Originally Posted by
steelreserve
It is the social liberals who are the problem. Fiscal liberals do not bother me nearly as much, if we are simply talking about the old-style ones who favor more government spending on programs to ostensibly "help" people. I may think that is irresponsible and very naive, but not really "evil."
The problem is that the social liberals - the ones who want to use the government to strongarm people into conforming with their ideas about how we "should" behave - they have taken over, and at the same time their ideas have gotten crazier and crazier.
Fiscal liberalism is now no longer about the benevolent use of public funds for the greater good. It is a tool to punish those who do not conform to social liberalism, including simply by being too successful or belonging to the wrong race. Social liberalism has seeped into every corner of it and poisoned it. For the most part, fiscal liberalism has lost its original purpose of charity and inclusion, and has taken on the social liberals' purpose of revenge. Maybe there are some who, call themselves "liberals" who still believe in the 1990s style of liberalism that was a more pragmatic discussion of public policy, not an angry rant against imagined boogeymen. Those are the ones who you could actually have a reasonable discussion with and find some common ground with, but they are rarer and rarer.
At the same time, the social liberals have changed drastically from their perfectly reasonable and honorable MLK-style goals of giving everybody fair treatment and respecting (or at least tolerating) each other's differences, giving each other space to live and let live. That died a long time ago, and now has been replaced simply with a hateful drive to methodically tear down anyone who is not a member of one of their favored groups, or who questions their social engineering plans. Modern social liberalism is not about equality, it is about conformity, and it is filled with attempts to psychotically control the language, science, education, culture, the economy, and anything else they can get their hands on - all in the name of forcing compliance. Inevitably, that has horribly destructive effects not only on social matters, but on economic and public policy matters that it touches as well. It is a sick ideology and I want no part of it.