I am a conservative. A true conservative. These are the things I want to conserve:
– Social Security payments, so that the elderly are guaranteed financial help when they stop working.
– Medicaid, so that poor people will not die for want of medical help.
– Medicare, so that older people are cared for in their vulnerable years.
– for those who qualify for neither Medicare or Medicaid, an affordable insurance system that gives them treatment without the need for them to declare bankruptcy.
– good education for all, without regard to geography or the color of the child’s skin, so that every boy and girl starts off with an equal opportunity in the world and an ability to think for themselves.
– Oversight of financial institutions, so that we will never have to go through the dual slumps that started in 1929 and 2008, caused by the deliberate decision to have a free-for-all.
– a well-funded government that keeps an eagle eye on food quality and safety.
– government that will insist that there is not only a fair rate of graduated tax on everyone according to his means, but enforces it.
– A legal system that is affordable for all and is not just the province of the rich.
– Medicare, so that older people are cared for in their vulnerable years.
– a society where there is no excessive gap between rich and poor, and where the middle class is not getting poorer year by year.
– A political system that is responsive to every person old enough to vote, and not just to those with enough money to buy influence.
Those who call themselves “conservative” are not conservative at all. On the contrary they wish to abolish many aspects of Western civilisation we value, and, far from conserving anything, are by their actions promoting plutocracy,
(Rule by the super-rich), and thus undermining the democracy they purport to support and the Constitution they affect to revere.
Absolutely every sentence is true and worthy, to say nothing of Epicurean.
Here’s another personal and sad truth: for most of my life, I thought those human social goods were what the political systems of West countries actually sought. It’s only in the last two decades that I realized each and every point you mentioned has to be struggled for against an oligarchy. Worse, that oligarchy is increasingly weaponized.
It is a creeping coup, and the public haven’t realized it yet. How could they? The media is overwhelmingly controlled by the coup-sters. The Civil War resurrected and fought by other means. Epicurus would be flabbergasted that we have allowed it to get so bad and so uncivilized.