Do minorities believe liberals encourage a culture of dependency and victimhood?
No. Helping people in need is what a decent society does. We know that Republicans are opposed to social programs and instead worship the rich while waiting for something to trickle down on them. The conservative/Republican narrative regarding African Americans is highly insulting and includes terminology that is apparently meant to be degrading. Republicans try to play to their racist, bigoted base by condemning and ridiculing African Americans for voting for the more liberal, progressive ideas of the Democrats. Conservatives have always been our enemies. They fought against the abolition of slavery and they fought against civil rights for African Americans. (And before some fool says Republicans fought for those things, the good Republicans were obviously not conservatives.) In any case, today’s Republicans realize that minorities detest their party for its backward, regressive, racist and bigoted agenda, policies and adherents. While it is true that 27% of African Americans live below the poverty line, that means that the 73%, the vast majority, do not. The claim of “handouts” as a motivating factor is not only insulting but it has no basis in actual fact. In any case, we will not be intimidated from advocating for programs to help those in poverty just because Republicans feel that poor people are worthy of disdain and ridicule. If Republicans were deliberately trying to alienate minorities, they couldn’t be doing a better job.
Why are liberals and democrats the only people who care about the poor?
The primary difference between conservatives and progressives is their attitude toward change. Conservatives approach change as skeptics, progressives as enthusiasts.Liberalism, the concept of protection of personal liberty from government encroachment, is orthogonal to the conservative-progressive axis. One can be a conservative and protect an institution that enhances personal liberty (e.g. the Bill of Rights). One may be progressive and advocate for changes that infringe on personal liberty (free speech “zones”, gun control, etc).The Democrat Party has been following the blueprint laid down in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society for half a century. Look at the inner city barrios and ghettos. Take a good look. Then look at the trend lines for unemployment, crime, and poverty in those same locales. Then tell me again how much Democrats care about the poor, when their policies simply lead to more poverty.
Is it true that conservatives advocate independence and progressives advocate dependence?
Your OP is doing what is called “splitting” - attempting to divide the wildly complex ideological landscape into two camps - as a strawman. As such, you are just as guilty as those who cleave the lines of society for their own profit.The plain fact is, we are all dependent on one another in some form. I’m dependent on the gasoline and groceries arriving to the market on a regular basis, and others depend on me to get things done for them. We are an inter-dependent society and that’s fine - it works.Where it doesn’t work is when people draw lines and cleave the society’s dependency-fabric in unhealthy ways. For example, in SE LA in the early 90’s was a riot executed by the liberal/left leaving whole sections of the town burned to the ground. People who lived there depended on those businesses - now what? The same thing happened in Ferguson, Missouri, and at UC Berkley. Liberal/left folks who cleave the societal dependency lines to get what they want. In Ferguson especially, people who didn’t live there came to protest and set fires. The real residents lived with the aftermath.It’s unhealthy and irrational.The people who came to protest were called protestors. In Baltimore the protestors were allowed to do all kinds of bad things - because they were protesting.No, they are criminals. Protestors protest. Criminals loot, burn, and hurt people. Let’s not get confused.Criminals act to break dependencies. Law-abiding people act to build healthy dependencies and nurture dependent relationships in the marketplace. This is healthy economic activity.While it is true the “independence” of a person is largely associated with their capacity to take care of themselves, they are not living on an island. Independence is best understood in context of dependence. Even the folks who wrote the Declaration of Independence recognized how dependent they would be upon each other once the British hit the road.
Are most Americans liberals or conservatives?
I have found that if you talk to conservatives we are more alike than you think. I agree with the other poster that it is the party system that polarize people. For instance, I haven’t met anyone who disagrees that gun laws should be enforced and certain people forfeit their right to gun ownership (felons, mentally ill, domestic abusers, terrorists). It’s just that one side misrepresents that the other side “wants to take all the guns away” and then people stop talking about it.I would say the majority of democrats do not believe that the welfare state is a solution to poverty. People should be lifted out of poverty so they don’t need handouts. This is a misconception that democrats want everyone to get “free stuff.” The real disagreement is actually about how to solve poverty, and the real conversation is never had because politicians polarize.I don’t think the majority of Americans are right wing or left wing. I honestly don’t. I believe that our party and our politicians make us believe that about the other side so they win.
Don't Communist Chants and Liberal Chants sound exactly the same?
Well if you read your history you can see that many Communist takeovers started with a bunch of people shouting slogans that were the same or similar to today's Liberals. They claimed to be there for the down trodden workers and they claimed to fight against the rich and would redistribute the wealth to the poor. Sound familiar? Liberals today still use slogans as part of their propaganda but have extended the class warfare to include gender warfare and race warfare as well. And just like the communists they picked certain groups to proclaim as perpetual oppressors. In the past it was the wealthy. Today it is white Christian conservative men. Granted given that Liberals have a few splinter groups such as feminists, LGBT,and civil rights activists they tend not to attack white Christian Conservative men on just one front. The feminists attack men, The civil rights people attack whites, LGBT's tend to attack Christians as do rank and file Liberals. So you get a mix and mash of propaganda and it gives them cover as well. And like communists of the past they claim to be just out to help the little guy but their ideas never help the little guy in fact it tends to actually hold those groups back. Do Women, Blacks, Gays in general seem any happier than they did in say the 60's? They don't seem happier to me. And that is because they go willingly into a form of oppression that merely tells them they are free. It's the exact same thing the communists did. They separated the people from those things that gave them hope like Religion and family and traded it for the lie that they would be better off without them. And the same thing is happening now in America and other western nations. A communist leader once said something like. "America will not be defeated with bullets and bombs but we will defeat it from within."