Any parts you are unsure about are explained in the link I provided, I believe.
Interesting. Reading that, it seems to me the criteria come really close to describing Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden as true conservatives, and come nowhere close to fitting Donald Trump.
Wasn’t sure if you were providing the list as something you personally believe in, or as an example of a definition?
I find it hard to commit to any one political party or philosophy, since I often agree with some of their views while disagreeing with others.
I am probably an odd mix of fiscal conservative and social liberal.
Would prefer to leave most of economics to the free market, and minimise government involvement.
But I realize that some things probably have to be done by the government or they won’t get done at all. Large transport infrastructure, for example. And the military: I am not so naive that I think that we live in a happy peaceful world; Ukraine being the obvious example.
On the social side, I strongly believe that the government should NOT be legislating morality.
People’s personal lives should be their own. Unlike, say, Islamic theocracies.
I tried to find a solid definition that didn’t involve my own beliefs.
Depends what you mean by conservative. What seems to have happened is that the two main parties have rotated their positions around the political compass, thus losing some voters and gaining others, as illustrated here:
Your idea of ‘conservative’ is probably close to the Economic Dimension on the chart, which used to track well with the division between R and D, but today that division is more of a diagonal line, closer to the Social Dimension than the Economic one. Anyone in the top right or bottom left of the chart is liable to have switched party during these decades, and conservative Dopers were probably disproportionately in the top right quadrant (and Dopers in general mostly in the better-populated top left).
The bottom left corner, where voters moved from Dems to GOP, is mostly the white working class who benefit from economically left policies but either gain nothing or are disadvantaged by socially left ones, and are not well represented on this board.
IMO the shift has left both parties kind of schizophrenic and unsure what they stand for, maybe the Republicans more so than the Democrats. Plus all these terms are kind of loosely defined anyway, so it’s not surprising no one can agree on them.
That’s an interesting chart. Going by that chart, I think what has happened since 2016 is that numerically small but previously in charge (based on politicians in elected office) lower right corner lost massive influence to the numerically large (in terms of voters) but with previously very little political influence lower left corner. Now the lower left corner is solidly in charge of the Republican Party. Since the lower right corner was very small in terms of numbers of voters, we didn’t notice any shift in election results when they moved to the upper right corner after the Trump takeover.
ETA: With the caveat that the lower left, which seems to me where MAGA best fits, care far more about the social dimension than the economic dimension, to the point that they are willing to sacrifice their economic self interest if they get their way on the social agenda.
In the American context, I think conservatism has been a lot of things over the years:
- An approach to social mores.
- An approach to the size and function of government (smaller, doing less).
- Support for certain specific causes over others: fiscal responsibility, a strong military, opposition to communism, “law and order,” etc.
- A personal aesthetic: frumpier, more buttoned up, more country club.
I think this melange* reached its apotheosis under St. Ronald W. Regan, which is probably why he’s treated like, well, a saint by the right (the only other decent president they have had post-war is Ike, but that guy seems like a Liberal by today’s standard). The problem for “conservatives,” however, is that each element of the blend has been found wanting or outright rejected by the public:
- Social “conservatives” have lost the battle on women’s rights, gay marriage, and pretty much everything. Only the nutjob “christians” give a rat’s ass any more.
- Neither Reagan nor any other GOP president after him has been able to deliver on “small government”; indeed, it’s hard to see any progress whatsoever.
- Trump has shown the GOP to have no principles at all with respect to all the issues they once performatively held dear.
- Fashion in terms of clothing, housing, food, cars, etc., has leveled out over the past 25 years, making it almost impossible to guess the politics of adults based on their appearance or lifestyle.
I think that the last try by the right to be “real conservatives” was in 1994 with the Contract with America. The GOP won huge in the midterms***, but the program went nowhere. They then dicked around with impeaching Bill Clinton****, thereby deepening their obstruction craft, and then Dubya became an indisputable Top 5 Worst president, further disgracing “conservatism.”
Obama having won, the GOP at this point had nothing to offer but culture wars and more obstruction. They did not, and still do not, have any ideas or a vision for the future. Trump was the perfect candidate for them, as he filled the vision void with his own cult of personality, and the party could go for pure fascism and authoritarian control in place of trying to sell the electorate on something.
Too many “conservatives” have gone over to Trumpism to pretend that they are “real conservatives” once he is gone. That game is over forever.
The liberal/conservative template is now completely irrelevant. I call myself a Liberal not out of any deep-seated ideology but because I think we need to take care of people better. If we can take care of everyone***** while balancing the budget, minimizing taxes, and maximizing freedom, then hey, that’s great, and I guess I am a Liberal and a “conservative” at the same time. I personally hate bother, red tape, taxes, and people getting up in my business. I recognize, however, that the whole idea of “small government” is failed bullshit. If it worked, some country would be doing it; none does.
So I call myself a Liberal to identify where I stand with respect to the dum-dums who think a ratfuck nazi like Trump is “conservative” and still believe that the template is alive. What the conversation should be about going forward is global best practices for governance and the tradeoffs that various approaches entail. In order to do that, we are going to have to de-moron-ize our politics and people, and that is going to take time.
TL;DR: To the extent that it was ever alive, conservatism is dead and a fake label for those who don’t want to take care of others.
*Not a Dune reference.
**Less true of teens and young adults who choose to take on the look of subcultures; i.e., hippies are reliably Liberal.
***I voted for them, too. George W. Bush, whom I hated more than I (justifiably, I think) hated Bill Clinton, was my pathway to Liberalism. My excuse was that I was 23 at the time and had been raised in a Republican household. Mea culpa maxima.
****Who should have resigned, IMO. I still think Bill is a scumbag.
*****While recognizing the existence of moral hazard, etc. etc.
Given how this thread and the other are going, that’s likely correct, in the sense that liberal is now essentially a synonym for Democrat and conservative a synonym for Republican. That doesn’t mean that the terms have never had meaning, just that they now have very little meaning apart as synonyms for the major parties in today’s political climate. If that is the case, it doesn’t really make sense to discuss what conservatives believe outside of the discussion of what Republicans believe (and the same for liberals and Democrats). I don’t like using the terms this way, but that could very well be where we are at as a society.
I can’t find it now, but I’ve definitely seen a chart showing voters in the lower quadrant are concentrated around the centre line, with another cluster in the top left quadrant, and fewest in the top right quadrant. Those socially conservative voters used to be split between the parties, and have increasingly moved into the Republican party. The top right (‘Cosmopolitan’) quadrant used to be the numerically small but disproportionately influential group, but have increasingly moved into the Democratic party, leaving Republicans more socially conservative but with an internal split between fiscally conservative and populist elements.
Not necessarily true. We didn’t believe it, but many such voters probably were/are hoping Trump’s tariffs can bring back the old manufacturing jobs and revive their ailing towns, and that cutting immigration will raise wages and lower house prices. However, social issues have become more salient than economic ones over time, so people who in the past were willing to sacrifice their social preferences for economic ones no longer are.
You could say the same of the upper left. Traditionally, wealthy educated liberals were willing to sacrifice their economic self interest, eg by paying higher taxes, to get their way on the social agenda. That’s possibly less true after the alignment since there’s less need to appeal to lower-left quadrant voters.
The funny thing is the norm for American politics for most of the 20th century and arguably into the 21st was for the political parties at a national level to be utterly incoherent - you had segregationists running in presidential primaries on both sides, wild shifts in presidential elections in terms of where party’s base of support came from, the Republicans going from opposing economic progressivism (in terms of federal regulation, progressive taxes and social policies) to supporting it to opposing it again, Democrats fairly radically shifting their cold war stances etc.
In the 90s the Newt Gingrich style of congressional leadership started the shift, with much stronger rhetorical coherence among parties. During the Clinton presidency you still had tons of unorthodox political alignment that didn’t neatly fit the two-party system, but the rhetoric was there. Post Clinton, you really saw legislative politics become a pitched battle, political parties become more ideologically fixed on the national level, and a separation of legislative priorities in which divided governments had much less compromise and presidents did a lot more policymaking without congress.
2016 to now is basically a return to the pre-Clinton norm with parties that don’t know what they stand for until ideological factions battle it out in primaries, just with the rest of politics still in a post-Clinton paradigm with legislative politics still being sorted on partisan lines and presidential agendas being more about executive actions and less about legislation. Of course sorting legislative politics on party lines that are constantly changing makes it more obvious that they are constantly changing, as do executive orders that just radically change every 4 years, compared with these huge ideological shifts that would then be tempered by a more regionally focused congress.
Should also say that the Republicans have a more apparent shift mainly because Trumpism is basically a personality cult and the Dems don’t have an equivalent of that. People who aren’t Trump still haven’t been able to win on a Trumpist platform unless Trump is also on the ballot, so Republicans are left trying to be pre-Trump republicans unless Trump is bringing the voter support for himself.
I didn’t know the historical perspective, that’s interesting.
Yes, that’s true. Right wing populist parties are comparatively more common and successful in Europe where multi-party politics is the rule, but in the US it seems to depend on Trump’s personality cult to work.
Good posts, but I don’t agree with this:
Growing up as a kid in the 70s and 80s, I always felt I understood what the parties stood for. Reagan in particular brought clarity to the Republican agenda, and Bush Pėre followed in his footsteps. I think it’s more Bill Clinton who muddied the waters by presenting the “vibe” of a Democrat but the more “conservative” policies of a moderate Republican (though I am not saying that this wasn’t a winning strategy at the time).
Today, I think it’s pretty clear what Democrats stand for: governing responsibly and trying to help those who need it. Yes, it’s pretty beige and anodyne, but it’s coherent. When I hear that Democrats need to pump up the message, do something different–just do something!–I roll my eyes a bit. Yeah, I agree, but the only reason we are here is because the American electorate has sunk to such a level of moronitude. It’s like trying to massage the message for a decent pound cake when the other side is offering whipped feces with tacks in it.
The Republicans stand for fascist rule in “conservative” drag–and often they don’t even bother with that. They are a scam, but they are pretty consistent about it. The only way in which they don’t cohere is by being divided into the true MAGA believers like MTG (WAG: 20% of national GOP pols?!) and the cowards just along for the self-interested ride (80%?!). But the public is dumb, so they don’t discern it.
The issue is the lower left corner can’t be appealed to. They’re in the thrall of Trump and they won’t move for any reason. The fact that Trump is able to win with almost exclusively the votes from the people on the lower left quadrant is why I think the numbers of ordinary voters in the lower right quadrant must have been extremely small, and that the upper right has been, for practical purposes, part of the Democratic Party since the Obama years.
I disagree. If those numbers were anywhere close to being correct, then Jeb Bush or John Kasich or Chris Christy would have won the 2016 Republican primary. The true MAGA believers are way more than just 20%.
I said “pols” specifically for the above stats. I agree that MAGA moron voters are at a much higher percentage.
Yeah, both Bush’s were pretty close to the Reagan blueprint, but Reagan was a significant break from Nixon. There were some similarities between Nixon, Ford and Eisenhower before them, but I’d say there was more daylight between them (also obviously Ford just randomly ended up as president). And then as far as candidates go Goldwater was completely out of left field.
Reagan was popular enough that his conservative policies are now viewed as mainstream conservatism, and policies that weren’t conservative are just seen as the cost of doing business. Like if a less popular republican had been basically the first to balloon the deficit without direct involvement in a war the way he did people would absolutely talk about them as eroding what conservatism used to be.
Nixon was definitely an odd bird. I think of his as a non-liberal progressive, though I’d be willing to be persuaded that my thinking on him is incorrect. In some ways, he was our most recent progressive president. He accomplished more for the environment than any other POTUS in the modern era*. He came closer to getting universal heath care passed than Clinton or Obama did. And of course there was his accomplishments WRT China. In many other ways, which are well documented, he did terrible things, but he was also a great force for progress in many areas which keep him from falling into the category of “conservative”.
*. The legacy of the federal government doing what’s right for the environment that Trump is busy tearing down? That isn’t the legacy of John Kennedy, LBJ, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama. That’s the legacy of Richard Nixon.
ETA: As I’ve noted above, I wouldn’t put Trump in the “conservative” category either (although obviously not for the same reasons that Nixon doesn’t fit). I think you’re correct that the pictures of Ronald Reagan and George Bush the Elder are the ones that should be next to the word in a dictionary.
Yeah, Nixon was weird. An authoritarian liberal, might be the more or less correct label. And a war criminal. A tragic case.
I fear this is accurate.
As others have observed, my criticism of Clinton and Obama was that they were more conservative than I had hoped.
As another that grew up as a kid in the 70s and 80s how are you forgetting the conservative wing of the party? Names like Sam Nunn, Sam Ervin, Daniel Patrick Moynihan ring a bell? Some, like Phil Gramm and Richard Shelby, who would go on to switch to the Republican side because they were that conservative?
Clinton fits right in on the liberal side of that coalition, a classic Southern Democrat.