I’m going to ask you a series of questions that will help determine where you fall on the ideological spectrum from a survey that I recently found.
Do you believe that the poor need to be taken care of? Do you believe that homosexuals should have the same basic rights as heterosexuals? Do you believe that everyone should have access to health care?
Chances are that just about everyone answered “Yes” to all three of those questions regardless of ideology. However, liberals will make you believe that conservatives would not answer “Yes.” After all, these are the type of questions that liberals will ask in polls, and then they will trumpet the results as proof of a left-leaning electorate.
It is easy to answer “Yes” to those questions because they do not really ask anything. The questions are extremely general, but they contain the right buzz words that liberals like.
For instance, the liberals claim that conservatives harm the poor, despite the fact that after generations of liberal policies to combat poverty, we are spending more than ever on assistance. Thus, any question about helping the poor is considered liberal. A question that would truly separate liberals from conservatives is: Do you think that the poor need to be taken care of by government assistance, or should government assistance be reserved for those that are truly in need?
Liberals also claim that conservatives are against homosexual rights, though they have yet to provide an example of a Constitutional right that homosexuals do not have. Instead, liberals are trying to barbarize conservatives similar to the way that communists were barbarized during the Cold War through propaganda. Liberals are trying to align a coalition on a single issue by falsely claiming that homosexuals do not have the same Constitutional rights as heterosexuals, despite the fact that marriage is not a Constitutional issue.
As for the access to health care question, like the poor question, it is far too general to really be decisive. Liberals want people to believe that they are the only ones that support access to health care, which they have generally succeeded in doing. However, the difference on health care between liberals and conservatives is not on access, but rather on forcing people to pay for others’ health care.
The truth of the matter is that it is easy to be a liberal, especially on a college campus. For college students, most of what conservatives fight for, such as lower taxes, more incentives for businesses, etc., are issues that do not impact current students. Meanwhile, things that liberals fight for align with the perfect, ideal fantasy land that sounds great but does not actually work when fit into policy.
This can be seen by the large percentage of college aged votes that Obama received in 2008, despite not offering any concrete ideas on policies for students and the economy. Interestingly, now that many of those 2008 voters have graduated into a bad economy that Obama was supposed to fix for them, they are beginning to lean toward Romney.
All in all, the liberal agenda is based more on fantasy than reality, which explains why liberal policies just do not work but also why it is easy to be a liberal.
Trenton Winford is a junior public policy leadership major from Madison.
