As historian Robert Conquest promulgated in his First Law of Politics, “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.”
I have friends and relatives who have voted Democrat since before Clinton, but they also want things for their families and children that my wife and I want for ours. They are mostly professionals, doctors, lawyers, business owners and such, and work hard to provide the best for their kids. They wouldn’t say it out loud, but while politically they claim to want “equity” in society, that isn’t what they want for their kids. As evidenced by sending them to top ranked private schools with the children of other influential people, hiring tutors and getting them into the better colleges and universities, they, like pretty much everyone else, want the best for them.
Hypocrisy?
Yeah, sort of, but that’s the game they know they must play to advantage their kids.
We didn’t have that kind of money when our kids were school age, but within the public school environment, we worked to help our kids get into as many gifted and talented and advanced placement programs as possible (it helped that my wife was a teacher who worked with gifted and talented kids), so while we didn’t have the opportunity to send them to the hoity toity private schools, we did the best we could with what we had because we wanted the best for our kids, too.
I read with some interest this morning, an article about a Democrat supporting family living in New York, the parents of which are also professionals (doctors), who were leaving New York City due to the elimination of the merit selection process for certain high performing schools in the city. The grade point meritocracy is being replaced by a lottery system with the objective of “diversity”, not producing top ranked students regardless of race or economic status.
Everything for which these people have sacrificed and worked to be able to give their kids a leg up is being stripped from them in the name of “equity” by a political party they support, allegedly because it isn’t fair that these kids have parents who worked hard so they can afford to help their own kids. It seems that working hard is now racist and unfair.
As this diversity, equity and inclusion ethos moves across the leftist enclaves, it is going to be interesting to see what happens.
My guess is that, once again, leftist liberalism will be shed under the glare of public awareness, that what they have claimed to support for their entire lives but have been largely shielded from, is not workable for them and they never really supported it in the first place.
The first clue has been the bursting of the massive virtue signaling about so-called sanctuary city status that was caused by a few buses and planeloads of illegal immigrants showing up in those citadels of diversity only to be rejected, and keep in mind, these numbers showing up are a miniscule percentage of the actual numbers with which the border states and cities are dealing.
Let’s understand that the Biden Administration has been running their version of Air America, call it Air Alien, for a long time, contracting with charter airlines to ferry planeloads of illegal aliens from the border to small airports around the country. He has sent them to Florida, California and New York, with scant media coverage (except for Fox News, that actually still believes in real reporting).
That never bothered the mayors of these sanctuary cities – as long as it was only Fox News and it was kept out of the major left wing media outlets they were cool with it because their constituents didn’t know about the midnight landings at the Westchester Regional Airport, but as soon as the buses started showing up at uncomfortable places and a planeload of “migrants” landed in Martha’s Vineyard, it got too embarrassing to ignore.
As long as it was Manhattan, Kansas dealing with in influx of illegal immigrants, not an issue, but when it came to Manhattan in New York, things got very real, really fast.
That’s all it took for mayors and governors to start squealing like stuck pigs, declaring “emergencies”, wanting to call out the National Guard, yelling for more federal funding, and even starting their own caravans to larger cities - like the Democrat governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, and the mayor of Denver, Democrat Michael Hancock, just did.
The long and short of it is that while the American Left and Right are on separate poles politically, in our actions taken where it matters – our families – we are not all that different because this isn’t a political issue, it is a simple matter of what we want and work toward for those we love the most.
I’m not proposing that political conservativism is the best way to go because I have come to intensely dislike the things that go with anything political.
As I have said several times, I looked hard at running for office a couple of times and discovered that the things that are required to be successful – the big money raising, the ass kissing, the compromising of principles – are just not something I am prepared to do. Modern politics are nothing like Mr. Smith goes to Washington. Today, Mr. Smith couldn’t get out of the gate.
What I am saying is that in life, conservative principles work - and judging by actions rather than words, more people live by them than will ever admit it.
That is the ultimate hypocrisy.
Thank you for articulating one of the things I've been saying the longest, which is that statistically EVERYONE in the USA, with exceptions too few to bother with, lives the way everyone assumes the Republican party wants them to.
Nobody anywhere *wants* his son to be a homosexual; no one wants his daughter to be promiscuous and abort her children. Nobody wants his money stolen and wasted on trains to nowhere, foreign money laundering, or bums that won't work. Everyone wants to be left alone in his religious beliefs, be they Roman Catholicism or stupid tree and planet worship. Everyone wants the crime in HIS neighborhood vigorously prosecuted.
The people who vote for the most part -- until recently, anyway -- disagreed about the best ways of achieving good results. With one party actively swinging a wrecking ball at everything in range, it's time to make common cause with those who voted for that party who can be persuaded.
That said, the compromise you think is necessary might not be. Somebody ought to drive this point home during a campaign, and instead of playing on the stupidity and gullibility of guilty white liberals and resentful minorities, use this "dirty little secret" to get people to think differently about their own interests.