David's diary Cato Echoes Kristol's Point on Health Care is a stark reminder that conservative politics is intimately related to spreading human suffering, and yes, even death. It's not just that conservatives are warmongers, moreso than liberals. And it's not just that they care about money, and don't care who dies so they can get more of it. Both those are quite true, of course, but they are only secondary manifestations. One can turn from one form of conservatism to another, over and over again, and repeatedly come up against this is one form or another: Conservative policies hurt people. Conservative policies kill people. And conservative policies tend to look worse to people as their lives become better.
The basic reason for this is quite simple, as George Lakoff, for one, has pointed out: empathy is a core liberal value, and because of it liberals don't believe in hurting people. While this is true of many individual conservatives as well, it is true of them in spite of their conservative beliefs, not because of them. Now that Bush is on the verge of leaving the national stage, it's worth recalling that he climbed up onto it under the banner of "compassionate conservatism," a tacit--if unintended--admission that conservatism normally is mean-spirited, if not downright cruel. Only thing was, the same turned out to be true of "compassionate conservatism" as well.
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