An old friend of mine who is a conservative said she knew that I am against Trump, but she wondered what I am for. I am glad to answer. What I am for? I can't speak for all liberals, but I can say what I believe in (this is a longer than normal post) - I believe in:
Balance and government.
I have a deep and passionate love for America. Patriotism is the love of America and what America stands for. Here are some of my deeply held beliefs.
I believe in capitalism. But you can't have capitalism without some Socialism. What I mean by that is that if you have capitalism without socialism you end up with fascism, which is where we are heading very fast today. That is, free markets without regulations and laws becomes crony capitalism, which becomes monopolies, which becomes Oligarchy and Plutocracy, which becomes fascism - right wing authoritarian dictatorship. Free markets without socialism ends up with child labor, jobs and products that kill workers and users, toxic deadly pollution, and an endless dis-empowering of the labor force into more and more subservience and helplessness.
On the flip side, socialism without capitalism becomes communism, becomes Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Soviet Union etc. - left wing authoritarian dictatorship. The 20th Century was littered with the crushed peoples under Communist monstrosities.
Without the balance of both capitalistic free markets and socialistic regulations and oversight you end up with an aristocracy of either the Left or the Right and the people become crushed. Today's Trumpsters are way out of balance and see no role for government other than the military (an exaggeration but it makes the point).
I believe in environmental purity and protection. Today's corporate culture is so dependent on short term quarterly results and thinking that without the force of government regulation and enforceable law the environmental concerns are never considered.
I believe in diversity and opportunity for all races and genders. JFK and LBJ enforced the Civil Rights laws in the '60s against the fierce opposition of Southern Democrats and with the help of northern Republicans. LBJ said he would lose the South for the Democrats for generations. He lost more than that since Richard Nixon implemented his infamous Southern Strategy in 1968 and switched the South from the white supremacist Democratic South to the white supremacist Republican South.
I believe in women's empowerment. America is moving out of the centuries of Male Chauvinism into a new era of feminine empowerment, and the Democrats are leading the way, especially by empowering women to take control over their reproductive lives and make their own choices about if and when to get pregnant, stay pregnant, and raise children.
I believe in diplomacy. That means not gutting the State Department and driving nearly the entire experienced and knowledgeable diplomats out of the State Department.
I believe in Public Schools, especially for the middle and lower classes. I have no problem with selected and qualified charter schools, but I have a very big problem with unregulated private schools - the iconic symbol of which was the Donald Trump scam of Trump University. We don't need Trump University type scams showing up in our K - 12 education system.
I believe in an America that leads the world in human rights and the spread of democracy. We used to be an imperfect "Shining Light on a Hill" as extolled by Reagan and W. We have become a screw you, we're out for Number One only (Number One is supposedly America, but is actually only Trump himself, but I don't expect the Trumpsters to see that)
I believe in free trade. I can't think of any one stupider thing, economically, that any uninformed and willfully ignorant president can do than initiate and accelerate a trade war with our trading partners.
I believe in the Free Press, and by that I mean the actual press, the imperfect press that makes mistakes and corrects itself, the press that practices actual journalism with checked and cross-checked sources - in other words, the mainstream media.
I believe in the professional intelligence services like the FBI and CIA and NSA. I believe when all 17 intelligence agencies in America say that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election for the purpose of destroying Americans' belief in democracy and put Trump into the White House they were telling the truth - making conclusions based upon the evidence of their investigations. I believe that the notion that the intelligence services are stacked with Socialist or Democratic operatives is total nonsense. It disturbs me greatly that all Trump has to do is repeat his nonsensical propaganda over and over (that there is a liberal cabal out to get him) and there are way too many Americans that believe the target of the investigations rather than believe in the integrity of the investigators - the investigations are ongoing and not yet concluded, but isn't it telling that Trump and his Trumpsters are becoming ever more agitated in their attempts to shut down the investigations?
I believe in the beneficial role of taxation and government. The government is absolutely vital to the preservation of civilization in America. Without government there is no rule of law, only the rule of billionaires, which is why I am so appalled by Trump's efforts to gut the government, gut the rule of law, gut legal system, gut the regulations, and put the foxes in charge of the hen-house.
By the way, I do not believe that America is some kind of church. God bless my Christian friends and I wish them great success in converting others into joining their Churches, but I do not want America to become their Church - that is a violation of the first amendment which gives each American the freedom of Religion and freedom from Religion - both.
In other words, since Trump and his Trumpster extremists are against almost all that I believe in, I have stopped being a Republican, stopped being a conservative, and am adamantly opposed to Trump and the extremist Right Wing that put him in power (with a little help from their good friends in Russia)
By the way, if you are not familiar with Nixon's Southern strategy, Nixon's Southern Strategy was explicitly laid out at the end of Republican consultant Lee Atwater's life when he unburdened his soul and said:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968
you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like,
uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re
getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all
these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a
byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to
cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a
hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
(Please forgive me for using the N-word, but the above quote needs to be very shocking because the racism itself is very shocking and the direct appeal of the Republican Party to racists is also very shocking)
One final thought, apparently the right wing echo chamber must be promoting the notion of liberal corruption. I am sure anyone can find anecdotal evidence of liberals who are corrupt, but given that the Obama administration went eight years without a scandal, indictment, or conviction speaks pretty loudly. Whereas the Trump organization has about numerous corruption scandals and actual indictments from the Mueller investigation alone so far - hard to keep track there are so many.
