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Partisanship isn't dividing us. This is a battle for the direction of the country. The left has just jumped off the edge of the world, seeking all kinds of never before used ways to block and sabotage votes in the Senate and doing other things. Historically, Republicans are pretty well behaved people who believe in the rule of law and tradition.

Granted "in general perhaps" all sides "believe" they want all good things for the country, but let us "define what that means to each side of the isle".

I think for conservatives, it means we are a strong capitalist nation with lots of self reliance, smaller government with temporary safety nets in society only.

I was from a Democrat family. The party and it's affiliation left the common people and us. We saw so much dirty stuff we could no longer handle it.

I view the Democrat party of today as liberals wishing to turn America into a European styled form of socialism.

I see a philosophy of everything through the government, and I find that unacceptable and a poor venue to funnel most things in every case.

I believe in collective bargaining, but also feel unions are out of whack today.
Business and rich people are not the enemy. They are the ones who take the risk, provide and sometimes lose their life savings and create jobs.

America is NOT a bottom up society.

Dependence on a political party, entity or government in general has proven over 40 years to be fruitless and debilitating.

Conservatives view all people as the same. We think how far people go and where they go is highly based on their being self-prepared for the opportunities in life.
Many suffer thier parents and have far more obsticles we can never fix.

So on and so on... I can go on and on regarding the differences.

Thank you. This is good. This is the start of a conversation I would actually like to continue over in the 'philosophy' topics, if you don't mind. A very brief response, but just enough to let you (and others) know that this is a subject I have been thinking about for some time). It think that it has become a power struggle precisely because we have lost the ground on which we could conduct a sensible civilized debate. Perhaps politics has always been rough and tumble. I don't know. But I do think there was a time when liberals and conservatives could debate these issues (the direction of the country issues) without rancor and excessive name-calling. Now, maybe those were the days when as Grover Norquist put it, the conservatives were a minority and knew they didn't have the power for a showdown, so they were polite out of necessity, not choice. Maybe that was the case. But maybe people were simply more civil in their disagreements then.

I've been reading Karl Popper's two volume work "Open Society and it Enemies". The thread I posted at commongroundcommonsense.org, "In Defense of Open Society" was inspired by that work. I'd like to start a thread with the same name here because I see this as an important problem that crosses partisan lines. In a nutshell, the central question is this: how can we rationally institute changes in our society? Changes take place whether we consciously bring them about or not, and some changes are threatening to some people. Popper charts some of the philosophers who have tried to tame change--Plato, Hegel and Marx--by suggesting laws of history (what he calls 'historicism')--but such ideologies led to totalitarian societies where society was forced, like Procrustes bed, to fit a revolutionary or essentialist mold, attended by great bloodshed and misery. Popper's question, and mine, is how do we bring change under rational control, so that we can improve things and minimize the advserse effects? Popper's claim is that society is best when it considers its beliefs open to revision in the light of evidence, like scientific theories, conjectures subject to refutation. Next, we do best if we introduce change in small increments, and monitor the effects--what he calls 'piecemeal social engineering'. This rules out grand Utopian schemes--but that is just as well, because most of those have been disasters. As a reformist liberal who follows John Dewey, Popper's suggestions make sense to me. But, as for everything else, the important questions lie in the details. Anybody care to come over to the 'philosophy' topic area and discuss this with me?