Using Gulliver's Travels to understand modern politics

[candy331]

Saw this letter to the editor in the Tallahassee(Florida)Democrat today. Thought you might like to read it!

Using 'Gulliver's Travels' to understand modern politics:

I have seen columnists and fellow letter writers to the Tallahassee Democrat use the labels "liberal" and "conservative" as invectives. I suggest we improve our public discourse by using Swift's typology from "Gulliver's Travels" to better distinguish our political differences.

First, the Lilliputians represent the current Republican Party. They are as corrupt as they are small. Modern Lilliputians learned Jim Crow racial politics from the old Southern Democrats. The Lilliputians trick their constituents, typically angry white males called yahoos, into reducing taxes and social spending while stripping the yahoos of their civil liberties. The Lilliputians tell the gullible yahoos that "tax and spend" only helps minorities and that the only civil liberty yahoos need is the right to own a gun.

Next are the Laputans, who are modern Democratic neoliberals and
republican neoconservatives who are the intellectuals of the Lilliputians. The Laputans love abstraction and get the Lilliputians
to act on delusional ideas such as NAFTA and Iraqi invasions. Ironically, it's the yahoos who pay most for the Laputans' delusions
with unemployment and dead or wounded sons and daughters.

Finally, there are the Brobdingnagians who are imperfect but moral citizens that attempt to live honest lives with tolerance and rationality. Now aren't those labels more informative than
just "liberal" or "conservative"?