COVID & the Differences Betwixt Conservatives & Liberals

 

If you vote for a federal Conservative politician you get tax cuts for the wealthy, slavish devotion to the oil industry, racist abuse of the First Nations, and support for imperialist wars. If you vote for a federal Liberal politician you get tax cuts for the wealthy, slavish devotion to the oil industry, slightly less racist abuse of the First Nations, and support for imperialist wars.

The main thrusts of the two capitalist parties are basically the same because they're capitalist parties. Capital puts profit before people. It puts profit before the health of the environment. It puts short-term benefit for the wealthy, powerful few ahead of long-term sustainability and sanity. Capitalism will happily use war and other forms of violence to impose its will. To the extent that parties embrace capitalism and are dominated by capitalism, to that extent will they pursue similar ends.

It seems to me though that Liberals (or Democrats in the USA) are in some ways qualitatively different from Conservatives (or US Republicans). Despite both of them having a penchant for ridiculous conspiracy theories (Trump-Russia Collusion for Democrats or "Stop the Steal" for Republicans) you will find that Liberals respond to things like unchecked police violence against unarmed citizens differently from the way Conservatives respond to it. The reason that I can talk to liberals is because when they hear about racist cops killing unarmed minorities and getting away with it, they're appalled, whereas conservatives will approve of these killings and say that the victims had it coming to them. (This won't stop conservatives from bloviating about their passionate devotion to individual freedom and their resistance to authoritarianism.)

But what do liberal governments do? In the USA they continue to arm the police with surplus military equipment. They continue to enforce racist drug laws. They pay mere lip-service to their voting base but perpetuate the problem. In Canada, Liberal Dalton McGuinty did nothing about out-of-control goons on the Ottawa police force. It was McGuinty who (in the dead of night) stripped Canadians of their Charter rights during the G-20 conference in Toronto in 2010. Justin Trudeau kept stephen harper's Orwellian surveillance legislation with very little reform.

But the differing responses of conservative and liberal voters and governments to COVID-19 shows the important, real-world differences between these two views of the world. For the most part, liberals accept reality, acknowledge how serious it is, and their governments apply policies that reflect this. Conservatives deny reality, invent ludicrous conspiracy theories to justify their denial of reality and their governments pander to these delusions. The real-world consequences of this can be seen in the death-rates and economic turmoil which are higher in conservative run jurisdictions and lower in liberal governed areas. 

So, yes, in important ways, liberals are "the lesser of two evils." But liberals still embrace capitalism and their minds remain infected by the anti-human values of capitalism. And (as I demonstrated yesterday in their mewling rationalizations about Justin Trudeau's contempuous response to Canada's first National Day For Truth & Reconciliation) they are quite prepared to engage in blatant tribalism and to defend their political parties from justified criticism. 

Socialists, left-libertarians, whoever identifies as farther into the lower-left quadrant of the political compass than mainstream liberal parties must recognize the limitations of liberalism and act accordingly. If there's still too much evil in their "lesser-evilism" it's best to cut them off and focus on building better alternatives.