The issue of environmental quality is one which transcends traditional political boundaries. It is a cause which can attract, and very sincerely, liberals, conservatives, radicals, reactionaries, freaks, and middle-class straights.
It`s not just Republicans. It`s Republicans and Democrats. It`s middle class, lower middle class, working class Americans who have felt the angst, who are frustrated, who are angry as a result of 1% growth which, in my view, has been really the issue that has propelled Donald Trump from day one.
What a country, and what a culture, when the liberals cry before they are hurt, and the reactionaries pose as brave nonconformists, while the radicals make a fetish of their own jokey irrelevance.
Marriage equality is a very middle-class issue and voting rights is a very working-class issue. If you do not vote, who are you speaking for? Who will be the next Fannie Lou Hamer? If not you or someone you know, then who?
It's a peculiar thing about liberals. When it comes to middle-class people who are fully capable of caring for themselves, liberals seek to undermine their independence in every way possible. With seductive 'entitlements' like guaranteed retirement, health care, nutrition, education, and jobs, liberals attempt to lure the middle class into dependence on the state. But when it comes to those who are truly incompetent, those whose mental afflictions render them unable to manage their lives at all, liberals are suddenly transformed into absolutists for personal autonomy.
To me, that's the important issue about spiritual principle: that you recognize it as both that which saves you from the self-sabotaging mind and that which heals you and lifts you up when you succumb to it and attract whatever personal disaster you attract.
A man's liberal and conservative phases seem to follow each other in a succession of waves from the time he is born. Children are radicals. Youths are conservatives, with a dash of criminal negligence. Men in their prime are liberals (as long as their digestion keeps pace with their intellect). The middle aged run to shelter: they insure their life, draft a will, accumulate mementos and occasional tables, and hope for security. And then comes old age, which repeats childhood - a time full of humors and sadness, but often full of courage and even prophecy.
You know, I think, people of all stripes in California, Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals, frankly, as I have traveled the state, the number one issue is jobs. And they are looking for which candidate can get the economy back on track.
Welfare became a term of opprobrium - a contentious, often vindictive area of political conflict in which liberals and conservatives clashed and children were lost sight of.
Political debate with liberals is basically impossible in America today because liberals are calling names while conservatives are trying to make arguments.
Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.
I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Sweden, which, during my teens, gentrified and is now completely middle class and even upper middle class.
Conservatives define themselves more by their hatred of liberals than anything else, and, conversely, liberals by their distaste for conservatives.
The only difference today between Liberals and Conservatives is that the Liberals go to mass at five o'clock and the Conservatives at eight.
What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.
Stupidity is a personal achievement which transcends national boundaries.
So a lot of our shows where even we think we've taken a very deliberate stand, liberals say, 'That's awesome, you took on the conservatives' same show and conservatives say 'That's awesome, you took on liberals.'