriminalize a lot of things on a personal level that conservatives wouldn’t.
Conservatives generally don’t seem to want a lot of laws mediating how we interact with one another. But they are more in favor of restrictions on what we do with ourselves. Whether it’s crime or drugs or pregnancy or gender or sex, they do think there should be restrictions on what the individual can do with themselves.
Both are, in my opinion, riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. Both are merely halves of a whole that we actually need a balance of. And the only safe way to ensure that balance, apparently, is for about half of people to be born prejudiced one way and the other half the other. Now and then one side gains dominance, and you get the pathological version of that viewpoint, but in my opinion the gridlock of the tension between differing approaches is actually the sweet spot of human society and survival.
You want to run that line between despotism and anarchy. You want the needs and freedoms of the individual respected, and you need the needs and goals of the group respected. If either side ever really succeeds at defeating the other, they will only do so by destroying or ignoring half the population, and the result will be an imbalanced tyranny or anarchy that will eventually result in abuse, decadence, degeneration, and eventual weaking and ruin. All societies are in a continuous cycle of it, of degeneration or regeneration, a movement toward balance or away from it. I think both political sides are capable of producing tyranny and anarchy in their own ways, possibly simultaneously. Because of the odd inconsistency noted above. Liberals would produce a tyrannical anarchy, while conservatives would produce an anarchic tyrrany.
Our country has often had good leaders and media figures who at least paid lip service to the idea that we actually need and need to respect both types of people. And in the past the distance between them had not grown so great. Now, the distance is reaching too great a polarity for the two to interact in a common balance.
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