Ha! Yeah, well, that may be true.
Anyways, people may vote for and join a particular party, especially in a two party system, for many disparate reasons.
Yes, but you aren’t an island to yourself. The things that the party supports and does, and the things other members of the party push for all matter. You aren’t voting for just the stuff you like, you are voting to empower everyone on that side, even the ones you want to disassociate yourself from.
Yes I know this is true for both sides, but at least on the left there are internal debates on things all the time, and we don’t have an official “never criticize a fellow party member” rule.
You’re the one who said that that’s what they have in common, and it’s obviously false for modern conservatives. If I said that the Green party and the Democrats had opposition to nuclear power in common, and you showed me lots of Democratic support for nuclear power, I would say, yeah, I guess you’re right.
If I said that Democrats and Progressives had a single-minded focus on British-style government-run healthcare in common and you showed me lots of Democrats who are opposed to National Health-style solutions, I would retract my claim.
Modern conservatives are in no way opposed to an expansive all powerful state. Some may be, but social conservatives want the state to regulate bedroom activities, crime conservatives defend the to ridiculous extents, and so on. In fact, I would say that dislike of an expansive all powerful state is one thing that really separates libertarians and conservatives.
In practical terms, in the modern world, Libertarianism amounts to protecting the privilege of the powerful and maintaining the status quo hierarchy, so it is in practice a type of Conservatism.
Libertarianism in the PRC is progressive but conservative in the US. It depends on the current state and trajectory of personal liberties.
Libertarian = selfish
Incorrect.
Libertarian = Sociopathically selfish
I was going to add “…with a touch of solipsism.”
All the libertarians I’ve known were just republicans who thought ‘libertarian’ sounded cooler and more sophisticated. And as mentioned above, to adopt that smirky ‘above routine politics’ pose. None of them would ever dream of voting democratic.
Back when I was into competitive pistol shooting, a good amount of the participants where “libertarians”. And what you wrote was entirely true. I’ll also add they thought they were the smartest people around but were truly just loud-mouthed guys, many with blogs (some still do), who had horrible ideas. This is one of the biggest reasons I don’t miss those functions. Even bigger than the outrageous amount of money it would cost to participate now.
I would say that your first sentence is probably correct, but the second sentence not quite so much. The main focus of the Conservative movement seems to be preservation of the power structure. Those with privledge (wealthy, white, male, christian) should remain privileged, those who are second class should know their place. This fits nicely in with the Libertarian ideal of a just world meritocracy. Those who are at the top are at the top because they deserve to be there.
Which highlights the trait that I find to be universal among Libertarians even more than the solipsistic sociopathic selfishness posted above, namely an insufferable over estimation of their self worth. Those who subscribe to this philosophy invariably do so under the assumption that were a meritocracy instituted they would invariably rise with the cream to the top, and the only reason they aren’t there already is because the parasites are holding them back.
You kind of get it. Part of Conservatism is trying to preserve the social order and their place in it. This doesn’t just apply to the most powerful and wealthiest, though. One can be quite satisfied with their position in the social order even if they are not at the top.
This is why Capitalism was originally a threat to Conservatives. It allowed people to move up or down the social order based on their own merits instead of a silver spoon in their mouth at birth. I went to school with two different sons of farm workers who making just enough to squeak by who are now worth at least tens of millions of dollars. In an old-time Conservative society, they would never be accepted as being equals in the community, but in a Capitalist society, one can move up.
Classical Liberalism is very much based on Capitalism. It has been said that Classical Liberalism attempts to apply Capitalism to the political world as well as the economic world. This is why I consider myself to be a Classical Liberal. The Libertarians take that Classical Liberalism and push it to the extremes.
I’m also quite Conservative. I’m not at the top by any means, but I’m quite happy with where I am in society and I certainly wish to protect that place.
Progressivism and Socialism, on the other hand, seem to want to put everyone on the same level (except with those that run it being afforded far more benefits). Since they can’t raise everyone up to the top, the only way to really do that is to bring the top down. It still won’t change much for those at the bottom because they will still depend on their Progressive Masters dolling out their “fair share” of the resources.
I don’t know if many Libertarians think that they would rise to the top in a Libertarian world. The ones I’ve met generally just wanted to be left alone.
There are a few weird misconceptions and lapses logicae here. I don’t know of any American progressives, or even socialists, whose goal is to make all individuals have exactly the same socioeconomic status.
(Nor do they advocate providing a special category of lavish elite privileges for political leaders; I suspect that’s a claim that you or your sources have just unthinkingly borrowed from the practice of “unofficial privileges” for Soviet nomenklatura and apparatchiks and their approximate equivalents in the Chinese Communist system. If you actually think about it in the US context for a second, you’ll notice that even an actual democratic-socialist politician like Bernie Sanders, with under $5 million of wealth at near 80 years old after many solid decades of gainful employment and recent lucrative book projects, is still way less wealthy and privileged than many of his own constituents, much less his wealthiest Senate colleagues. And younger democratic-socialist politicians like AOC have way less money than that.)
It’s not like there’s no middle ground, as you’re suggesting, between making everybody as wealthy as the richest and making everybody as poor as the poorest. What progressive policies tend to aim for, and achieve, is reducing inequality and raising living standards for the less privileged, rather than making everybody’s living standards exactly the same.
It’s also rather insulting to suggest that the working classes are simply dependent on political “masters” “dolling” [sic] out resources to them. Most poor people work damn hard for a living, and they are not responsible for the systemic inequalities that make it very difficult to get out of poverty in our current system. (And no, having known in your lifetime a couple multimillionaire farmers whose parents were working class, of unspecified income and prospects, doesn’t disprove the claim that it’s very difficult to get out of poverty.)
Want to raise the living standard for the poor? The social system that the progressives want to overthrow has had astounding success in raising the living class standards for everyone. The poor of today, at least in the US and a number of other more advanced countries, have living standards that the wealthy of a couple centuries ago did not enjoy. That came through Capitalism, not Progressivism.
That came through both progressivism and capitalism. Where do you get the idea that those concepts are mutually exclusive?
Absolutely, including the establishment of 8-hour workday laws and minimum wage levels, restrictions on child labor, movements for the civil rights of women and nonwhite people, consumer and healthcare protections, municipal reforms, stabilization of the banking system, and world-changing innovations such as the invention of automobiles, airplanes, telephones, radio, mass-market sewing machines, etc. etc. etc.
Remember what the period that produced those particular improvements was called?
Doubtless from the same source where many other conservatives get similarly distorted caricatures of a stark binary division between so-called “Capitalism” and “Socialism”, with the name “Socialism” misapplied to what’s actually a childishly exaggerated version of full-blown rigidly centralized state communism. Namely, from today’s propagandistic right-wing media.
In the real world, as you say, the American socioeconomic system is a mix of capitalistic and socialistic practices, and there isn’t an American democratic-socialist anywhere who actually advocates “overthrowing” capitalism entirely.
Even the official platform of the Democratic Socialists of America isn’t advocating the kind of total state control in the name of egalitarianism that billy-jack mistakenly imagines. Although they support nationalizing certain kinds of businesses such as utility companies and encouraging the voluntary growth of worker-owned businesses, labor cooperatives and so forth, they are not in the least suggesting that private property or private ownership of business should be eradicated, or that everybody should be forced into rigid state-controlled socioeconomic equality.
Those and similar communist-dictatorship notions are just scraps of Soviet Union-era Stalinist ideology that modern right-wing propaganda outlets are falsely calling “socialism” in order to frighten the nervous and ill-informed.
Which system is this?
Most people learned at some point that the terms left and right came from where representatives of the people, clergy and nobility were seated at the Estates-Generales called before the French Revolution. That was a long time ago.
People use terms like Liberalism and Conservatism as if they do not change. But the meaning and implications were different in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, and now. The Republican Party following Trump is not the same as it was under Reagan. The Conservatives who support it now do not apparently believe the classical tenets and the traditional intellectual foundation of Conservatism has been deemphasized.
One might say an anarchist is someone who believes loose social organizations can replace government. This view is stated most reasonably in books like The Dawn Of Everything. But despite historical relevance it is hard for me to see it functioning well in modern countries.
It has been said Democrats want social freedom from government, and Republicans want economic freedom from government. There is a little bit of truth to this simplification.
Libertarianism wants as little government as practical. This in theory, given the above simplification, means it is not limited to Conservatism although it can be and these days often is. Some Libertarians just want economic freedom. But some who call themselves Libertarians support tougher measures for other people or selective morality, and so these often are not really Libertarians at all. In this sense it can be a label of convenience or even pretention.
I am politically moderate. But I do have a small Libertarian streak, in the old fashioned sense of the word. I do think government has an important role in public health and has many other significant and valuable functions not easily delegated or dismissed. But there is something to be said for a light touch with regards to influence and rule making. Government, on occasion, should stick to its areas of greatest competence.
That sounds a bit True Scotsman-ish, though. And “just wanting economic freedom” is often rather selectively defined.
E.g., when wealthy people are taxed for universal healthcare and have to pay their employees a minimum wage, then Libertarians say they’re being deprived of economic freedom. But when low-wage workers suffer because their bosses underpay them and they can’t afford non-subsidized healthcare, then according to Libertarians that’s somehow not being deprived of economic freedom.
I get what you’re saying about governments needing to be not too heavy-handed with regulation as a general principle. But I’m very, very skeptical about the common Libertarian attitude that government regulation is automatically an assault on freedom but the private-sector exploitation and immiseration that the government regulation is working to prevent is not any kind of assault on freedom, oh goodness no.
That is a fair criticism. Terms mean different things to different people and I certainly agree there is an absolute need for law and regulation - so I am a weak libertarian at best. Still, these rules can be simplified in some instances. The government should not seek to solve everything. The private sector certainly cannot solve everything. Above all else, I favour democracy.