armor99,
Like you, I am also conservatively minded but try very hard to understand the more liberal point of view. It is very difficult to find someone who can remain calm and collected and be objective when these conversations arise. It usually ends up in name calling and something or other about Bush.
Anyway, I have a friend who I would call an ultra liberal. Strong union affiliation, anti-war, global warming must be stopped regardless of its damage to our standard of living, business in general and profit in specific is bad, the US is to blame for most of the ills in the world, Bush - well you know. He has even gone so far to say that Fidel Castro must be doing something right or he would have been taken out of power by now.
Fortunately, he is my very good friend so we have had more than a few conversations. Admittedly, we have stayed away from hard politics lately as the election cycle progresses. He is a strong Hillary supporter so he is feeling kind of down as of late.
What struck me most about your post is the commonality between your Uncle and my good friend. Kind of like an epiphany for me. The commonality is the lack of objectivity or quantification of progress towards a goal. Maybe us conservatives are too analytical but, it seems the liberals are always striving for some kind of idyllic state. Not quite sure how to get there and not quite sure how they will know if and when they get there. Still, they march on.
When trying to decide something, anything, my good friend often says he needs to feel gestalt first. Which can defined as "a structure, configuration, or pattern of physical, biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts".
For him, it is not the end result that is important - it is the process that satisfies him. This may well explain the Obama phenomenon where lofty ideals carry the day. No need to actually have a plan. Not important.
I feel you may have hit upon a distinguishing feature of the liberal mindset. Something that conservatives have a hard time understanding. Why actually accomplish anything when simply striving for something is all that matters.
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