@rosborne979,
rosborne979 wrote:Do Liberals and Conservatives really exist, or are they just subjective concepts used to skew and manipulate our attention.
Yes to the latter portion of that sentence. People self-identify in these categories. Liberal and conservative were terms invented by newspapermen in England after 1830, and liberal was used in the traditonal sense of someone who was generous, and conservative in the sense of those who resist change.
The terms have become shibboleths in the United States. They are not simply used to manipulate, but to get people to support ideas, whether or not those ideas are actually good for them, or for the nation. And people get suckered by them every time. Conservatives whine about freedom all the time, but what is really being asked of them is to support license. Capitalists do not want to be hindered in the pursuit of the bottom line, and conservative demagogues can whip up support for measures which actually harm the people who support them, such as opposition to environmental or work safety legislation.
So-called liberals are no better, and they are victimized by their own demagogues just as routinely. For example, liberals agitated for the windfall profits tax at the time of the Arab oil embargo, but the provisions of the bill were not closely examined, and since it only taxed domestic production, it had the effect of making us more dependent on imported oil--why should domestic oil companies spend money on exploration and exploitation of domestic sources when they would be taxed, but weren't taxed on imported oil?
These labels are indeed too vague, and they are indeed used to manipulate people.