For the thoughtful reader notice how the right can only project an often imaginary or exaggerated characteristic on the left. The right has no answers and if it were not for liberals they would have to look at their ideology's lack of any real accomplishment.
Shriner's is conservative according to one conservative but consider it helps handicapped and injured children but our government which helps a great many more people in all conditions is bad. If you can reconcile those thoughts in the same head, you can perform any ideological magic. And that really is the problem for any rigid ideology, when the real world intrudes it becomes someone else's fault. That sort of simplistic thinking makes life easy, finger pointing has always been the weak man's crutch; note too, no one answered my perennial question below.
PS The greatest progressive achievement was social security, followed by medicare and voting rights for all. I have asked for years for a conservative accomplishment equivalent to any of these and never ever get an answer. I wonder why. asked here: http://www.usmessageboard.com/healt...-conservatives-and-empathy-4.html#post4049757
"Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things...every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor." Matt Santos
I think if you do a careful evaluation of history you will find that it was mostly modern American conservatives, not liberals, who brought all these into reality. There is no way that FDR could be described as a 'liberal' under the modern definition of the term. He had no way to look ahead to see how future congressional leaders would corrupt and misuse his concept of social security. If he had, he would not have pushed it. It is now a far different program that what he promised it would be, it is not sustainable as it is, and it is one reason the United States is pushing headlong off the bankruptcy cliff.
The Civil Rights act would never have passed without Republican support--they supported it proportionately more than Democrats did. It was the modern Conservatives, aka Classical liberals, in both parties, not modern day liberals, who understood the concept of unalienable rights who voted for it. The EPA was authorized under Nixon with almost 100% Republican support. You want to call HIM a liberal? He is remembered for Watergate and other scandals, but in his first term he actively pursued five areas of domestic reform: welfare, civil rights (including not only desegregation and voting rights, but also additional rights for women and , economic and environmental policy, and reorganization of the federal bureaucracy.
There is a difference between a nanny state and unalienable rights. Modern liberals honor the nanny state while modern conservatives put the focus on unalienable rightts and personal freedom.
Who is more empathetic? Those who ignore the dependency created by well intentioned but wrong headed government largesse? Or those who see the unintended negative consequences, understand how it is affecting those trapped in them, and who are committed to breaking the destructive cycles that put them in it?