There is a drastically widening gap between the Democratic and Republican political parties. Everyone knows this. As people get angrier and angrier with the other side, values are further varied. But there are words associated with each political party that supposedly describe their standpoints. These terms are Liberal and Conservative. Now, I feel that in the basis of the words, they describe each political party's values accurately. Liberals want to change the world, and loosen the grip, while conservatives want to go back to traditional values. But what does it mean when you take these terms away from politicians and apply them to real sociology?? I've given a lot of thought to this, and I feel I can apply the values of each word, and show where our society has gone in both directions over the last few decades.
A guy named Shawn that I used to work with and I started with this argument a couple years ago one day at lunch. We were arguing about the upcoming Presidential campaign. While we both seemed to agree on which party should be represented in the next President of the United States, he did say one thing that stuck with me, and is the basis for this article. His exact words were "No successful society in history has ever gone from a liberal state to a more conservative state." This is something I have never believed to be true. After all, the formation of Abrahamic religions is testament to a group of people going from living off of basic conscience to having a concrete set of rules and guidelines to live life by. The rules were even etched in stone. To further history on the matter, every time the society of the Nation of Israel started to fall away from these values that were instilled, they were taken from their homes and enslaved by another superpower of the region. Now, I'm not out to make this into a religion lesson by any means. My focus is going to be on American society over the last 70-100 years, but I do feel that this can be used as a reference point. The Renaissance can also be used as a model of a society that became more proper and conservative and succeeded for a very long time. There are also examples of failure. The Soviet Union was in a state of rigid stiffness and modesty, and they failed miserably. Nazi Germany, another example. The people of these nations, however, had no freedom to express themselves as Israel and many nations of Renaissance Europe, and that is a key factor in the success of a modest, conservative society.
Both Liberalism and Conservatism have had an ebb and flow in the recent history of the United States on the society as a whole. Individuals have always had the freedom to choose their own path, and that is a part of what makes this society work, but lets take a look at some of the ways that we've seen the ebb and the flow, and how expectations of the people have been changed over the last 100 or so years.
As I mentioned before in my article on manipulation, the dynamic of the average American family has changed since 1913. Back then a 10th grade education was a very common thing. You most often stayed on the family farm until you were military age, then you served in the army, came home, and chose to continue the agricultural life or join the budding industrial revolution. You married a young woman, bought a house, and started a family. You paid your taxes, retired, and enjoyed your golden years. You never discussed sex outside the home in public, and your kids stayed virgins until they got married. A few luckier kids got to go to college, but it wasn't nearly as common as it is today. This was life up until the 50's. I can, without a doubt say we've become more liberal than this, but as I mentioned, there was an ebb and a flow.
The 50's brought a big change in true American society. the television was beginning to become a commonplace household item, and it was becoming very common for every family to have a car. These two items presented information to become readily available to the people, and gave more of a freedom to family members, especially dating teenagers. While the people on TV were still portrayed as super conservative, often with married couples sleeping in separate beds, teens now had a way to spend time alone with each other, no longer being required to be in one or the other's home, and unsupervised. Most everyone who will be reading this is most likely over the age of 16, and does understand the urges that come with being that age. This drastically began to liberalize society. Many will only point out the fact that it led to more teen pregnancies and the decline of the American family, which it may have. But I do see another side of this. Teens and young adults started learning earlier how to make their own choices about their own bodies and futures. People began to be free to make their own choices outside of expectation, including education and military service. I feel that this led to a slow and steady rise in finishing high school and college attendence.
Now the 60's and 70's, I feel, are the big factor in saying that we have gone back to being more conservative now. As the sexual revolution rose up and drugs ran rampant, we, as a society, became more liberal than we have ever become. The music got louder, drugs got stronger, and the social expectation was for the young people to always partake in this activity. Americans still had the option to make their own choices, but the direction that the majority was moving in was in the liberal direction. Common themes of "all you need is love" and "lets all share everything", plus the weed and the acid and the orgies of the late sixties put America in a state where it couldn't be any more free, and any more liberal. We had essentially hit the wall of one end of the spectrum, and the only thing to do was to turn around and ease our way back.
Now, as I said before, there really isn't an overall direction that society went, whether conservative or liberal, through the 70's, 80's, 90's and 2000's. In many ways we've become more liberal. All women have the right to choose their careers, an idea that would have been absolutely unheard of in the 50's, up through the 70's. Some women have chosen to stay at home and raise a family, but the vast majority are out making a name for themselves. This is a very good thing economically, as it raises the opportunity for our per capita income. Marriage and kids in themselves are an option across the board, not an expectation as they once were. We kept the sexual freedom and the drugs, offering them up as options for the people who wish to partake, and it's still hard to walk through a dormitory without smelling that very familiar smell. Sexual orientation, once seen as the greatest taboo in the world, is now completely open, homosexuality even being encouraged at times. Even clothing has become more and more revealing as time has gone on. But we've also moved some of our collective ideals in a conservative direction. The 80's big business movement, and the 90's small business movements made it more acceptable to be "the man". The information age brought a large amount of people out of the factories and into an office, trading in a uniform for a suit or skirt. And even with our sexual freedom, the vast majority of our society still prefers the path of marriage and family, even if it is a little later in our lives than our parents did it.
All in all, we have come to be more conservative, but we do live in a time period where, when you take the politics out of the words, we are in a very nicely balanced state. We have the choice to be as rigid and traditional as our 30's and 40's counterparts, or be as wild and free as our 60's counterparts. We've chosen a little of both, and it makes our American society a great place to live.
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