There is no need to devise a test for liberality/conservatism. Just go to their parades. The liberals are the bunch that do not have “I’m all right, Jack, screw you” emblazoned on their banner. :eek:
cowgirl - When I said Conservatives I meant the Progressive Conservatives as opposed to the Reform or C.R.A.P.
Matt… I think The Right Honourable Prime Minister Feynn has a better ring to it than Prime Minister Layton… 
Can someone please tell me how “liberal” is a class?
Liberal studies 101.
Let’s be honest here: the most vocal members of every political group on this board are of the stupid self-righteous twit variety. That pretty much is the definition of someone who’s extremely vocal about politics, isn’t it?
jjimm…
Actually, speaking as a self-considered conservative, I would agree with this. I would define it similarly, saying that Conservatives often consider the needs of the group/state/country/whatever to be more important than the needs of the individual, while Liberals often consider the individual to take precedence over the group/state/country/whatever.
It’s not that either side completely ignores one or the other, it’s just that one or the other seems to be more important.
Also, Conservativism, by its very nature of relying on age-old, tried-and-(supposedly)-true methods, has a very long-term view of things, but tends to ignore the short-term. Liberalism, of course, is the opposite… if it sees a problem, it wants to fix it as soon as possible and end the suffering that it would cause. There are advantages and disadvantages to this, and I agree with you that a healthy mix of both ideals is the best solution.
Just a question from a dumb Yank. What does the ‘Right Honourable’ mean?
Oh, and what the hell is a ‘Minister without Portfolio’?
That’s a Minister who doesn’t have a portfolio, obviously.
Little Known Fact: According to Miss Manners, the proper way to address a MWP is by saying “I got yer portfolio right here, pal!”
This just in:
Nobody Injured in Drive-by Posting
“Clearly, it was aimed at somebody” said a spokesperson “But nobody is sure exactly who.”
“Right honourable” is the formal style for the Prime Minister. “The Rt. Hon. Pierre Elliott Trudeau,” for example. Or “The Rt. Hon. member for Saint-Maurice,” in the House of Commons where they go by ridings.
It’s also applied to the governor-general (the Rt. Hon. Adrienne Clarkson).
Oh, thanks. :mad:
Well it’s about time we started getting organized!
One reason why liberals are becoming more and more disliked are because of the types of attitudes displayed in the “An apology to the USA” thread.
The far left does not like America. They would have the USA dissolve its sovereignty and allow us to be governed by the UN.
The conservatives have major flaws, too, but that’s for another thread.
And conservatives are never knee-jerk. Which is why, when an issue arises, they actually pause for half a second before saying, “The solution is to cut taxes!” (For the rich, of course. They’re never in a hurry to cut payroll taxes or sales taxes, which hit poorer people the hardest.)
Actually, liberals are usually against corporate welfare.
Civil rights, Vietnam, women’s rights, the environment, gay rights…shame on us liberals for taking the stands we did! 
As opposed to the bulk of the Christian Right (and a good deal of the secular right, too) who love America, but only insofar as it consists of People Like Themselves.
Jeez, Poly! A genuine miracle occurs, elevating a truly remarkable man into the office of A. of C., and already you’re scheming to replace him!
Opal - I have had long term aspirations to become the All Powerful and Benevolent Dictator of Canada so as long as your plans for world domination don’t include Canada we’ll get along fine.
Well, back in the day, liberals stood for the best of American values–tolerance, equal pay for equal work for all people, equal justice under the law, balancing the needs of commerce with the neeeds of the environment–those are all wonderful things.
But over the past three decades, a sea change has occurred and liberalism has come to stand for reflexive anti-patriotism (all the liberals who blamed 9/11 on American foreign policy and not on the hijackers or bin Laden and who find burning the American flag to be admirable), Luddite economic views (international trade is EEE-vul!), and social and personal irresponsiblity.
Ideally, both liberalism and conservatism are political philosophies which provide to their practitioners nothing more than a general way of approaching political situations from a consistent point of view, and with well established ethical criteria for goals and methods (politics being a specialized subset of ethics). (No, really!). Neither liberalism nor conservatism necessitate predrawn conclusions regarding goals and methods, but they do necessitate consistency of preference.
Liberalism looks for collective egalitarian means toward specific social ends, putting emphasis on the responsibilities of government for social welfare and deemphasizing government enforcement of social mores. Conservatism regards social conventions as the primary means toward societal stability and distrusts social engineering, therefore emphasizes individual responsibility to community, with limited government welfare and active government recognition of social mores.
When political philosophies are used to establish statements of position on topical issues, then ideologies are created, which, although they are typically labelled according to the philosophy by which they were established, develop their own internal logic which is often unrelated or even diametrically opposite in principle to their founding philosophy. Ideologies are useful only in a very narrow sense; they allow a solidarity of commitment and action which would be unlikely to occur were all holders of a philosophy led by their independent topical analyses. Ideologies allow party leadership.
Unfortunately, ideologies are most attractive, once established, to those individuals either incapable or otherwise indisposed toward independent analysis. Ideologies inevitably accumulate political dogma, setting up a political milieu wherein opposing sets of dogma create entrenched political wings.
In the rhetorical battle between left and right wings, the righties have the natural advantage of a message which is cohesive around set conventions; they are at root conservative and stand for a well established world view with plenty of social inertia maintaining it. Lefties, being at heart wide open to unconventional approaches, are a more amorphous and rudderless group.
And while lefties distrust righties due to their entrenched opposition to the very social changes being sought by the lefties, that sort of distrust is hard to communicate against a group which ostensibly represents accepted and established norms. But it’s no trick at all for righties to portray their opposities as irresponsible and fuzzy headed destroyers of society. (Or as America haters and “economic Luddites” like friend gobear just did.)
Fortunately for lefties like me, the reality of ever-increasing social change works to the creation of more lefties like me.
So there
:: applaudes xenophon ::
A nice assessment of the underlying structure of political philosophy, and where it goes wrong. Ya think maybe we should try, sometime, to put together a message board that promotes free-thinking, independant analysis, and combats group mentality and ignora. . . .
um - yeah. . .
It is, of course, Balderdash like this that makes me fear for the future of the Republic. Ignorant rhetoric of this sort is what leads perfectly reasonable people to conclude that politics is a game played by the demented in which only the rational are hurt.
You, my friend, may sit in the peanut gallery, being spoon fed your politics by radio and TV loud mouths and waiving your big foam finger all you want about Liberals hating America, or Conservatives wanting to snoop in your bedroom, or tax cuts as the sovereign remedy of all ills. We have sunk into the politics of slogan and I suspect it will take a crisis of epic size, on the order of the Great Depression or WWII, to shake us out of it. In the meantime you may talk among your selves. This is all intellectual masturbation.
Kudos Xenophon,
I think you provided a welcome bit of solid reasoning into what always devolves into a nasty interchange.
An objective analysis would simply put forth that by definition the conservatives stand for the status quo while the liberals stand for change. I cannot provide any cites, but I think it a fairly stable limb to walk out onto to state that as a whole, most everyone is more comfortable with the status quo, and find change and best exciting, but more generally frightening. We fear that which we do not know, and how can we possibly know that which has not existed before?
I am amazed that no one has linked yet to the Political Compass where one can take a test that places your results on a 2-D political spectrum. Of course the answer is not terribly scientific, but is a fun exercise nonetheless.
If one is to use the workings of nature to guide one’s life, as I am prone to do, then the facts of eveolution show that clearly a little bit of both is necessary. One needs the conservatism to maintain those aspects of society that truly work to improve that society’s “survival”, and yet the added spice of liberalism is what provides the mutations and improvements that are essential to the ever-upwards trajectory in complexity and the corresponding need to change to meet that complexity. If “mother nature” were wholly conservative, we would still be single-celled creatures in the seas if we existed at all. It is the liberalism of nature that has created we humans and the plethora of animal and vegetable diversity we see today.
It is important to note that just like in evolution, not every change is a change for the better. There have been plenty of social experiments that have failed. It is important for liberals to recognize that they may well be wrong and to plan for that eventuality, and for conservatives to recognize that sometimes those experiments have worked, and to be willing to give them a try every once in a while.
If you don’t believe in the theory of evolution, well… I guess just remain a conservative cause nothing will ever convince you to change.
As to the OP, I guess that liberals represent change and are therefore a threat to everyone who currently benefits from the status quo, or at least believe that they do. It therefor becomes very understandable why they would be pilloried in public.
my $.02
CTB