Seeking Equality

AMONG THE MANY infuriating proclivities of American conservatives is their tendency to utter banal platitudes in support of lame arguments, then convince themselves and behave as if they have in fact brilliantly articulated some eternal verity. Stuff like: "guns don't kill people, People kill people". One of them once took great joy in reminding me that during the civil rights struggles of the nineteen fifties and sixties, it was often as not democrats, not republicans, who got in the way of achieving legislated civil rights by voting against civil right legislation. And, it was the republican party which was founded as the anti-slavery party, in opposition to the democrats, in 1860. What they fail to mention is that all that was a very long time ago, things have changed, and now, the democratic party, not the republican, is the progressive party, although teh republicans began as a progressive movement, but rapidly got sidetracked by money. you can always anticipate some historically proficient republican to point out that the democrat party was in antebellum times the party of slavery. And so on, blah blah blah. what are they trying to prove, that our modern 1019 version of the republican party is more supportive of cultural diversity and social equality than their democratic opponents? Really? Somehow, I just do not see the MAGA Trump movement, which appears for all the world like a white Christian nationalist mob, being on board with LGBTQ equality, racial, gender, and religious equality, and multiculturalism, anywhere near the extent of the democrats if at all. More to the point, the people who supported rather than oppose slavery, the people who supported rather than oppose civil rights and racial equality, these people were, and still are, the liberals, and the pro slavery anti civil right people were, and still are, the conservatives. The issue is liberal conservative, not republican democrat. Human begin by nature are not inclined to create societies based on equality, or, for that matter, families, groups of friends, or organizations based on equality. Humans by nature are a lot of hierarchical little critters. To created a society, a nation, or a civilization with social equality, which includes economic and political equality, requires social convulsions sufficiently powerful to overthrow the status quo, which in every case is a pyramid, a hierarchy. That's the essence of liberalism, or, as we say nowadays, "progressivism"; the desire to change society by instituting cooperative planning. Conservative prefer tradition, liberals, change. Beyond dispute, the world is forever going to change, one way or another.