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To: GilGil

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).


4 posted on 03/07/2016 8:10:52 AM PST by The_Reader_David (And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know...)
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To: The_Reader_David

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 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?


6 posted on 03/07/2016 8:13:07 AM PST by GilGil
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To: The_Reader_David
are all “right wing” (and ideally, from the left’s point of view able to be portrayed as all being Nazis).

If the only opposition the Left will acknowledge is "Nazis", eventually, Nazis are what they will get.

18 posted on 03/07/2016 8:37:59 AM PST by Jim Noble (Diseases desperate grown, are by desperate appliance relieved, or not at all)
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