Social engineering doesn’t seem to work. Attempts to shame people out of racism and tribalism, or to abolish religion in authoritarian regimes, or to get people to adopt more expensive energy when it is cleaner to do so, or to revert back to farm life (like they did in Cambodia) all failed.
Then again, maybe I’m wrong. There is a reason people who live in lands conquered by Muslims and Christians hundreds of years ago are mostly muslims and christians now. So social engineering with religion can work.
It was the Democrat party that insisted that slavery was a State’s right which eveuntually lead to the birth of the Republican party with Lincoln as it’s Presidential candidate. It was the Democrat party that supported the KKK. LBJ broke with his Democrat party to push for the Civil Rights bill.
That is an interesting question IMO too. But perhaps it makes more sense if one compares Prohibition to say the various restrictions placed on smoking or Mayor Bloomber’s attempt to prevent oversize soft drinks.
Speaking of Edmund Burke, the Jacobins definitely were on the wrong side of history, while the more moderate Girondins were on the right side.
I don’t know about that at all. The French Revolution, while having lasting long term changes cannot be said to have succeeded by the goals of the people who started the revolution. The revolution ended in despotism and a return to absolute monarchy, and the despot that effectively ended the revolution is well known. So both the failed radicals are known, often lionized for some things they did, and the despot who ended the revolution is known and lionized for some things he did.
Democrat and republican are not the same as liberal and conservative. Conservative democrats in the south were a big part of the democratic coalition from 1865-1965. But those conservatives left and became republicans after the civil rights movement. The south is now deeply republican. But evenso, conservative isn’t necessarily tied to party label.
LBJ broke with southern politicians. He had the support of the vast majority of republicans and democrats in the north and west. He had almost none of either party in the south. There is no evidence LBJ broke with the democratic party for the civil rights bill. He broke with southern politicians of both parties, but all non-southern politicians voted overwhelmingly for it.
I would like to respectfully make the following corrections to the above:
It was the Democratic party which insisted that slavery was a state’s right which eventually led to the birth of the Republic party with Lincoln as its presidential candidate. It was the Democratic party that supported the KKK. LBJ broke with his Democratic party to push for the Civil Rights bill.
Other corrections have already been made by others.
First, it’s not as if the conservatives and monarchists of France somehow won the day via strong arguments. The French monarchy was restored through the combined military might of numerous foreign nations.
Second, the French monarchy was only restored for a little while. The Bourbons didn’t stay in power long, and neither did “citizen king” Louis-Philippe. Ultimately, France became the secular republic that the original revolutionaries had wanted all along.
Hahahaha. I was responding to parts of Polerius and greenslime1951 posts.
If you’ll be kind enough to send me a list of posts I can and can not respond to and include recommendations of how I may respond, I promise to give your lists all of the consideration it’s due.
Neither of the posts you quoted specified the Republicans or the Democrats. Others have more comprehensively and thoughtfully corrected you. Since you continue to fail to get the point, I suggest the following list of posters you should reply to:
That’s retarded. Sorry, but it is. Not jumping on the bandwagon every time, and thinking that a lot of the things that are good now are worth preserving hardly makes a conservative person wont to “promote greed and cruelty” or to “fight only for evil causes.”
Alessan has it right. Society needs a Devil’s advocate, as it were- a group to say “Wait a minute… what are we giving up here? Why is this better than what we have?”
Of course, the political parties on both sides have warped and perverted what the parties and even the ideological terms stand for over the years; much of what the Republicans stand for was actually called “liberalism” once upon a time centuries ago.
Nixon was anything but a hardline right-winger; and I guess the Dem presidents before him were too cowardly to do it themselves.
Now the liberal position carried through by FDR and Truman was to acquiesce to the USSR and allow the Soviets to occupy and control all the countries that they ‘liberated’ in WWII…leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the forced removal through ethnic cleansing of millions more.
Ohh…and the liberals forced the Japanese into concentration camps.
I still don’t see how any of this supports your original claim
You claimed this:
The French Revolution either succeeded or failed, I say it failed. It’s hard to me to even countenance an opposing argument on that point. Unless you truly believe the Revolution begun in 1789 wanted said Revolution to end with a military dictatorship in which one man ruled France with an iron first, I don’t know how you could argue otherwise.
Further, I’m less concerned with the Bourbon restoration as I am with what actually ended the revolution: Napoleon’s military dictatorship. Additionally your point about how the Bourbon restoration didn’t happen because of conservatives making a “superior argument” is pointless. You were talking about revolutions, revolutions are not decided by people who make superior arguments but by people who win the revolution (by whatever means it is won.) Winning can happen on the battlefield or in the minds of public opinion, sometimes both.
So the French Revolution failed. By your thesis, its members will be scoffed at and reviled. Are they? Some are, sure, but some are also considered French national heroes and great thinkers. By your thesis, the forces that ended the revolution will not be remembered. Are you arguing Napoleon Bonaparte is not remembered? Probably one of the top 5 most famous people in Western history?
