waauw wrote:Hey, I'm a european and I'm a firm believer in the liberal set of values. However I've noticed that on the internet there seem to be a lot of americans using "liberalism" as an insult.
Therefor I would like to ask americans here to tell me why there are so many americans who hate liberalism? I can only assume it's not the same reason why some europeans hate liberalism. In europe it's people looking from a socialist perspective who hate liberalism, however the US being so anti-socialist I guess it has another reason?
You have to go back to a bit before the time Reagan was elected. That was when there was this group that called itself the "Moral Majority" became a laughing stock because they were truly anything but a majority. Except.... shortly after that you began to see a very serious, but subtle shift in how things were referred to. Unions were a threat to the big business "powers that be", the "establishment", if you will, but average Americans were very pro-union, so tromping on union rights was a bad political move. HOWEVER. a lot of those union members were church-going family folks, so touting "family values" did work, and that is what they did. Initially they denounced homosexuality, but that did not take as well as some would have liked. They succeeded in spades by opposing abortion and being "anti drugs". (its in paranthesis because a lot of that "war" actually turned a tolerable situation into something downright nasty, but it played well outside of those areas where kids schools were being sprayed with chemicals and public forests were seeing Vietnam-style booby traps).
We also saw a change in the view of immigration. Suddenly the focus on "America, the land of immigrants" became "America, home to a bunch of
illegal aliens". "Border Security" became an issue -- never mind that the real breaches threatening us had little to do with Mexicans wanting to get jobs here.
The environment was more nuanced, but we had just gone through a large period of perceived deprivation, overstated warnings of doom due to the loss of oil... and, well, the world did not end when the teens of the sixties grew up and had kids of their own. IN fact, a lot of them grew up and decided they LIKED big houses and stock portfolios. Unlike in Europe a lot of the US economy really does and has still depended upon not just the use, but production of natural resources like timber. Prices of paper escalated, Japanese needs drove the cost of timber up and there was a boom in logging. There were a few blips, like the spotted owl bit (really about salmon and huge areas of land denuded, but that's another whole story). Out west, the issue of timber was heavily contentious during this period -- and by "contentious", I mean death threats, a few actual killings and a lot of general nastiness.
Anyway, the sum is that a group of political minds bending conservative decided that changing the actual language used would convince people to go conservative.,, and it worked.
