Liberal or Conservative

Whether conservative or liberal, the growing partisanship in American politics illustrates a stark need for foundational changes to occur. Looking at the Founding Fathers and their primary focus in creating the American system makes the smaller debate over liberal or conservative factions moot. In full, the current debate between a conservative or liberal political focus detracts from the ability to move forward as a nation. Recent events illuminate the overall political reduction that takes place when deciding on an ultimate decision between strictly liberal or conservative policies.

- Liberal or conservative factions seemed to rise to power in varying generations. Especially within the twentieth century, each presidential administration seems to undue the policies of the previous President. For the most part, larger national trends often mirror this presidential shift as each generation lays claim to specific societal movements. The overly used, the grass is always greener, could not be more true than when applied to the American political scene. Consistently, the independent factions in America seem to decide elections as both political parties, either conservative or liberal, require this swing-vote to secure victory.

- Possibly the best example of the persistent choosing between liberal or conservative factions dates back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. After five consecutive terms of Democratic rule, the nation underwent a conservative trend in the 1950s. This back-and-forth continues throughout much of American history as the same process would occur after the Kennedy-Johnson reign, to the Nixon-Ford years.

- Although as a nation America has maintained its integral strength in world affairs, many domestic concerns eat away at the overall success. Rather than approaching policy in a comprehensive fashion, the administration in charge often peace-meals together a weak example of their desired goal and hopes that future administrations will bolster their attempts. Many of these policies lack actual political consideration, but due to the partisanship in politics, no issue is left with out political debate.

- This constant fighting between conservative or liberal parties makes any instrumental change impossible. Obama’s recent victory left a glistening impression of the American political scene, but less that just a year after, his administration appears inactive and on the verge of dissolution. Rather than working through change, the focus on American conservative or liberal parties makes the losing party hold out and simply say no. This disallows any type of beneficial policy and hurts the nation in a notable way.

Moving forward to a beneficial American political system, the split between America–liberal or conservative–needs to be repaired in a big way. Either through the induction of a successful third party, or more action-taken place by dissatisfied voters, something needs to shake up the stagnation of the American government.

Democracy

Right now our country facing the worst economic downfall since the great depression, we are involved in two wars and unemployment numbers are rising on a monthly basis. The democratic party has the majority in both houses of congress and the country is depending on them to fix these problems. It is frustrating that the republican party that helped create many of our current problems are now pointing fingers and claiming to be economic and foreign policy wizards. We need democracy now. We need the democratic system that our founding fathers implemented at the start of our country to work again.

- The democratic party needs to realize that it is the majority. Bi-partisanship is very important, but if the republican party is going to refute every policy that the President proposes, the democratic party should use it’s majority to implement the President’s agenda.

- Our democracy didn’t work so well during the Bush administration. President Bush vetoed many of the democratic proposals during his 8 years in office and we now see where that got us. President Bush exercised his power in deregulating the markets, giving tax cuts to already wealthy corporations who shipped jobs overseas and growing the federal government in very dangerous ways. He also practiced globalization in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regardless of whether you think we should have invaded these countries or not, the way in which we went about these invasions is looked at by many experts as morally unjustified. All of these actions were not due to democracy or proper use of our democratic system. Instead they were implemented by an administration that acted as a dictatorship. The Bush administration went against the laws of the United Nation in order to invade Iraq. They also appointed officials to change the definition of the word “torture” in order to make their torture policies legal. President Bush also put into law the biggest invasion of American’s privacy with The Patriot Act.

- President Obama’s critics claim he is a socialist. However they did not object to the Bush administration expanding government more than any other administration in our nation’s history. Critics of the current administration claim they are spending too much, but they were rather silent after President Bush spent the same amount as all of the preceding presidents combined by the end of his first term. These statistics are relevant because for 8 years, our democracy failed. It was not about what was right or wrong. Instead republicans saw all of their views as right and were against anything and everything democratic.

It is now time for government to start working in the interest of it’s people. The 2008 presidential election saw the biggest voter turnouts in our nation’s history. This has to mean something. Maybe it means that the American people want our democracy to work again. Maybe it means that the American people are tired of politics as usual. Whatever it means, this is an important time in our country and the world is watching to see what we do with this opportunity.