Opening Salvo from Justin
Took me a while to get through that, but it was quite good. Of course, being a liberal I take offense to the suggestion that we’re all stupid, poorly dressed and intent on destroying our country. Only the poorly dressed bit is statistically inarguable, because we tend not to be the highest wage earners in the land. That’s especially true now with just under a decade of wage stagnation and price increases under our belt. But I digress.
I heard an interesting interview with David Fromme (sp?) from the American Enterprise Institute this morning. He’s on a mission to shake up the Republican party, being a lifelong Republican himself. The most interesting quote was “we got 46% of the vote and we needed 5% more, but you don’t get those 5% by yelling louder about the stuff they weren’t interested in before.” The conservative movement in the US, I think, either needs to solve the neo-con, religious right and/or corporate socialist infiltration to become something other than a wedge party and regain it’s long term viability in what is inarguably a center-left country [ed: we later clarified that I meant centre-right, and this was a Freudian slip].
From the standpoint of moral psychology, you have liberals who focus on harm and fairness and conservatives who focus on authority, group identification and purity. The big government and wasteful spending is a problem, but until conservatives do a better job of addressing harm and fairness issues in their platform more directly, the big government and wasteful spending attacks sound to liberals like veiled threats to do away with protections and to increase privileged advantages. The fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives on harm is an easy one: conservatives think harm = military threat, liberals think harm also includes economic threats and other areas where government seems to be a good answer simply because there are 300 million people to sort out. The party which covers those bases the best, rather than stacking up entirely on one side, will get the electorate.
PJ mentions Barry Goldwater. I wish I was around then. A conservative who said “I don’t give a rat’s ass about gay marriage. Let them marry. That’s none of my business. What I want to do is run the government more efficiently and responsively and at a lower cost.” That would have been music to my ears. What my conservative friends are trying to do now is convince me to join up with them on taxation and spending issues in exchange for accepting policies which I feel are detrimental to freedom. Especially considering the Republican party in the US has been protecting subsidies, targeted business tax advantages and market-entry qualifications which are anti-free-market and anti-competitive. I think a lot of liberals like me basically view the Republicans to date as false libertarians who are pro-corporation and deviously anti-market, but we won’t deal with the actual libertarians because they’re all obsessed with the NWO, Zionist conspiracy theory and the gold standard.
My two farthings. I have a fun time arguing with X who is an arch-conservative. I basically agree with him on half of his points and spend the rest of the time trying to convince him that liberal philosophy only seems insane and evil to him because he reads conservative news outlets that re-enforce his existing views, pays attention to anti-liberal messaging and primarily focuses on reading liberal publications that are in the far-left nut jobs category. If you dig deep on your chosen philosophy and stay at the service level on your opposing philosophy, you’re just brainwashing yourself ;-)
Thanks for sending this. As you can see, it’s one of my current favorite topics. I’m interested in learning more about how British conservatism differs from the US movement. Any leads?
