Posted on 05/01/2006 3:07:32 PM PDT by astoundedlib
"IBTZ!"
Why are you trying to ban me? People have responded to this thread and everything is going fine...Also i don't have much time to answer these days, so please, if you don't like that thread don't try to ban me...ther is no point...
Best regards.
My comment was directed to the ridiculous position of American liberals, who spend too much time worrying about whether Jacques Chirac approves of what they are doing and not enough time worrying about the security of our nation. It really shouldn't matter what Jacques thinks if an action enhances our national security.
Close enough. First of all, no need for a war: political change in the United States comes about through the ballot box, not armed revolutions. American conservatives hold the institution of choosing leaders through the political process to be sacred, and we would never short-circuit it.
As for "liberalim" dying on its own, umm... I think we need to get straight what we mean by "liberalism" here. I was referring to liberalism in the American sense of the word, which is vastly different from the European. In the European sense of the word, Free Republic is chock-full of liberals. I guess you could say that it's socialist welfare states that we don't like.
Enough semantics, back to your question. Socialism doesn't "die on its own." Neither does any other system. Like any economic system, socialism is nothing more than a whole bunch of people producing and moving goods around in a certain way. Socialism goes away when the powers that make it exist stop making it exist. In the case of socialism, that would be government, because socialism relies on coerced transfers of wealth, which only a government with a monopoly on force can do.
The way that I described it happening was the worst case scenario: with more and more people qualifying for entitlement programs, those programs will require the redistribution of greater and greater amounts of wealth. Eventually, the amount of wealth that must be redistributed is great enough to make the program not worth maintaining, and the government implementing the program decides, because of popular political pressure or simple necessity, to shut down the program.
Something to think about: when was the last time you heard about an entitlement program getting smaller?
Dissatisfaction with liberalism or radicalism or modernism or progressivism has been recurrent in modern history, and it's had some justification at times. Such a turn from "progressivism" happened after the French Revolution in Europe. Something similar happened in the Western World after the Second World War.
Gleason ignores those developments to focus on what supposedly happened in Europe from 1880 to 1945. That's probably what he knows -- or thinks he knows. But it's significant that he chooses a supposed course that leads to fascism not one that, like the Cold War conservatism of the Christian Democratic parties, had other results.
And what happened from 1880 to 1945 was so complicated and multifaceted that you leave a lot out if you construe it as a "revolt against liberalism." For one thing, such a six decade long "revolt" didn't happen in the US. For another, "revolt" doesn't characterize what was going on in England, and it only imperfectly relates to France and other established democracies.
The "revolt" paradigm singles out some actors -- rebels on the European right -- as important and ignores others -- determined socialists and bewildered or staunch, persistent liberals. A paradigm like that may nevertheless work in describing one historical epoch, but it doesn't travel well to other times and places, because the factors involved are never quite the same.
Alright! good enough! Why i started this thread, is not that i want a war or the liberal party to disapear, but i feared of a bit too much agressivity from a party to another! Anyways, a fragile soul i am!
Best regards.
When one party is trying to make its own nation lose a war (the democrats or in American political lingo, the liberals), it is necessary to be very aggressive toward them to prevent them from surrendering in a war we are winning.
Were the democrats (aka liberals) acting as a LOYAL opposition, then aggressiveness would not be justified. But they are not. Many of them are behaving as traitors. As to them, we are not being nearly aggressive enough.
Thanks again!
I understand more and more the position of conservatives, that i never considered before...What actually triggered my interest in conservatism is our curernt PM, mister harper who is actually running the country pretty well, and keeps his cool against other propositions from the other party...anyways!
Best regards.
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