I was kidding on the square.
Carter was known as a conservative Democrat when he was elected (though not a really conservative Democrat). The left wing of the party didn’t have a lot of love for him. Among his market friendly policies were the deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, done after detailed and careful study.
GWBush really was incredibly popular among conservatives. The idea that he wasn’t a true conservative is waffling. Obama is a highly consequential President and there’s nothing illiberal about a smart, strong and efficient military. I mean in the empirical sense, not the spend-mindlessly-based-on-sloganeering sense.
American conservatives really have nothing to be scared of. Because liberals will protect them. American liberals defeated German conservatives during the First World War under Wilson and during the Second World War under FDR. They did it by forming coalitions. Obama never claimed to be a peace President. Obama set out his stance back in 2002: he wasn’t against all wars, he just opposed dumb wars.
(With apologies to Velocity for that last paragraph.)
A lot of what makes conservatism today is a matter for calibration. The obstructionism is indeed a new development.
This is approximately the position of modern conservatives. The ones we have are fine, but we can’t let anybody else in. They’re not like us, you see. They talk funny. And look different. Heck, they smell different. Have you seen what they eat? Who cares if their families are here? We can’t handle more people in any case. And they’re probably terrorists.
Coolidge’s weasel words are not tolerance but antipathy. They are the rationale for passing the Immigration Act of 1924. You’ve managed to point out how conservatives have kept the same stomach-turning mindset of bigotry for 100 years without ever needing to change the language they justify it in, because it still works for the same set of yahoos. Quite the political accomplishment but I’ll never let you get away with calling it liberal.
This is about the fourth time this month that I’ve seen references to Jimmy Carter as a “true liberal” or something similar…this after about forty years of not hearing this at all. I don’t understand why the shift. Certainly the liberals I knew back in the '76 election season tended to support Mo Udall or even Fred Harris over Carter, and in 1980 any remaining liberals who had supported Carter were in the Kennedy camp or the Anderson camp (or in at least one case the Barry Commoner camp). Kennedy certainly attacked Carter from the left (to the extent, admittedly, that Kennedy ever made a coherent case for running, which is debatable).
I’m not completely opposed to the notion that Carter was actually some great liberal icon, but I’d really like to see some justification for it. It doesn’t square with my recollections. And I’m kind of dubious about reading this stuff only now, long after the fact… Though it’s possible of course that people have been saying it for years and I haven’t been paying attention. Still…
As I said above, this wasn’t a general statement about government. It was a specific complaint about what was wrong with the British government in 1776 and why the American colonies were leaving it.
Part of the problem is applying modern standards to the Presidency - the issues facing Jefferson and the context he was operating in are very different than the ones faced by Obama. And part of the problem is what do you mean by truly liberal and truly conservative. Take Johnson - he did great things for the social welfare and civil rights part of the liberal agenda - but he also escalated the war in Vietnam. A “true liberal” would have pulled out.
What makes you a conservative is being popular among people who self-identify as conservative. Terrible definition, bud. “Conservative” has a meaning.
When smart, strong, and efficient means destablizing Libya and Yemen, bombing funerals and hospitals, and covertly funding religious fanatics it is decidedly illiberal.
Empirically, Obama was the 4th most hawkish president since Truman.
Wow this is hardcore Patriot jingoism. I see how the word conservatism for you means “Republican”. Wilson was a liberal interventionist, but when Wilsonian adventures in Iraq are undertaken by GWB, they are suddenly “conservative”. In any case, to suggest that Americans were under threat from the Kaiser is some pretty strong bullshit. The only reason Americans would have been in danger is if they were travelling on belligerent ships carrying munitions. Wilsonian “liberals” by the way were busy segregating the armed forces, preaching the virtues of eugenics, and lynching blacks. That great “liberal” Wilson imprisoned Eugene Debs for making a speach against Wilson’s banker war.
Before WWII, “liberals” by your definition instigated war with Japan with the embargo. “Liberals” enslaved men and sent them to their death around the world. “Liberals” jailed Japanese in concentration camps. Also, the “liberal” base was still chasing American blacks around the South with white hoods on. “Liberals” in labor unions were disenfranchising minorities and bashing poorer workers over the head when they tried to work.
Besides that fact. It was Stalin who defeated the Nazis, you know the kind of “liberal” you seem to be ok hitching your wagon to.
There is no wall in America with a sheet of conservative principles and a sheet of liberal principles that you can tick off and compare to events in the real world. Nor is there a sheet of actions that are labeled conservative or liberal.
“I know it when I see it” works most of the time, but only about as well as it works for pornography.
Yep, that’s what the Declaration of Independence was in the aggregate. It also happened to be a statement of the underlying philosophy of the government itself. I don’t know what else to tell you if you disagree with the specific words I quoted before, or think that they were just some random legal argument that was later discarded.
WillFarnaby - you made some points of varying quality IMHO (please take that as a complement) but I’m going to set them aside in favor of my central argument.
When you get 85% approval from Republicans, real time acclaim by conservative publications and flattery from the religious right, yeah you are a true conservative. “Conservative” and “Liberal” are social groupings and their beliefs are driven as such. GWBush wasn’t popular among the wide public but Republicans had school girl crushes on the guy. It’s revealed in polling.
If you want to take a different set of definitions based upon ideology, fine. (That’s reasonable.) But you must define your terms. I did read contemporary accounts that the Iraq war wasn’t really conservative, but I consider that horsepucky. Because it was backed by conservatives and opposed by liberals. I agree that the Iraq War wasn’t Libertarian (a word which I do define in terms of ideology), but that group is electorally insignificant and in foreign policy a tiny part of the Republican base.
Big deficits are the essence of supply sideism and record military spending. So yeah, big deficits are conservative.
Another background factor is that the Republican Party and conservatism have become less and less fact based over time. During the 1970s it was different.
Another background factor relates to the ease of tracing a liberal tradition back into the 1600s (certainly the 1700s) and the relative historical myopia of conservatism. Adam Smith wasn’t a conservative thinker in his day. Even Churchill is tricky to pin with that label. I’ve dipped into histories of American conservatism and the farthest they go back is Taft whom they don’t cover in much depth. (Cites are Perlestein and Kabaservice. Andrew Sullivan discusses the 1920s and 1930s in terms of a rather obscure conservative writer, ignoring Mencken.) Most histories start with Buckley, if they go that far back. Corrections and citations are welcome.
As I alluded to earlier, I have only the sketchiest concept of conservatism within an 1870-1970 framework. From 1950-2016 I’m on firmer ground. Temporal overlap intentional.