Posted on 05/14/2019 5:58:12 AM PDT by Kaslin
A recent article dealt with the fiftieth anniversary of The Who's rock opera Tommy: "The Who's Tommy at Fifty."
Tommy still excites me and makes me shake my head in wonder at how a group of early twenty-somethings could put out such an exquisite piece of music. But that was par for the course for British rock in the late Sixties. They say they don’t make ‘em like they used to, and when it comes to Tommy, they’re right.
The story validates how the best things in life are always timeless, whether it's a rock, jazz, or classical music album, a piece of antique furniture or an 800-year-old cathedral in Paris. But timelessness not only applies to material things or music for that matter, but to ideas and principles as well. And this gets to the crux of the differences between conservatism and liberalism.
The ideas and principles of conservatism have always been timeless, beginning with the father of conservatism, Anglo-Irish statesman and political theorist Edmund Burke, who wrote in "Reflections on Revolution in France" about the destructive consequences of the French Revolution and that by 'throwing out the baby with the bathwater,' you are inviting nothing but trouble when the tried and true are dispensed with and replaced only by reason and ideas devoid of a transcendent morality that in turn unleash all kinds of negative consequences.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Conservatism rests on a sense of cultural continuity, a carefully engineered and guided evolution that changes only when “change” equals “improvement.” Liberalism promotes change for change’s sake, where “different” is blindly assumed to be “better.” It destroys continuity rather than preserving it, which is why every liberal must learn history’s lessons the hard way.
“As a thought experiment, if the Democrats were to provide the perfect equality of identity politics and universal entitlements for all their constituents, what then? The party would collapse out of a lack of ideas.”
We are witnessing the demise of the Democrat Party - and Thank Goodness! MAGA! :)
My folks loved JFK - and they are both staunch Conservatives. The author is right that they’d never be part of the Socialist Democrat Party as it stands, today.
A political ideology is a set of principals aimed at establishing or maintaining a certain social system; it is a program of long-range action, with the principles serving to unify and integrate particular steps into a consistent course of action. It only by means of principles that men can project the future and choose their actions accordingly. Leftard principles (altruism, collectivism, statism, and socialism) are anti-reality and irrational, and so they always and necessarily lead to destruction, disaster, and misery/suffering.
Conservatism works in the long run because at its root is pragmatism - what has proven to work.
But the world changes, so in order to continue working it has to be receptive to new ideas as well.
It is that friction between old proven ways and new possibly better (but not yet proven) ways of doing things that defines the struggle between conservatism and liberalism.
Conservatism without a certain dose of liberalism will lead to stagnation. Liberalism without a great dose of conservation will lead to chaos and misery.
Finding the right balance between the two is the great human pursuit, and what politics is all about.
It is still all about power with them, thru and thru.
Not all changes in the world are changes for the better. Conservatism is the bulwark against change that is nothing more than “different.” Resting as it does on proven, time-honored principles, it buffers a culture against violent, traumatic upheaval in the name of progress. Some see that as inertia, but in reality, it is a guardian.
Burke wrote taht conservatism “combines a disposition to preserve with an ability to reform.” We’ve lost the disposition to preserve.
“Not all changes in the world are changes for the better.”
Is that straw man supposed to be an argument against what I said?
Nicely said.
No, it’s supposed to reinforce what you said.
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