If mainstream conservatism is a “philosophically flabby movement,” and I won’t argue that it isn’t, this is not evidence of its success but simply of its exhaustion and lack of imagination. Perhaps conservatism should thrive on loss and defeat, but I see little evidence that the conservative movement in America understands that it has already lost on many fronts. There is an illusion of success that the most recent election has kept alive, but it is a temporary one.As the campaign for the Republican nomination for president gets weirder by the minute, what does it mean to be an American conservative? Daniel Larison and Corey Robin debate the changing nature of conservatism.
I think this is a fair representation of many conservatives - we simply would like to live our lives with as little interference from the government as possible.And yet, generally speaking, it's conservatives who want to use government to keep people from using birth control, having abortions, inserting certain body parts into certain other body parts, getting married except under specific discriminatory rules, and so on, and moreover to use government to push their own religion upon the citizenry.
"we would like to live our lives with little government interference" does not mean "we would not like the government to interfere in the lives of others." I think the discussion in the second link makes an important point -- that "government not interfering" is a mis-phrasing. Conservatives demonstrate again and again that what they want is their life -- that is, their privileges -- to be left alone, and if anybody challenges that, they think it is the job of government to suppress that challenge.Good point, but it's beyond even that. They don't only want the government to interfere in the lives of others when their own lives are challenged by those others; rather, they want government to interfere in the lives of others who behave differently than they (claim to) behave.
The vested power in America was male. The pill represented an epochal shift in women's ability to control their own lives, allowing them to choose to interact in society in a way that wasn't at risk from unexpected pregnancy. Suddenly there were more women in politics and in the workforce, demanding equal access and equal pay.That may be so, but I seriously doubt that anywhere near the majority of conservatives who rail against birth control are in any real sense threatened with a loss of power if women in general are legally allowed to use birth control. For most of them, it's just kneejerk holier-than-thou vituperation against the Other.
Scratch a conservative talking point, you'll see privilege asserting itself.
I wrote The Reactionary Mind for many reasons, but one of them was to show—contra Carpenter, Sullivan, Blumenthal, Tanenhaus, Krugman, and many more—that today’s conservative is in fact conservative. She hasn’t betrayed the traditions of Burke, Disraeli, Hayek, Oakeshott, Buckley, and Reagan: she has fulfilled them.The evidence is quite compelling, he shows how Burke's main complaint about the old European order was that they were too 'conservative' in the ordinary sense. Burke wanted a counterrevolutionary movement that was as radical, utopian and uncompromising as the Jacobins.
Today, Witness [Whittaker Chambers, 1952] serves as a reminder to us all that conservative worries about liberals with compromised loyalties have a historical basis (although it should also remind conservatives about the origins — and sensible limits — of such worries).??? Anybody have an idea what he's talking about? Care to explain?
But it’s not just Burke who makes these sorts of arguments in favor of ideological zeal and against prudential restraints. Nor is it in the face of an arguably lethal threat like Jacobinism that conservatives make them.posted by Anything at 12:57 AM on November 12, 2011
In the twentieth century, one finds a similar move in Friedrich Hayek, arguing against not the totalitarianism of Stalin but the democratic socialism of Britain and France and the liberal welfare state of the New Deal.
Now, one of the most interesting things about pre-fabricated political identities is that they come as package deals. There is no logical connection whatsoever between supporting a woman's right to abort an unwanted fetus and supporting subsidies for alternative energy. The strong cultural correlation between these stances creates an illusion of ideological coherence. Since most of us aren't political theorists, we tend not to see that the force determining the various planks in our favoured party's platform is the drive to craft a winning coalition cobbled together from diverse and sometimes conflicting interest groups, not Truth...posted by TheophileEscargot at 12:58 AM on November 12, 2011 [3 favorites]
I think the paradox, or the irony, is that the evolution of partisan coalitions can lead to bizarrely incoherent partisan worldviews. Easy money in a recession is the objectively pro-business position. However, the rising preeminence on the right of the idea that inflation, like taxation, is largely a mechanism of unjust big-government expropriation can, through mere association, make this viewpoint seem like the "pro-business" one, even if it isn't. It's this kind of drift in the composition and ideology of partisan coalitions that can make even debate over economic policy seem like just one more front in the culture war.
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Also whenever I try to think about everything I hate in the world it all seems to condense into a William Buckley shape, which went over the ocean to become Lord Monckton and thus, entertaining.
posted by The Whelk at 10:28 AM on November 11, 2011 [5 favorites]