Written by Thomas Magstadt   

In this election, millions will march to the polls like lemmings and vote for candidates who don't care about them. Liberal have allowed conservatives to define them, a task made easier because the meaning of words like "liberal" and "conservative" changes over time. Here's an attempt to define what it means to be a liberal Democrat in 2012:

1. Every man, woman, and child in America has a right to affordable health care.

2. You can be a patriotic American with all the rights of citizenship even if your first language is Spanish.

3. Pretending to put the good of the country above personal gain while firing workers and outsouring everything possible to India is dishonest and hypocritical, not to mention un-American.

4. Banks too big to fail cannot be trusted to make financial decisions affecting the well-being of us all without regulation but a woman can be trusted with decisions about her own body.

5. This president did not cause the Great Recession; the conservative extremists in Congress sought to thwart him at every turn because as Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in an interview in the National Journal on October 23, 2010, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

6. Jesus loves you even if you're are a socialist, homosexual, pacifist, Rastafarian, vegan, tree-hugger, African-American, union member, or your Kenyan father was raised in a Muslim family.

7. Corporations are not people. If it doesn't have a heart, it's not a person. If it has more rights than people, it's a corporation.

8. The difference between people and corporations is obvious unless you're on the Supreme Court. When the Supreme Court ruled that free speech under the First Amendment creates a constitutional right to bribe or blackmail politicians, buy votes, and spend unlimited amounts to subvert elections, it was an impeachable offense.

9. Cutting the deficit is neither responsible nor realistic without 1) deep cuts in defense spending and 2) tax reform that closes special loopholes for the rich and incorporates the "Buffet rule" (a 30% minimum tax on individuals making more than $1 million dollars a year).

10. Creating jobs and revitalizing the economy is more important than cutting the deficit, but deficits and debt do matter.

11. Iran is not our problem; invading and occupying other countries just because we can is not a solution. We have the most potent nuclear arsenal on earth and the only army, navy, and air force with a massive military presence in every ocean and on every continent; people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

12. American taxpayers deserve the same benefit Congress gives itself; if the cradle-to-the-grave benefits Congress has created for its own members is not a form of "socialism" – a self-contained welfare state within a dysfunctional federal state of its own making – then North Korea is a model democracy.

13. Military service is a duty of the rich and privileged no less than the middle class and minorities.

14. Women deserve equal pay for equal work. The gender gap at the highest echelons of government and business is a national disgrace; ditto for the 2007 Supreme Court decision that denied Lilly Ledbetter redress for pay discrimination.

15. After three decades of relentlessly raiding the Social Security Trust Fund to finance tax cuts for the rich and subsidies for big business, Congress has no moral right to cut benefits without first cutting its own pay in half and doing away with all benefits the rest of us don't receive, including health insurance.

16. Members of Congress and high-ranking military officers should be banned for life from serving as lobbyists or working for defense contractors.

17. Evolution isn't a "theory"; education is too important to be left to religious fanatics.

18. Voting for Barack Obama on November 6 is no guarantee we will finally get "change we can believe in"; voting for Mitt Romney is a guarantee that we won't.

19. The "free market" is a myth perpetuated by the very people who most want to restrict competition by preventing the government from breaking up monopolies, cartels, and megabanks; no modern market economy can function or sustain a fair society without regulation. Where corporations write the rules and control the regulators, the public interest is an orphan.

20. Telling lies is unethical even when the objective is to win elections; when politicians lie they lead by example no less than when they tell the truth. We should not be surprised if the level of moral conduct in society declines when our leaders display the kind of behavior we decry in our everyday lives.

21. Greed is not good.

22. A decent society is possible. It's what the promise of a "more perfect union" in the Preamble to the Constitution means.

If you a) don't believe everything you read in the Wall Street Journal OR the New York Times; b) rarely agree with anybody who does; c) never watch Fox News (but occasionally sneak a peek for comic relief); d) care about what's fair and try to keep an open mind; and e) wish we had more than two viable political parties – chances are you're a Democrat. But beware Democratic party leaders. That, too, could change.

Note: This version of this article appeared under a different title in Nation of Change.