Posted on 03/07/2016 7:53:41 AM PST by GilGil
Under the 2D filter of life, conservatives are united by a common ideology that is supported by reason. But under the Master Persuader filter, conservative is a word created for the purpose of identity persuasion. Nothing more. According to my filter, conservative has no logical or coherent reason for existing. While I assume it once had a noble birth, at this point it is just a hodgepodge of ideas that disagree with Democrats. Some of the individual ideas have merit, but they don’t belong together in the same bag for any reason that is obvious to me.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.dilbert.com ...
When everyone from Jeb Bush to Marco Rubio to John Kaisch telling us about “Being the rel Conservative” in the race you know Conservative is a meaningless term used by the GOPE to keep certain voters on the party plantation.
IOW, the “real conservative in the race” is ME. Anyone is either to the right or left of ME.
But the GOPe used to despise conservatives, and until recently shunned the label. It’s just useful to them now.
The problem is that conservatism is not actually an ideology, but a temperament or attitude that is essentially opposed to ideology: hang on to the good from the past; don’t accept the “new” simply because it sounds good, critique it on the basis of the common experience of mankind; allow the peculiarities that have grown up as a result of history to survive if not flourish, rather than imposing “rational” solutions on everything (in the American context this is mostly seen as letting the individual be free from government compulsion, but it also includes letting different states do things differently and keeping non-state social institutions be free from government compulsion); accept that life is tragic (the Christian conservative sees this in terms of the Fall, but the tragic sense of life is there in all properly so called variants of conservatism).
What is incoherent and makes no sense is “right wing” because this is defined only by opposition to the programme of the left, so that everyone who opposes the left, be it American conservatives, British Tories, monarchists, ultramontanists, Nazis, anarcho-capitalists, the Dutch PVV which is almost exactly like the left in its programme, except that it sees the danger of Muslim immigration to Europe which is now part of the left’s project and vociferously opposes it... are all “right wing” (and ideally, from the left’s point of view able to be portrayed as all being Nazis).
The problem is that conservatism is not actually an ideology, but a temperament or attitude that is essentially opposed to ideology: hang on to the good from the past; don’t accept the “new” simply because it sounds good, critique it on the basis of the common experience of mankind; allow the peculiarities that have grown up as a result of history to survive if not flourish, rather than imposing “rational” solutions on everything (in the American context this is mostly seen as letting the individual be free from government compulsion, but it also includes letting different states do things differently and keeping non-state social institutions be free from government compulsion); accept that life is tragic (the Christian conservative sees this in terms of the Fall, but the tragic sense of life is there in all properly so called variants of conservatism).
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What you just said a communist could say. A lot of people in the old Soviet Union have longed for the good old days when there was “law and order.” Are they conservative?
Trump is like a computer virus that infects all the wanna-be’s and puts them out of business.
No, Communism, the most rigidly ideological of ideologies, was all about rejecting the past by revolutionary change in favor of new untried ideas that sounded good, but flew in the face of human experience — St. John Chrysostom penned a critique of leveling in the 4th century, imposing “rational” solutions and stamping out peculiarities (central planning). It also fundamentally denied the tragic in life, with sneering dicta about breaking eggs to make omelets and millions of deaths being “a statistic”, and its expectation of the perfectibility of Man (”the New Soviet Man”).
^^This^^
This is the election I no longer refer to my beliefs, philosophy or attitude as "conservative".
I like how they took the labels off of my t-shirts, so I took the labels off of my political opinions.
If communism is all about rejecting the past, why are there so many communist citizens dreaming about the good old days when there was law and order. That is the past.
“Conservative” means “opposed to rapid change”, if we’re going by the Burkean definition. Since the Marxists have been the largest group which proposes change, and since the Marxists have defined political terminology since the founding of the USSR, conservatism was traditionally defined by opposition to Marxism.
Now that our government largely follows the tenets of Marxism, using the Burkean definition of conservatism would suggest that we adopt Marxism as the status quo. Were we to shrink the government to its proper role where it soley provides for national defense, and were society to reestablish supremacy of the family, we would change society dramatically.
Hence, the GOP-e bleats about how they’re the “real conservatives”, since they want to preserve the Marxist status quo. In that regard, perhaps they are right.
This is what should be called "libertarian." Unfortunately, this term has also been given too many definitions and thus has become, in effect, undefined.
In practice, "conservative" is little more than 1) a word people who call themselves conservative use as a synonym for "good," and 2) a word people who do not call themselves conservative use as a synonym for "bad."
Wow! Very nice definition. Basically that boils down in my view to the individual being celebrated over the collective.
Ayn Rand wrote about this over and over again.
When the Declaration of Independence “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” That means to me that the individual is above the collective. These days the individual no longer exists.
Yes! Exactly. Has lost all meaning but gives millions of people the right to get anger about a word that has become meaningless.
The disunity in the movement comes from the fact that there are a lot of people claiming to be conservatives who are nothing more than pawns for the status quo. Virtually no one has practiced true small-government conservatism since Ronald Reagan, even though almost every Republican candidate has paid it lip service.
If you answer to the definition of conservatism is to tell someone to go read a bunch of books then the battle has been lost. If you cannot define it for me in a few words then the cause is hopeless.
If the only opposition the Left will acknowledge is "Nazis", eventually, Nazis are what they will get.
Trump’s critics agree that the guy who wants to shift power to the states, arm citizens, and neuter the oligarchy is a totalitarian fascist. Hmmm! sounds pretty conservative to me! Shifting power from the Feds to the states and from the Feds to the gun owning individuals seems like a conservative idea.
By definition, a ‘conservative’ is someone who supports or at least has affection for the status quo. When America was founded, European conservatism honored Church and King. In America, it became Biblical morality and the Constitutional contract.
There are completely different starting points now. Terms like ‘Originalist’ or ‘Restorationist’ more properly describe FR-type conservatism.
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