The words Liberal and Conservative are both good words and philosophies. Neither word applies to today’s Republicans or Democrats.
The words are deliberately mangled by both political parties today.
1.) Attach a label to a party.
2.) Mangle the definition and “win”.
However, the programs of social security, welfare, section 8, Medicare and Medicaid are linked more closely to the Democratic party. They are also linked to individual rights in that people have the right to food, shelter, clothing, and medical health. In as much as they are linked to individual rights, they are liberal. Hence, in the minds of many, Liberal equals Democratic and vice versa.
Government programs are run not to provide individual rights, but in an effort to solve government problems, like how to get people that are disabled out of the health care system and off the streets. Don’t want people dying on the streets or consuming all the resources of our hospitals. And they are run to provide revenue for nursing homes owned by wealthy republicans. They are run to get people out of the ghettoes, which are an embarrassment for government. The problem is that these programs are poorly managed and run and engineered not to maximize human rights at minimal cost, but so that politician-lawyers can gloat about how they care about the poor. These programs are used more for propaganda, illusion and delusion than for providing maximum benefits to a maximum number of people at the lowest cost. Hitler, in an analogous manner, kept some Auschwitz Jews comfortably “resettled” for purposes of propaganda, illusion and delusion.
Badly engineered, ineffective and expensive programs have been labeled liberal. They have degraded the liberal concept.
No, Democrats are not liberal anymore than Republicans are conservatives. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have advanced poorly engineered and thought-out programs not to maximize individual rights, but to maximize votes.
Unlike a well run and competitive company, government has NO quality control and no competition with which to maximize their product – except to maximize bragging rights and hence votes. Tis a most poor system created by lawyers that aren’t educated in engineering, economics, or production, but rather in using the legal system to tax their clients.