Thread:68.32.196.63/@comment-681745-20130412075435/@comment-26279493-20150418204042

Hi there. Good to see you active here.

Just a quick comment on why poor people vote Republican. You commented on the difficulty of maintaining a Liberal perspective. It can be really tough. When you're confronted constantly by conservatives, it's challenging to keep from being reactionary, and they count on it being easier to join them than to resist.

If the conservatives are in your own society or peer group, there can be plenty of pressure to conform. You can always choose to share your liberal thoughts with a sympathetic group and just keep quiet with your less "enlightened" friends. As long as there are "free" elections and secret ballots, you can always choose to express your opinion there.

If the conservatives are in a competing society, there can be an all together different pressure. Some cultures have little respect for natural human rights. In that case, Liberalism may seem all together different than what it seems in the US or many other more Liberal societies. If the competing society threatens your Natural Human Rights, your Liberalism may have to be much more pragmatic. It might take a form of trying to respect their natural human rights while actively preventing them from taking yours. Liberals believe in the right to protect their lives, rights and property and means of aquiring it.

Maybe it's about the difference between assertion and aggression. Both can be forceful. However, one is based in protection of rights, and the other is an assertion of force to gain privilege or deny rights to others. Either one can result in escalation to force, but we see only one as justified or moral.