While many wouldn't put the Libertarian cause directly in the right-wing today they all sound alike to me. Conservatives are hopping mad at the liberal agenda, President Obama is dictating but they can do nothing about it. The biggest concern in the party is that the American people are still behind the President and their base is weakening. Many are scared, but they can't stem the tide because....they have no ideas of their own to offer to solve any of the problems. This is entirely because conservatives are the party of the status quo. A vote for a conservative politician has increasingly become a vote to do nothing. To elect a Republican in a Democratic Congress, you are just putting someone there to say NO we will not do anything to solve the problem. "Please, let's cut taxes and let people keep their money and then they will solve their own problems"
Despite the obvious fallacies and failures of those policies in generating ecomonic growth, Republicans continue to stress this as the only solution to our growing economic problems...because this is how it has always been. This is how America grew and they are right. Eventhough we are also known for our innovation and technological dominance, America has always been a country who left alot to the individual and limited the power of the government. This is how it has always been.
But this is not a solution to our current problems. What President Obama and the Democratic Congress is proposing is a radical solution to a group of festering problems. Yes, there may be a more direct solution to our economic problems and the Democrats are using this time to push through a large social agenda but these are proposals to make everyone's lives better.
The biggest concern in the fiscal conservative base is not that these proposals won't work...it's that they will work and we will live in an entirely different America. An America where money is not the controlling factor over the basic welfare of the people. Where business works for the general public as much as it works for the people with money. It is the core reason why conservatives can only say NO. A left wing government fundamentally shifts the power from the ones with money to the people with votes....and this is not what this country is all about. America is the king of Capitalism and whoever has the most money controls the most business, which controls lives through jobs, products offered, employer provided health care and pensions. What if this were a more socialist (don't say that word) society? Well without the corrupt parts of either system, fundamentally it would be a country more suited for the whole. As it has failed in Russia, it has thrived in Sweden. Surely in a hybrid system it could work.
But it would be a change. A fundamental change for America. The question is if it meant a better life for the whole, who cares? Maybe America needs a change.