Reminds me of the old joke: if you are under 30 and you are a conservative, you have no heart; if you are over 30 and you are liberal, you have no brain.
The other part about it adds in September 11th. The Left just doesn't get how much the country returned to its inate roots after that event, and why.
The media has already begun the slow slide into oblivion. If they don't change, (and they won't) it'll be great to watch.
Not intending to nitpick, but I hate that quote. I understand what it's trying to say, but it's wrong. It doesn't explain the college students who started ProtestWarrior, or my eighteen year old, staunchly conservative college freshman son, either. And he's not alone, by any stretch. And he doesn't parrot his old man's views, either. ;>)
Did Churchill say it as a conservative, classical liberal or neither?
Did he revise Guisot/Clemenceau to mean socialist = liberal?
Charles Krauthammer [op-ed, May 25] quotes Winston Churchill as saying, "If you're not a liberal when you're 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative when you're 40, you have no head."
This quotation is frequently but mistakenly attributed to Churchill. It is anyway unlikely that Churchill would subscribe to this philosophy: He was a swashbuckling soldier at 20, and a Conservative member of Parliament at 25. A couple of years later he switched to the Liberal Party (which was not liberal in the modern sense), and later went back to the Conservatives.
The phrase originated with Francois Guisot (1787-1874): "Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head." It was revived by French Premier Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929): "Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head." -- Peter Rutland
CHURCHILL AND THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY Lord Blake, FBA, JP April 5 ... I have chosen for my theme an aspect of Winston Churchill's extraordinary career, which tends to be forgotten both in Britain and America. We are inclined to think that it began in 1940. But he was 65 by then – an age at which most people have reached retirement. My theme is his relations with the Conservative party. After 1940 they were relatively uncomplicated. Before 1940 it was a different story.
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….He found himself, at the age of 20, head of the family in precarious financial circumstances. He meant to forge a career, but he felt no great
love for the Conservative Party. Its stuffy conformism had destroyed his father – or so he believed. He would not at once abandon the Churchill family tradition. He would begin as a Conservative, but the allegiance lay lightly on him from the start.
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Almost from the beginning of his parliamentary career, Churchill was far closer to the right wing of the Liberal Party than to the orthodox Conservatives.
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For Churchill this was the turning point. Socialism was anathema to him. No one had more vehemently supported the White Russians against the Bolsheviks in 1919-20. No one had been more distressed when Lloyd George withdrew British support and left the White Russians to their fate. To compare Bolshevism with the British Labour Party may seem absurd. For Churchill, however – and he was not alone – the socialism preached by Ramsay MacDonald was merely a watered-down version of Communism. And for communism, as practiced in Soviet Russia, he had unlimited hatred
and contempt. To him it was the embodiment of ruthless terrorism, total tyranny, and destruction of all the value of Western civilization. It would produce grinding poverty, extinguish liberty of thought, belief, speech or the press, and do all in its power to spread its evil doctrines over the rest of the world.
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In a long letter to The Times, published on 18 January 1924, he proclaimed his position and finally broke with the Liberal Party.
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And so the greatest statesman to have led the party bowed out. He had been leader for nearly 15 years, but the relationship was often uneasy, especially
after the war. He was a man of genius, energy, vision, a master of the spoken and written word. He had saved England in 1940. But was he really a
Conservative and if so in what sense? Perhaps the answer is that he was an anachronism. It was as if time had been warped in some strange way, and an eighteenth-century Whig was leading a twentieth-century Tory Party.
Kirk: Postwar Conservatism's Prophet by William A. Rusher
Prior to the middle of the 20th century, by far the most powerful conservative force in the United States was the tradition we now call classical liberalism" (to distinguish it from the group of collectivist and redistributionist impulses that hijacked the word "liberalism" for itself a few decades back). Classical liberalism was grounded in the Enlightenment's celebration of the freedom of the individual, and derived from that source the twin concepts of political democracy and a free-market economy.
First in the United States and Britain, then ultimately all over the world, these concepts have constituted an immensely successful strategy for liberating the energies of humanity and furthering its happiness. In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Friedrich Hayek brilliantly restated the principles of classical liberalism in the teeth of the socialist doctrines then threatening to sweep the postwar world.
But mankind needs more than a strategy, however grand; it needs a purpose. One group of classical liberalism's critics, proclaiming the "death of God," had defined humanity's happiness as the ultimate purpose, and set about planning this--thus spawning this century's plague of totalitarian states. Another, more popular in the democracies of the West, had seized on the concept of "liberty" as the ultimate good, and were slowly degrading it into the undisciplined, hedonistic license we see around us today.
That was the state of affairs in 1953 when a young professor at Michigan State University published The Conservative Mind. Russell Kirk was only 34, but in this enormously influential book he almost single-handedly rooted American conservatism in the rich loam of the ancient Judaeo-Christian tradition, and thereby gave it the philosophical heft of a world-view. He also gave it its name: Not even Bill Buckley, defending many of the same principles two years earlier in God and Man at Yale, had called the amalgam "conservatism."
It would take years before Kirk, Buckley and scores of other writers could anneal the various components of American conservatism into the fighting faith it eventually became, and even longer before their new alloy could be hammered into a political weapon capable of dominating American politics. But Kirk never wavered. Year after year the books rolled from his pen: A Program for Conservatives, Academic Freedom, Roots of American Order and dozens more. He lived to see himself honored as one of the earliest and greatest prophets of the conservative dispensation.
By coincidence, the April issue of the American Historical Review carries a perceptive and important article by Professor Alan Brinkley of Columbia University entitled "The Problem of American Conservatism." The "problem," according to Professor Brinkley (who carefully disavows "any personal engagement with or sympathy for conservative politics"), is "finding a suitable place for the Right--for its intellectual traditions and its social and political movements--within our historiographical concerns."
For, as Professor Brinkley goes on to discuss at length, "American conservatism has been something of an orphan in historical scholarship." There are many reasons for this, but ultimately he concludes that what historians must do today is open their minds. "Secular intellectuals," he writes, including most historians must "concede that they have been wrong in some of their most basic assumptions about America in our time." They must "recognize that the progressive modernism that most scholars, and many others, have so complacently assumed has become firmly and unassailably established in America--the secularism, the relativism, the celebration of scientific progress--may not in fact be as firmly entrenched as they thought."
Political Science 1 -- September 4, 2002
Background to the U.S. Constitution.
The founders were Classical Liberals.
Can someone point out to me where/when Churchhill said this. It is my opinion that Rose Friedman said it. Rose is an economist and the wife of Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman.