Posted on 01/13/2003 2:40:26 PM PST by ATOMIC_PUNK
Conservatism in the English-speaking world has gotten a bad rap for the last, oh, say, 200 years. Ever since the Romantics decided that real artists needed to shatter society's conventions for the sake of shattering them and essentially thumb their noses at time-honored customs and morals, most anyone claiming to be hip, edgy or just plain cool has been assumed be a liberal. In other words, the nose-ring crowd is on the Left, and those complacent, hypocritical, SUV-driving, suburban-living, bourgeois stuffed-shirts get shunted onto the Right.
Unlike Lucianne and Democratic Underground, FR management is surprisingly tolerant of "disrupters" who go against the forum's ideological bent, as long as they try to be "thoughtful" in their criticisms. If you are a liberal poster, though, expect to get nasty personal attacks as well as polite disagreement.
FreeRepublic has something for both liberals and conservatives. For those on the left, it provides revealing insight into how and why conservatives think the way they do. For right-wingers, FR is a great place to hang out, stay entertained, get enraged, or simply reassure yourself that you are not alone and that conservatism is still alive and well in America today. But more significantly, FreeRepublic and political forums like it, both left and right, provide a group portrait of America at the beginning of a new millennium, and the picture that emerges is a paradoxical one: a country whose people can be frustrating, provocative, humorous, intolerant, thoughtful and, above all, argumentative all at the same time.
(Excerpt) Read more at flakmag.com ...
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