Conservative culture clash - Republicans hold on to what is sacred
Even though Sen. John McCain lost his bid to be our 44th president, almost half of America’s voters voted for him and for other Republicans. Why did so many “common people” — as Teresa Heinz Kerry called them during the 2004 election — vote for the party that according to the Democrats does not represent their interests? First of all, most Americans are religious. They believe in God. Twenty percent of Christians in the United States say they talk to Jesus every day. America’s Orthodox Jews and observant Muslims also pray and talk to the Almighty daily. They all believe that the contemporary Democratic Party, dominated by its secular left, disrespects the God-believing, the God-beseeching and the God-fearing.
Second, while they may not know who the Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman was, they do understand basic economics. They instinctively know that they owe their jobs and their living standards not to government and to socialism, but to capitalism and to profit-making businesses. They realize that while government may tax wealth, and use the money it gets to pay for public employees and public programs, government does not create wealth. Wealth is created only by and in the private sector.
The environment is a third area in which the common people differ from the elites. They may not have read Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. But they accept his thesis that old species perish constantly and that new ones emerge to take their place. So why, they wonder, are we spending millions of taxpayer dollars to save the Northern spotted owl and the snail darter sucker fish? Like their wealthy brethren, the less-than-wealthy do not want to see America’s old-growth forests cut down. But neither do they want government restrictions on logging other trees, which they view as a renewable commodity and a source of good-paying jobs.
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