The Divide is Cultural

Listening to some Democrats talk recently helped clarify the political divide in America. I learned that Democrats really can't understand why anybody outside the country club set could possibly support the party that is harmful to their own economic self-interest.

These Democrats have completely missed the point with where average conservative Americans are coming from. Economically, I think many average Americans are upset with the wage depression happening because of outsourcing and illegal immigration. But all they hear from Democrats to deal with that is "tax the rich". And Democrats repeatedly show themselves to be somewhere between unconcerned to promoting illegal immigration.

So economically, conservatives stay with the Republican candidates despite their coziness with big business, because they simply fear the socialist high regulation and taxes on the other side. If Democrats would simply promise to reduce subsidies and perks to big business and talk about "fair trade" in contrast to unfettered "free trade", they might win many on the conservative side who can't find such candidates.

But the big divide isn't over economic issues; Democrats drive away conservative voters who can't stomach their social agenda.

Conservatives are generally pro-life. The Democrat candidate is not just pro-choice. He made the stomach-turning comment about not wanting his daughter to be "punished with a baby" if she made a mistake and got pregnant. He also has been clear in his radical position that babies born alive in botched late-term abortions should be killed. That's a position even nominal pro-choice people find abhorrent. Abortion is not the removal of a glob of tissue that might otherwise develop into a human being; it is a judicially invented "right" for women to have sex with men with whom they don't want to have a baby. (to paraphrase Ann Coulter)

Conservatives believe strongly in self sufficiency and responsibility. The basic idea that money should be confiscated from those who have and given to those who don't after much of it is skimmed by government bureaucrats is abhorrent. Conservative Christians especially feel an obligation as individuals to help the poor, but in a way that helps them get on their feet and self-sufficient, not in the government welfare model that encourages them to become dependent on the State.

Conservatives are upset at the Democrat-supported and ACLU-enforced takeover of public education. It is one thing for schools to implement reasonable policies that limit influence on the students by any particular religion or denomination; it is quite another to implement extreme policies that persecute any form of religious speech in schools while favoring an atheist agenda throughout the curricula.

Conservatives believe the United States is the best country ever founded in the history of the world. They take seriously the founding documents and the constitution, especially valuing freedoms of speech, religion, assembly, to keep and bear arms, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Democrats, and particularly their current presidential candidate, would appoint judges who promise to ignore the Constitution and make law according to their own ideas of "justice".

If Democrats really want to connect with the common man, they need to descend from their elitist circles and find out who the common man is.