Posted on 12/30/2009 8:57:54 AM PST by PeterPrinciple
Conservatism (Latin: conservare, to "save" or "preserve")[1] is a political attitude and philosophy that advocates institutions and traditional practices that have developed organically,[2][3] thus emphasizing stability and continuity.[3] The first established use of the term in a political context was by François-René de Chateaubriand in 1819, following the French Revolution.[4] The term has since been used to describe a variety of politicians with a wide range of views.
In Western politics, the term conservatism often refers to the school of thought based on British politician Edmund Burke's criticism of the French Revolution. Though his legacy as a conservative is disputed, he wrote against the excesses of mob rule.[5][6][7]
R. J. White wrote: "To put conservatism in a bottle with a label is like trying to liquify the atmosphere ... The difficulty arises from the nature of the thing. For conservatism is less a political doctrine than a habit of mind, a mode of feeling, a way of living."[8] Russell Kirk considered conservatism "the negation of ideology."[9]
Conservative political parties have diverse views; the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, the Republican Party in the United States, the Conservative Party in Britain, the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, the Conservative Party in Canada and the Liberal Party of Australia are all considered major conservative parties with varying positions...........................................
(Excerpt) Read more at bing.com ...
Like Mark Twain said: "We have the words but not the music."
The source is a bing search on conservatism. Most do not like wikipedia, others say use it wisely. Bottom line is know your enemy.......................and know what you stand for and will not move on.
I think these article are good because we better understand how others define conservatism. Read the articles, note which ones are first on the list. Post what you agree with and why, or what the lies are and why.
http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/conservatism.html
This is 3rd item on a bing search for conservatism. Know your enemy.
An intoxicating, addicting philosophy founded not in facts, but in emotional responses to human nature. The Liberal deludes himself with the notion that “If the world would only conform to my way of thinking, we would live in Utopia.” The Liberal believes that someday this vision will actually be reality, even though history strongly suggests otherwise.
That defintion from a tenured professor at UCLA, in Information Technology. Shameful.
* Tell the taxpayers what they are getting for their money
Civilization requires a substantial number and variety of public services, which in turn require moderate and reasonable amounts of taxes. Despite decades of conservative rhetoric, a majority of Americans are perfectly happy to pay their taxes. And yet liberals keep letting conservatives clobber them with rhetoric that makes taxes sound like a bad thing. It is time for liberals to stop losing this argument. To start with, do not talk about amounts of money (”we should spend $15 billion on health care”). Instead, talk about what the money buys (”we should provide medical care to 15 million children”). And stop letting Bush call his tax policies “tax cuts”: he is not cutting those taxes; he is just postponing them.
Of course, the left is always setting up its own aristocracy of the anointed intellectual with faceless bureaucrats as their gate keepers.
Assess the sixties
Make a list of the positive and lasting contributions of the sixties. Americans would benefit from such a list.
Conservatism Conservatism is a political theory which is peculiarly difficult to define because one aspect of conservative thought is its rejection of explicit ideology and its preference for pragmatism in political matters. It is also difficult to define because different societies and generations do not necessarily seek to preserve the same things. Although some elements common to conservative values can be traced back to the early history of political thought, conservatism as a distinctive political creed emerged in the 18th century, when it became necessary to present arguments against the rationalist thinkers of the European Enlightenment, the utopianism they hoped to create, and the radical forces unleashed by the French Revolution. In Britain Edmund Burke published his classic work Reflections on the Revolution in France, which emphasized the importance of traditions, institutions and evolutionary change as opposed to abstract ideas, individualism and artificially designed political systems. In France Joseph de Maistre provided a more reactionary version of conservatism in essays which defended established authority against revolutionary ideas; he emphasized the need for order and the importance of the specific national traits in a given political system.
Conservatives do not necessarily oppose change in itself, but they are sceptical about attempts to fashion a perfect society in accordance with some pre-existing model.
They also tend to believe that man is flawed by weaknesses that make certain ideal goals illusory, although not all of the major conservative thinkers relate this view to the Christian notion of Original Sin. They regard their support for tradition as reflecting their humility in the face of the experience of earlier generations—an experience which they believe to be crystallized in institutions.
At the level of political practice a number of conservative parties exist in the political systems of Western Europe and the Commonwealth. In continental Europe the parties which share conservative values have typically not called themselves conservative. Most have preferred to use terms like Christian Democrat, or, as with the attempt to re-create the now defunct Italian Christian Democratic Party, the ‘People’s Party’. In France Gaullism, as the main conservative force, has used conservatism’s call to national unity and patriotism both in its labels and in much of its electoral appeal. Conservatism is as much a matter of personal outlook and reaction as a particular creed: it makes sense, therefore, to talk about the conservative wing in a socialist party, for example, stressing the importance of experience, socialist tradition, respect for organizational continuity and so on.
http://www.bookrags.com/tandf/conservatism-1-tf/
Conservatism construes society as something that grows, and conservatives prefer pruning leaves and branches to tearing up the roots. The latter view is taken by radicals who believe that nothing less than a revolutionary transformation both of society and of human beings themselves will serve to save us from what they believe to be a deeply unjust society. Generically, then, all are conservative who oppose the revolutionary transformation of society. Specifically, however, conservatism is one of three doctrinal partners, each of which may plausibly claim centrality in the European political tradition. One of these is liberalism, constituted by its allegiance to liberty and the values of reform, and the other is constitutional socialism, whose fundamental preoccupation with the problem of the poor leads it to construe all political problems as issues of realizing a truer community. Modern politics is a ceaseless dialogue between these three tendencies and movements.
Conservatism in this specific sense emerged from a split in the Whig Party in late eighteenth-century Britain, and it was only in the 1830s, when the present nomenclature of each of the three doctrines crystallized, that Tories began calling themselves ‘conservatives’. This name failed to catch on in other countries, most notably perhaps the USA, where ‘conservative’ until recently connoted timidity and lack of enterprise. From the 1960s onwards, however, the tendency of American liberals (predominantly but not exclusively in the Democratic Party) to adopt socialist policies has provoked a reaction which calls itself ‘neo-conservative’ in testimony to its adherence to many classical liberal positions.
As it is conservative doctrine that political parties must respond to changing circumstances, it would be not merely futile but also paradoxical to discover a doctrinal essence in the changing attitudes of any particular Conservative party. Nevertheless, conservatism is not only a doctrine but also a human disposition; many conservative temperaments have influenced the British Conservative Party, whose response to the successive problems of the modern world may give some clue to conservatism. Under Disraeli it organized itself successfully to exploit successive nineteenth-century extensions of the franchise, and its electoral viability has since largely depended upon the allegiance of the figure known to political scientists as the ‘Tory workingman’. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, it rode a tide of imperial emotion and economic protection and stood for the unity of the United Kingdom against attempts to grant self-government to Ireland. Between the two world wars, Baldwin saw it as the task of the party to educate an electorate, now enjoying universal suffrage, in the responsibilities of power. After Attlee’s creation of the Welfare State from 1945 to 1951, Churchill and Macmillan found conservative reasons for sustaining a welfarist consensus, but since 1976, Mrs Thatcher and a dominant wing of the party identified the expense of the welfare state in its present form as one of the emerging problems of politics.
A principle of conservation offers little substantive guide to political action, and is vulnerable to the objection brought by F.A.Hayek: ‘By its nature, it cannot offer an alternative to the direction we are moving’ (The Constitution of Liberty, 1960). It is a mistake, however, to identify conservatism with hostility to change; the point is rather the source of change. It is characteristic of all radicals to seek one big change, after which a perfected community will be essentially changeless. On this basis, they often seek to monopolize the rhetoric of change. Liberals consider it the duty of an active government to make the reforms that will dissipate social evils. While refusing to erect limitation of government into an absolute principle, conservatives tend to think that, within a strong framework of laws, society will often work out for itself a better response to evils than can be found in the necessary complexities of legislation, and worse, of course, in the simple dictat of the legislator. Conservatism is, in this respect, a political application of the legal maxim that hard cases make bad law. It is thus a central mistake to think of conservatism as mere hostility to change. It poses, rather, the issue of where change should originate.
Like all political doctrines, conservatism is loosely but importantly associated with a particular temperament, a view of the world. It is characteristic of the conservative temperament to value established identities, to praise habit and to respect prejudice, not because it is irrational, but because such things anchor the darting impulses of human beings in solidities of custom which we often do not begin to value until we are already losing them. Radicalism often generates youth movements, while conservatism is a disposition found among the mature, who have discovered what it is in life they most value. The ideological cast of contemporary thought has provoked some writers to present conservatism as if it contained the entire sum of political wisdom; but this is to mistake the part for the whole. Nevertheless, a society without a strong element of conservatism could hardly be anything but impossibly giddy.
http://www.bookrags.com/tandf/conservatism-3-tf/
I like the above, being some what of a pruner myself. I remember one horticultural lab in college. Was on a Saturday and I didn't want to be there. We pruned the shrubbery in front of the admin building at SDSU, so I really hacked my shrub down much more than any of my classmates. Prof came by and said good job, take 2/3s off and leave a third. Got an A for the lab, no one else did.
In The Devil’s Dictionary (1906), the American writer Ambrose Bierce cynically (but not inappropriately) defined the conservative as “a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.”
Kirk described six basic “canons” or principles of conservatism:
•A divine intent, as well as personal conscience, rules society;
•Traditional life is filled with variety and mystery while most radical systems are characterized by a narrowing uniformity;
•Civilized society requires orders and classes;
•Property and freedom are inseparably connected;
•Man must control his will and his appetite, knowing that he is governed more by emotion than by reason; and
•Society must alter slowly.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/PoliticalPhilosophy/HL811.cfm
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