OK, lets talk about the scoliosis testing (I believe that you brought it up in the other thread in the Pit as well). I know that you are sensitive to having others put words in your mouth, but my understanding of the stance that you take here is that drug testing of students and scoliosis screening occupy the same plane, correct?
What I fail to understand is how a Conservative is content to delegate these responsibilities to the State. I may be way off base here, but isn’t one of the cornerstones of Conservative thought personal responsibility? Wouldn’t you (as a father) feel that something had already gone pretty wrong at home if it was through the school that you discovered that one of your children had scoliosis (God forbid)?
And that is what I still am not getting about Conservatives. The way that they seem to advocate a small State, personal responsibility and the awareness of unintended consequences except when it comes to some issues. Maybe what I am asking is why they are not more like Libertarians, I don’t know.
Binarydrone, you might find it instructional to look at the political compass, a theory that shows politics not just in left and right, but in libertarian vs. authoritarian. To me this makes the supposed inconsistencies highlighted in your OP very easy to comprehend - you’re looking at conservative policy along the X axis, and neglecting the Y axis.
I want to focus back on the OP. Their are plenty of definitions for the word “conservative” in adjective form. The most generic definition that I can think of is: “Keeping the Status Quo intact, or adverse to immediate and abrupt change.”
Of course, when this term enters the political arena, just like everything else, it gets twisted all out of shape. Sometimes Republicans take the opposite stance on a particular issue simply because the Democrats chose their stance first. But this happens both ways equally.
The OP raises a good point. If the Republicans (not conservatives) are for protecting our way of life, and at the same time against personal invasion, drug enforcement is a troublesome subject for them to deal with. The term “zero sum game” gets thrown around a lot, but I feel that it trully applies to this situation. If you add to one side, you have to take away from the other side.
So, yes, this is contradictory, but not entirely, because our way of life has to be protected. On this issue, a compromise will always happen, as long as drugs are illegal.
I don’t buy it. The prohibition against “drugs” is the heavy-government infringement. To say that arbitrary searches don’t count as a larger, intrusive government because they’re law enforcement doesn’t explain why the proscription of, say, smoking a dried plant by a competent adult isn’t itself an act of a larger, intrusive government. The prohibition of drugs by the state is not a law enforcement question; it is a choice of whether the state should eschew personal choice and impose its own standards on individual actors, just as the OP had indicated.
Binarydrome, your confusion comes from looking at it in -er- binary terms.
Conservative vs. liberal is not a linear model, it is a matrix, as jjim pointed out. Imagine a box divided into 8 sections, in two rows of four. Label one row “conservative” and the other “liberal.” Now label one box in each row “foreign policy,” “social policy,” “personal responsibility” and “role of government.”
Using whatever criteria you wish, mark your own positions in each box. It’s unlikely you’ll wind up with all four checkmarks falling neatly onto either the conservative or the liberal row.
What separates a “conservative” from a “liberal” is how many boxes they’ve checked in one or the other row, and how strongly they feel about a particular box. For example, right through the 1970s, there was a group of Democrats who were quite liberal on social policy, but very conservative on foreign policy. They happened to identify with the “liberal” Democratic party because they were more strongly influenced by their social issues.
Similarly, there is a type of Republican who is led to the conservative side by views on foreign policy or personal responsibility, but is somewhat “liberal” in terms of social policy and role of government.
On a national level, the Democrats and Republicans tend to give equal weight to each box, but on a local level, one box may be far more important than another.
In fact, I’d submit that many in both the conservative and liberal camps are willing to sacrifice the role of government to further their agendas on the other three categories. They’re separated only by the semantic difference of “as big as it takes to get the job done” vs. “as small as it takes to get the job done.”
That’s the right idea, but there are other, similar, and better examples than that one, though. They’ve got Carol Mosely Braun and Howard Dean pegged as on the right …