To tell you the truth, I think that Rev nailed it. People (many, even most) don't *WANT* to be free. They want someone to give them stuff, keep them safe, and if they get the opportunity to tell others how to live their lives or to feel like they played a part in keeping someone else from doing something they don't personally agree with (but which harms no one wrongly), so much the better. They're perfectly happy sitting there in that nice warm water - and hey, someone's even making sure it doesn't cool off, how NICE!
Those of us who don't subscribe to such beliefs... well, you might be right there. It could be lack of motivation, as you suggest; for my own part, and I suspect for others, there's a VERY strong sense of futility, of tilting at windmills when damn few others want us to make the effort to increase everyone's liberty - so why bother? I don't want to be Don Quixote, even if the "imaginary enemies" are real. I believe that such attitudes will likely continue until things become intolerable. What happens then? I don't know, but I suspect it won't be pretty - certainly on an individual level, and possibly on a larger one.
I will agree that there are many individuals identifying as Republican that I would have little to no problem with - many of them here on this forum, even, and plenty more out in the world. The problem is that even those individuals seem (to me) to be all too willing to accept "more-of-the-same" if they think it gives "their side" a chance to win the election - which means that we as a society keep heading in the wrong direction. That many then bemoan the fact that "I wish we could have politicians who were DIFFERENT!" just makes me go
- lacking the headdesk or head-to-brick-wall emoticons I've seen on other forums. When so many people, so many GOOD INTENTIONED people, refuse to vote for the candidate embodying everything they claim to want and then complain that they didn't get the difference they wanted from Mr. More-Of-The-Same, that's... frustrating. Add to that the Republican Party's decades-long custom of violating their own stated principles of encouraging self-reliance and working for limited government. Yeah, Obama's been racking up the debt and expanding government at a breakneck, even record pace - but W. certainly wasn't a piker in that respect himself, as I think everyone here can agree.
So, the question (to me) then becomes, how do we get all those people who claim to REALLY WANT limited government, government debt reduction and spending within its legitimate means, and the enacting of policies promoting self-reliance rather than reliance on the Nanny State to actually VOTE for people who would act on those things? How do we get the Republican Party to once more be the group referenced in the OP joke? I don't have an answer for that - I wish I did. I'd love for the Republican Party to adhere to the ideals it claims to stand for, to be in fact the bastion of individual liberty it claims to be, to be a group that I generally wouldn't have a problem voting for in any given election. But I know that voting for people who violate those principles is not the way, and I won't do it.
