Wow, reading this thread (i did only get 10-15 posts in…) it seems that ‘left-wing’ is to ‘SDMB’ as ‘SDMB’ is to ‘internet’.
And many of the remaining conservative intellectuals have jumped ship. See, e.g., Christopher Buckley (“To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, ‘I didn’t leave the Republican party, it left me.’”); Charles Fried (endorsing Obama in part because of the Palin nomination). The current Republicans have embraced anti-intellectualism with a gleeful abandon I don’t remember ever seeing before in my 30 mostly right-leaning years.
I suspect this is because a lot of their ideas got a fair hearing and lost. The verdict is in on global warming. Supply-side economics turned out to be bunk. Universal health care actually seems to outperform the alternative in the real world.
Eventually the right will start changing their views to fit the evidence instead of vice-versa, the ignorant populists will once again be distributed evenly across the political spectrum*, and there will be a vibrant intellectual right. I’m wearing my Republicans for Obama button as I type this, and I look forward to that day.
- This is not to say that everyone on the right is an ignorant populist, only that it seems ATM that most ignorant populists are on the right.
Conservatism on the SDMB is at a low water mark because conservatism in the United States is at a low water mark. After 8 years of Bush/Rove/Cheney the conservative movement has crashed into the ground and then got out shovels and started digging. Eight years ago I would accept the label “conservative” because that label would be more helpful than not in allowing people to understand what my political positions were.
Not today. My political positions haven’t changed (much), rather the conservative movement has turned itself into a cheerleading section for the current administration. Today, “conservative” means one thing: “I’m one of the 17% who think Bush is doing a heckuva job. And Sarah Palin is gonna be even better!”
And so there’s no way I’m going to self-identify as “conservative” nowadays.
It would be nice if there was a viable political party that was in favor of cutting government spending (or at least slowing the growth of spending!), free markets, free association, education, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. As of October 27, 2008 it seems to me that the Democratic party and Senator Obama are the best I can expect.
I think it’s actually the opposite - liberal ideas have been so out-of-fashion that people have forgotten how bad they are. It’s always easy to have high-minded principles and big ideas when you’re not the one having to govern and make difficult decisions. It’s easy to make ideas look good when they haven’t been tested by reality.
As for the ideas of the right having lost… You need to take a better look around the world. Europe is full of countries with low taxes and regulations (‘new Europe’ especially). The most libertarian world leaders such as Vaclav Klaus had tremendous influence in the new European countries. Corporate taxes have declined around the world. Government-managed industrial policy, once the ‘wave of the future’, has been largely abandoned. Japan, that 80’s ‘shining example’ of the marriage of business and government, is economically moribund. Union membership around the world is at an all-time low. Most countries have much flatter tax rates today than they did 20 years ago. The value of free trade is accepted almost universally.
So no, I don’t think the ideas of the right have lost. I think the right in the United States has been hijacked by ‘compassionate conservatives’ like the Bush’s, and by the religious right. They pay lip service to conservative economics but don’t really care about them, and don’t know how to implement them or how to defend them. So the right has been tarnished through association with them. George W. Bush has presided over the largest growth of government in U.S. history. He’s no conservative. The steel tariffs he put in place were not conservative. The Prescription Drug Benefit was not conservative. Almost doubling the budget of the Dept. of Education was not conservative. About the only thing he can lay claim to that was conservative was low taxes, but he never cut spending to match, so his tax cuts were reckless.
But anyway, we’ll have a better idea of which ideas, conservative or liberal, are better in the U.S. in about 8 years. Because the U.S. is about to take a drastic turn to the left, and we’ll get to test out those ideas. Actually we did just test some out - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were big-government liberal ideas - using the government to change the rules to help poor people buy houses they could otherwise not afford. It was social engineering on a large scale. How did that work out?
You can’t have it both ways. Ronald Reagan did the same thing Bush has done - ie. increase spending and decrease taxes simultaneously. Is he not a true conservative either?
Anyway, while conservative economics might be winning - and that’s certainly not a settled argument - conservative social policies are clearly losing.
I don’t agree with that either. Liberal social policies such as multiculturalism are now being reconsidered around the world. The Netherlands were once a bastion of liberal social policy, and they’re turning back towards the right. Here in Canada, our liberal social policies such as hate speech laws and gun control are under attack. Our human rights tribunals have turned into kangaroo courts that are being mocked even in left-wing newspapers. Even the concept of international criminal courts and the supremacy of the UN as a ‘world government’ is being seriously challenged again.
Some conservative social ideas are failing or have failed, and good riddance. But so have many grand liberal social ideas. I don’t see the pendulum moving in any particular direction.
Really? Consider the last hundred years - we’ve had universal suffrage, the repeal of sodomy statutes, equal employment/housing/rights legislation, minimum wages and the 40-hour work week…
I may be wrong, but I’ve wagered via my vote that over the next 8 years Barack Obama will run a more conservative administration than George Bush has over the past 8 years.
So I suspect that the US is NOT about to take a drasitc turn to the left. In fact I suspect the US is about to take a modest step to the right. Taxes might be higher, but how else are we going to pay off the trillions of dollars of borrowing of the last 8 years? George Bush went on a spending spree, how can we call it “leftism” when the next administration tries to pay down our debts? Such a thing used to be called “fiscal conservatism”. If we want to keep the massive expansion of government spending we’ve seen over the last 8 years we’re going to need a massive expansion of taxation to pay for it. High government spending and high taxes might not be my first choice, but better that than high government spending and low taxes.
Nitpick: He wasn’t canned; he resigned from writing the column. Said as much on his recent appearance on The Daily Show.
Cite
It’s hardly going to be a fair test. Bush started with a country that had a working economy and general peace. Obama (assuming he wins) will be starting from a much worse situation. He’ll be spending a lot of his energy trying to get back to the point where Bush started from.
Cos we is smart.