Posted on 06/11/2016 9:31:08 AM PDT by OddLane
One of the benefits of the Trump campaign, regardless of one’s thoughts on the merits of a Trump presidency, is its exposure of the conservative establishment. The irony of an undisciplined and at times extremely uncouth candidate, whose grasp of policy is tenuous, to say the least, obliterating the intellectual veneer of a movement with hundreds of millions of dollars in endowments and countless scholars at its disposal is one which will be endlessly analyzed in the years to come.
Professor George Hawley’s book, Right-Wing Critics Of American Conservatism, does not seek to analyze or deconstruct the Trump phenomenon, but it does hold some clues as to why Donald Trump has succeeded in dismantling a political infrastructure which has dominated the Republican Party for over half a century.
This book is a marvelous discovery for a number of reasons, not least because it provides a coherent, internally consistent definition of conservatism, as well as its ideological antipode, contemporary liberalism. After examining and rejecting several philosophical distinctions between the right and the left-including Thomas Sowell’s assertion that this divide reflects a difference in beliefs about the innate malleability of human nature-Hawley arrives at an intelligible cleavage between these two very broad political groupings.
He asserts that the left/modern liberalism is an ideology which extols equality as the primary virtue above all others when considering how our society should be structured, whereas the right/conservatives view equality as a subsidiary or ancillary value within our society.
(Excerpt) Read more at american-rattlesnake.org ...
“He asserts that the left/modern liberalism is an ideology which extols equality...”
All commissars are equal, but some commissars are a little more equal.
Whither, whence, hither, hence ... once we had great pronouns in our language.
Few are aware of the true philosophical bases of the right and left, or of the essential roles of constitutional government, or of the rising stakes in each successive election cycle going forward.
Liberals concentrate on fixing the income differences via a handout (e.g., free cell phones for deadbeats) while conservatives prefer a handup (e.g., training programs) that allows the individual to rise to the level they want. Fifty years of handouts and with more and more people thinking they "deserve" more handouts has clearly shown this approach solves nothing in terms of income equality. When are the poor going to learn the Democrats don't give a crap about them; only that they vote for them, hence the handouts to keep them in line. Stupid.
I guess so, but ideologies become tribal. After enough political cycles, whatever the original philosophical difference was, the conflict comes to be more of a raw "us versus them" thing. You can find some very elitist people in the egalitarian camp. They're there because the use of power in the name of equality is in their own group interest, or because at some point something really turned them against the other side.
Never has the “battered wife syndrome” analogy fit a situation as well as the marriage of the conservative movement to the GOPe.
There Is no mention of the media so this analysis of the Liberal/Conservative distinction is flawed.
As I mentioned in my post, another definition would be Sowell's, i.e. the different approach each has to human nature. The left views it as infinitely malleable, while the right recognizes man's fallibility and the inability to fundamentally alter something ordained by God/created through evolution.
That's too general and too dogmatic. "Always" doesn't include the 1940s and 1950s when liberals were actually fighting against Communists, and "whenever" doesn't have much to do with the days when National Review was edited by John Sullivan, when they published Sullivan's and Peter Brimelow's criticism of immigration policy. Fringe voices have been excluded from National Review or movement conservatism, but it's easy to forget that exclusion wasn't immediate or automatic. Plenty of dissidents found a home there for longish periods of time.
For example, why did a vociferous defender of Senator Joe McCarthy believe that the anti-Communism of the John Birch Society was beyond the pale? Also, why are the seemingly benign sociological observations of Jason Richwine worse than the anti-civil rights editorials from the early days of National Review?
There were some real snakes that Buckley excluded from his movement, whatever his own past was like. Not everybody who criticizes "movement conservatism" from the right is a good influence. Isn't that clear by now?
National Review movement conservatism is quickly becoming a thing of the past. What you'll see now is people trying to define their own version of "movement conservatism." They'll behave in the same high-handed way as the old NR commissars they criticize and exclude ideological deviants in the same way that they condemn yesterdays' movement poohbahs and panjandrums for doing.
, whose grasp of policy is tenuous, to say the least,
Yeah, “policy” is tough to grasp. Got it. By the way, WTF is this policy that a successful, educated 60 something American finds so tough to grasp?
You're right about the tolerance-if you could call it that-displayed by magazines like National Review. I think Brimelow was a senior editor at NR until 1998-quickly jettisoned once Lowry was put in charge.
Great article, thanks.
Then too bad for him as ‘modern’ liberalism is solely a justification for Bread and Circus as exemplified by our government subsidized consumer spending, which is done for the benefit of the media that monopolizes control of the ‘public square’.
Liberalism/conservatism is, and will always be, defined by support for “wise” (democratic0 feudalism/ support for divided governance.
A modern philosopher should heed the effect the medium has on the message and consider the ramification of a consolidated national mass media. Ignoring the distortions caused by the surfaces of Plato’s cave (so to speak) yields sterility.
undisciplined and at times extremely uncouth candidate, whose grasp of policy is tenuous HAHA was in debt 9.2 BILLION with a B, when the housing market crashed, NOW owns 200 companies, employs thousands, has an IQ of 157, the highest of ANY POTUS in history was in the 130s, has wrietten many best sellers, http://wafaa-sherif.com/new/ar/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/How%20to%20Get%20Rich.pdf
Let’s get our terminology correct. Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Bill Kristol, Rich Lowry, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, and the rest of the pro-Democrats are NOT and never have been Conservatives. Oh, they talk about it as if they know something; but they don’t.
So, stop with the Conservative label. They are part of the Uniparty and whatever philosophy they espouse at the moment.
Don’t mention it.
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