David Leonhardt wrote a very interesting piece for The New York Times highlighting the resistance to change in America. Each time this nation tries to better itself, so-called conservatives who are profiting from America’s failures try to scare gullible people into keeping the status quo. Here are a few examples.
“We are against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program,” said one prominent critic of the new health care law. It is socialized medicine, he argued. If it stands, he said, “one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” — the critic was Ronald Reagan offering his prediction on Medicare
The federal income tax, a senator from New York said a century ago, might mean the end of “our distinctively American experiment of individual freedom.” Social Security was actually a plan “to Sovietize America,” a previous head of the Chamber of Commerce said in 1935. The minimum wage and mandated overtime pay were steps “in the direction of Communism, Bolshevism, fascism and Nazism,” the National Association of Manufacturers charged in 1938.
After Brown v. Board of Education outlawed school segregation in 1954, 101 members of Congress signed a statement calling the ruling an instance of “naked judicial power” that would sow “chaos and confusion” and diminish American greatness. A decade later, The Wall Street Journal editorial board described civil rights marchers as “asking for trouble” and civil rights laws as being on “the outer edge of constitutionality, if not more.” (Sounds similar to today’s conservatives whining about judicial activism when they lose)
Why do conservatives always exaggerate and get it wrong on almost every big, important issue?
