One of the
trademarks of
liberals is that they
believe that things can be
better for
everyone then they are now, and that this won't be
achieved by doing things that have already been
attempted and
failed. So they tend to propose new
programs. This, however, has a number of
problems inherent in it.
People tend not to like change. Especially when they think it will hurt them. Any change from the status quo, no matter how many people it helps, will likely hurt at least a few. And those few are often more concerned with themselves than any other result, fighting it. This can make enemies.
Failure. Trying new things will inevitably lead to failure, at least part of the time. The only way to avoid it is to never try anything new. But there little tolerance for our government and our leaders to fail. They can't try multiple things and find the best because of the multiple failures. Some will point to this as poor leadership, others as wasting money.
Government inertia. Once you create a government agency, it becomes much harder to eliminate it, and how hard this is becomes greater the longer it is around. Perhaps it's that all the people working in that agency don't want to lose their current job, political connections are used by the powerful, and the like. And then people use this agency as another thing to be upset over.
Conservatives get around this by tending not to try as many new things, and talking more about going back to the way things were. The problem is that the way things were wasn't acceptable, or we'd still be there. Ok, let me clarify that - the way things were wasn't acceptable to everyone, but it was likely acceptable to the ones who want to go back.
So, it remains a huge gap between the two groups...