[Fiji Hill]

Oh, conservatives were vehement ideological and political opponents

Indeed, they were--Conservative leaders such as Senators Robert A. Taft (R-Ohio), William Jenner (R-Ind.), and Pat McCarran (D-Nev.), Human Events publisher Frank Hanighen, and polemicists such as John T. Flynn, Garet Garret, Felix Morley, and William Henry Chamberlin were vigorous opponents of liberal interventionist schemes.

[Leisler]

Leaders? Of what? I can find a handful of people for or against anything. I must of missed the big leader election convention. When are are they going to be held this year?

[aruanan]

Indeed, they were--Conservative leaders such as Senators Robert A. Taft (R-Ohio), William Jenner (R-Ind.), and Pat McCarran (D-Nev.), Human Events publisher Frank Hanighen, and polemicists such as John T. Flynn, Garet Garret, Felix Morley, and William Henry Chamberlin were vigorous opponents of liberal interventionist schemes.

Those who claim that conservative politics is an example of an ideology don't know the meaning of ideology or conservative politics. The word has come to mean "a system of political thought," but that loses the original distinction as a means of using reason, free of religion or aristocracy, to devise a system that will ensure equality and justice for all men.

Conservative politics is based on known quantities of what man actually is, of lessons learned through long experience in a real world. It is about as ideological in nature as mechanical engineering.

Ideological politics begins not with man as he actually is but with man as the ideologue believes he ought to be or could be if only the ideologue and his followers had enough time, money, or power to make them that way.

Since time, money, and power are all limited and since the ideologue has never been successful in accumulating any of the latter two through persuading enough people to make any difference (because at every stage of effort his product is defective and he relies chiefly on spinning a fairy tale of a perfect future), he aims to take control of a government in any way he can so that he can exercise power both to coerce the masses toward immanentizing the eschaton and to extort money from them to pay for it.

Since his world view is by definition in conflict with reality, the degree to which he is able to use state power to force people to conform to it is the degree to which people will be dehumanized and oppressed.