I feel this has been asked before, but I ask it again in light of this thread.
In that thread, people refer to Eisenhower and Buckley conservatives. Other than referring to historical individuals, how could someone explain a conservative agenda that makes sense to me with respect to today’s issues and today’s social/political/environmental/international environment?
When I was a kid in the 60s, my understanding was that conservative and Republican were somewhat synonymous, and represented support for fiscal restraint, a strong military, yet restraint WRT military action. I suppose I also believed it was consistent with maintaining the status quo - what essentially reflected white/male/wealthy privilege. Also generally coming down on the side of business over labor. Religion was confusing to this young atheist, as Catholics were considered liberal and Southern Protestants conservative.
Other than that, I’ve never really tried to “define” conservatism. I have long had the impression that - despite their words - the Republican party did not seem to really align with conservatism WRT spending and military intervention. So that sort of left social issues such as abortion, school prayer, affirmative action, immigration…
Also - what politicians today consistently reflect conservative views? If there are no current conservatives, I wonder how useful that is as a term?
The Pit thread I cited mentions a perceived tendency for liberal Dopers to gang up on conservatives. Whether true or not, I’d appreciate it if liberals try to curb their enthusiasm over explaining - and criticizing - what conservatism means.
The answer to the thread question is — tribal loyalty. A fixed ideology no longer has much to do with it beyond dislike of outsiders and foreigners. So Trump 47 is all out against the professional managerial class, while he was unironically proud in Trump 45 that he went to Wharton (“the best school”) and that Jared graduated from Harvard. Now it is conservative to slash their research funding and tax their endowments.
Personally, I am by temperament a bit slow to accept change, and alert to possible unintended consequences, So I may have been a few years slower to embrace same-sex marriage than most here. That might make people suspect I am a modern conservative. But it has little to do with it. Look how easily the conservatives of today jettison the idea that tariff changes should be the result of drawn out negotiations with long lead time. Now, if their tribal leadership wants it, they embrace rapid change..
This post is too U.S. centric, but you can see some of the tribal as opposed to go-slow, dynamic in Brexit, and maybe in Orban going after the Central European University.
There may be a small handful who are true conservatives, but not very many. I mentioned John Cornyn in another thread, and I think he qualifies, at least in the sense that his principles are conservative, but that he has had to compromise those principles because his party is no longer the party of conservatives.
That’s more about political parties than the ideology of a particular philosophy. Yes, it’s true that the Republican Party is no longer the party of conservatives. But I think it hasn’t been for a long time. I’ve also mentioned this before, but I think it turns out that conservatives represent a very small fraction of the population. I think an accurate description of the situation is that for many decades, going back at least to Ronald Reagan, is that the tail (Republicans that are true conservatives) was wagging the dog (Republicans that care more about what the current day MAGAs care about rather than real conservatism). Yes, the Republican politicians were almost all true conservatives up until Trump won in 2016, but the large majority of the voters have always been MAGAs who were voting R because they had no place else to go. The actual slice of conservative Republicans among the voting public turned out to be a small number.
I realize this doesn’t explain what conservatives believe, but it does explain why the question is an academic one. It’s because there just aren’t very many true conservatives. The philosophy no longer has any utility to the voting public. For what it’s worth, I think those conservatives, few in number though they are, are now in the Democratic Party. They are represented by what are called “mainstream” or “center left” Democrats who have not yet been able to figure out how they can successfully run on a platform that they outwardly admit is conservative.
In the past, ‘conservatism’ was perhaps considered a reasoned position on the spectrum in political debate but it’s been quite a long time since then. Maybe at least 50 years; hard to pinpoint the time when the meaning slipped?
I think it slipped when the Dixiecrats moved to the Republican party, mostly under Reagan’s campaign in 1980. That planted the seed for the take over of the GOP by the MAGA types. Abortion seemed to have been the wedge issue that changed everything.
Old-school conservatives: Like strong military, favor NATO, favor stability, don’t like making huge changes, etc. Dislike Russia, regimes, dictators, etc. Want maturity in leaders. Want low taxes, less government. Willing to eject bad leaders (such as Nixon.) Some such conservatives still exist today. They’re typically third-party voters or moderate Democrats.
MAGA new conservatives: Nothing is predictable, except all about owning the libs. Cozying up to Russia and tyrants is okay. Leader can be a 79-year old who behaves like a 7.9-year old, no problem. High taxes and big government are okay as long as it’s OUR guy doing it. There is no such thing as a bad leader if he’s OUR guy.
First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order.That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent. Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription. Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability Seventh, conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked. Eighth, conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism. Ninth, the conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions. Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.
Okay, I’ll take a shot at outlining conservative ideology in a non-judgmental way.
The core tenet of conservatism is that America has achieved its ideals. All we need to do is protect and preserve those ideals. In some cases, that means preventing other people from changing us away from those ideals. It also means changing back to those ideals in cases where we have already changed away from them.
I will divide it up into two categories
Fiscal conservative believes in lower taxation with lower federal spending or at worse taxes match spending. At the political level, this does not exist anymore as both sides spend far beyond revenue and both sides are hesitant to raise taxes to do so with Republicans wanting very selective tax cuts. Economists call themselves Keynesians but originally JM Keynes said that the government should save in the good times in order to spend in the bad times. Today the government spends in the good times and spends even more in the bad times so that Keynes himself would be considered a fiscal conservative.
Social conservatism believes there should be an inertia to overcome with changing social norms. This was the biggest betrayal of the Republicans in the 1980s as “traditional” meant “my view of Christianity” so now “Social conservative” equated to fundamentalist Christian morality with (and this is the worst part) the belief that it is the government’s job to enforce those rules and not leave it to your Church/God.
That’s why I feel the Republican Party left me; 70s/80s conservatism simply does not exist anymore anywhere.
Or unaffiliated and vote for the closest to their beliefs which in Colorado means Democrats. Just let that sink in for a minute, I consider myself a “Conservative” Republican and the Dems in my state and Kamala Harris were far closer to my political views than Republicans. I did vote for a few of Republicans (three) that I’ve met and chatted with and were what I would call Rational Republicans.
That sounds right. That change coincided with the Rockefeller Republicans becoming Democrats, and here we are.
I’m still of the belief that the real conservatives are just small in number compared to what would be expected by a bell shaped distribution. If the far left is -100, the center 0, and the far right 100, then I think there is a huge dip starting around 20, with a deep trough up through around 75 or 80 (where the Liz Cheneys of the world reside, and where the Rockefeller Republicans used to reside before they moved left), and then a large hump between 80 and 100. On the left, between 0 and -100, that pattern doesn’t exist, and instead we have the normal bell shaped distribution.
I think it was before that. Reaction to the Civil Rights movements are the birth of modern American conservativism. Forced integration and non discrimination laws poisoned federal government for Republicans.
It seems like that should be the case, especially in light of the hypothesis that the change was either started by or accelerated by Nixon’s Southern Strategy. The big flaw in the hypothesis is that it fails to account for Carter’s win in 1976 and his sweep of the South (minus Virginia if you count that as the South).
I think part of conservatism is the belief that the role of the federal government should be restricted to those areas that cannot be adequately handled by the states (national defense, controlling interstate commerce, etc.)
Part of the reason for this belief is to take into account that the US is a large country with a wide variety of ideologies. However, it depends on the somewhat rosy-eyed assumption that a state is fairly homogeneous in its views. Since this is often not true, the result of making states responsible for such a wide variety of issues and services is that it simply kicks the problem down the road.
Thanks for this discussion. You’ve written a lot, which I will have to digest before I can respond.
Yes, because of my ignorance, my discussion is largely limited to the US. I really have no idea whether non-US posters are politically conservative or not.
But I tend to agree that the use of the word “conservative”, as in the linked Pit thread, is somewhat problematic. We might as well ask why there are so few unicorns or passenger pigeons on the boards. Whether or not a true conservative ever existed, I doubt there is a healthy population of them in the US these days.
That’s an excellent way of putting it. Whatever MAGA is, it isn’t conservative, even if that is what they call themselves. Which means that if real conservatives do still exist in any significant numbers in the US (and IMHO they don’t), they are either in the Democratic Party, voting third party, or not voting at all.
ETA: Third party voting has not been at an all time high. Democrats are obviously not winning blowout victories that they would be winning if they’d had a large influx of new voters. And voter participation is close to the all time highs for 20th and 21st centuries. IMHO that’s good evidence that those options I noted are not what has happened.
