Posted on 03/02/2002 4:04:51 PM PST by LiberalBuster
In the late Sixties, the liberal cartoonist and wag Al Capp suddenly turned against the Left. People were startled by his apparent rightward swing. "I haven't changed," he insisted. "Liberalism has."
Today it's conservatism that has changed. The conservative movement of yesterday has moved like a migrating herd from most of its old principles. Staunch conservatives like Patrick Buchanan and Samuel Francis have been excommunicated, attacked, snubbed, blacklisted.
Once upon a time, conservatives stood for limited government, the rollback of the welfare state, strict construction of the Constitution, and traditional morality. Today they merely want their own people to run big government.
They used to oppose needless military intervention abroad; today they equate militarism with patriotism. They used to demand that the U.S. Department of Education be abolished; today they want to expand it. They used to denounce Franklin Roosevelt; today they venerate him.
Constitutional government? Conservatives have simply dropped the subject. They can live with the status quo, which is not conservatism's legacy but liberalism's. Yesterday's heresy has become today's orthodoxy.
Traditional morality? Again, conservatives have dropped the subject. Their new hero is former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who supported legal abortion and homosexual rights and brought his mistress to official functions. Giuliani is a winner. He knows how to get and use power. The media have adored him since the 9/11 attacks. So conservatives have adopted him as their poster boy.
When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, conservatives (including me) wanted to feel they had triumphed, that a victory for their movement meant the permanent vanquishing of liberalism. Even liberals thought Reagan had "turned the country around." But Reagan, while repeating conservative platitudes, challenged very little of the institutional structure of liberalism and in fact embraced most of it. During his eight years in office the Federal Government continued to grow, nearly doubling its spending. As Federal deficits mounted monstrously, conservatives dropped another subject: the evils of deficit spending and unbalanced budgets.
Still, conservatives pretended they had conquered. They equated Reagan's minor gains with the radical and lasting changes Roosevelt had effected. Reagan himself encouraged this feeling by inviting conservative leaders to White House dinners. That was all it took to sustain their delusions. After all, most of them had never been beckoned to the White House before. What better proof that they now reigned?
Meanwhile, a new breed was emerging: the "neoconservatives." These were former liberals, mostly pro-Israel and anti-Communist Jewish intellectuals. There weren't really very many of them, but they had disproportionate influence; conservatives welcomed them as allies with awe and gratitude.
In the conservative press, support for Israel suddenly became mandatory and criticism of Israel became taboo. Conservatives stopped complaining about "foreign entanglements" and foreign aid. Yet another inconvenient subject had been dropped, to be replaced by embarrassing fawning on Israel. Just as liberals had once turned a blind eye to Soviet spies and agents, conservatives ignored Israeli espionage.
The neoconservatives were still basically liberals, albeit Cold War liberals. They favored the New Deal legacy and looked back at Harry Truman as a great president. The old conservative agenda of a return to constitutional government left them cold; limited government would hamper military action abroad. But they have moved to the head of the conservative movement, and their chief followers are conservative "leaders."
In short, conservatism has been swallowed up by neoconservatism. THE WEEKLY STANDARD, a neoconservative magazine, has made William Buckley's NATIONAL REVIEW redundant. The founding generation of NATIONAL REVIEW included men of the stature of Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, Henry Hazlitt, Frank Meyer, and Brent Bozell; none of them could write for the magazine today. It has no room for independent or original thinkers -- or even for writers who espouse its own founding principles.
Former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has observed that we have "defined deviancy downward" -- that is, we have become so inured to behavior formerly recognized as deviant that we have tried to cope by lowering our standards. In the same way, conservatism has been "defined downward." The principles conservatives once upheld have been defeated politically, so conservatism has abandoned them, adopting instead the old liberal positions and calling them conservative.
How odd, and sad, that a movement professing to fight for tradition should drop its own past down the Memory Hole.
< Here on this forum, espousing conservative principles is attacked from the Libertarians more than the liberals. At least some here believe in limited government, but too many have abandoned the moral imperatives that made conservativism work.
Man I hope your flame proof underwear is on. LOL
But ... Giuliani is now endorsing Simon over Riordan (Riordan is pro-abortion, etc.) for the Republican spot in November's California Governor race.
Where was Sobran when this happened?
That is an absolute lie. Every libertarian on this board would be happy as punch to go back to a strict Constitution. For example, the drug war is nowhere in the Constitution, it is a Conservative poohbah.
And here is the crux of the issue: It is us moral conservatives that gave you those rights. And it is us moral conservatives that wrote the laws that defined right and wrong according to the Bible, and it is those rights and wrongs that libertarians are working to overturn the laws on to allow what you mistakenly call freedom.
A morally bankrupt people are not 'free'. While a people are moral, they are free, but a people that are not moral, they will do and think any wicked thing that amuses them. It is then, that the other people who are in charge of government, have an obligation to enforce laws that govern behaviour. While we were a moral people guided by the Bible, like it used to be until this century, we had laws to define right and wrong, but people knew why things were right and why things were wrong. Now, thanks to the immorality of today's society, no one knows why things are right and wrong anymore except to say that they are legal or not, or whether they infringe upon my 'right' of choice or not.
That is not morality. Because there is no common morality anymore, we have every reason to expect that extreme laws will be passed to control people through the courts, instead of through the pulpits. A Biblical based morality allows all kinds of liberty, while a non-Biblical morality leads to chaos and crime and vice; all the things that libertarians are fighting to allow today, from the Pink Pistols (Gay rights 2nd ammendment group) to those who want to legalize drugs to those who want to legalize prostitution.
And, libertarians will be cheering this removal of morality all the way, because it comes in the way of what is mistakenly called liberty. Liberty in the eyes of a libertarian is license, license to do what you want when you want no matter how immoral it is, no matter how much it destroys families or lives, as long as the government doesn't disallow it, as long as I have free will to do it to myself, libertarians call that liberty.
And that is why I will never be a libertarian.
I think most libertarians would espouse limited government, the rollback of the welfare state, strict construction of the Constitution
I guess that it is the question of morality that sticks in your craw, but I think many, perhaps most libertarians agree with that as well. The difference is that the first three on the list require a government to be small and stay out of our lives. The fourth, for some, asks for a government that forces certain behavior upon all. Big difference.
A most astute observation.
Buchanan, Francis, and Sobran, are populists, who, like Huey Long, appeal to the dark sides of human nature.
Buchanan's views and John Sweeney's protectionist views are indistinguishable.
A very scary thought.
Yep this is the original home of "talibornagain".
It has gotten so that many do not even know a conservative stance anymore..sad!
;^)
We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, Promote the general welfare and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.
Show me how drug use is not against domestic tranquility; show me how drug use that destroys lives and minds through free, legal use does not do this. How exactly does encouraging drug use through legalization promote the general welfare?
Show me how allowing sodomites to teach in schools is securing domestic tranquility, by allowing these perverts to brainwash our kids and abuse our children. Show me how the normalization of this perversion promotes the general welfare?
Show me how allowing Homosexual marriages secures the blessings of Liberty and promotes the general welfare all the while these perverts have spread an incurable disease to the general population, to those who only had an operation, or needed a bone marrow transplant, or happened to get a needle stick in an emergency room. Libertarians fight for those perverts rights.
Show me how prostitution secures domestic tranquility by ruining families, by spreading disease, and then show me how demanding medical checks of these prtostitutes does not abrogate their rights to do what they please! Show me how the spread of veneral disease and AIDS promotes the general welfare. Libertarians constantly fight for the right to engage in these actions because it 'shows' freedom, and 'doesn't hurt anyone!'
Show me how the spread of pornography, which has been linked to the rape of women by some who have recently viewed it, and the spread of immoral dress and sexual ideas that are rampant in society, on television, and in the pop Queens like Britany Spears, how Playboy models are considered role models for actresses, spokespersons for products, chosen for Hollywood film roles, and tv gossip shows: Show me how all that, which libertarians fought for, has increased the blessings of liberty and promoted the general welfare of this country.
Show me how the immorality that Libertarianism demands does any of these things, secures the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Show me how the immorality that Libertarianism demands promotes the general welfare.
Parental laws against these things tried to stop it or at least keep it to a minimum. Libertarians want these laws repealed, so there can be more of these perversions.
Ok, now we'll need a definition of "political fundamentalism". Thanks.
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