(December 7, 2012 at 4:36 pm)CapnAwesome Wrote: I am fairly conservative compared to other members of this board. I take sympathy with many conservative positions and often style myself as a Goldwater conservative. I think there are many other conservative Atheists, they just tend to call themselves Libertarians instead. However I, like most conservative atheists don't vote republican, because the party is openly hostile towards Atheists.
As a conservative the Democrats offer nothing to me, even as an Atheist the best I can say that the Democrats are not hostile towards me. That's it. In fact in recent years Democrats have become a more openly religious party. As both a conservative and Atheist, I find Obama's support and expansion of Bush's faith based initiatives to be completely disgusting. Many of my more liberal friends seem to be either unaware or to forgive Obama for this because once in a blue moon he mentions the existence of 'non-believers' in a speech.
What I was really wondering though was with the floundering of Republicans in the elections, and the fact that young people are overwhelmingly more secular and less Christian than their parents, why don't Republicans go after the Atheist vote? They have policies that could definitely be geared towards Atheists, such as a hostility towards Islam and mulitculturalism. Or are they just a bunch of old stubborn white men who are content on going down with the ship?
I am a pragmatists, and for a very long time I havent carried with me a certain political ideology which I always promote, eaven if it`s promisses stand in contradiction to reality.
I base my vote and my opinion on who has convinced me with the better argument and on what is realistic.
And generaly the entire German public is becoming more like me in this regard moving from a political landscape which was dominated by traditional voters and a small amount of swing voters. To a enormous amount of swingvoters.
This happened mainly because social politics such as the abortion debate, same sex marrige and other - have disapeared out of the political debate here.
Politcal discurse is more centered arround iferstructure, foreign policie, economics and other....
Participants within that political field therefor can no longer appeal towards a traditional voter block thruogh stereotyping oposing positions in debate arround social issues and other as the german sociaty has become more and more tolerant.
So the change within american politics which I think would broaden the field of possible voters for the republican party, is the removal of the debate on social issues from the american political discurse.
