[dark_lord]

[Kirk] declared that religion, family, and private property and its yield, as well as law and order, were the foundations of a conservative society ... 'My kind of Republican Party is committed to a free state, limited central power, a reduction in bureaucracy, and a balanced budget'" Goldwater

But is this what everyone thinks conservatives are about? For example there are WOD conservatives on this forum who are not for limiting central power or reducing bureaucracy if it means that individual states will decriminalize marijuana. Most Republicans elected don't appear too interested in reducing bureaucracy or balancing the budget.

My observation is a lot of conservatives want to capture the Federal government so they can implement their way of thinking. Now I personally think having the Republicans controlling both houses of Congress and the Presidency is a good idea so we can get the backlog of judges filled with conservative, non-judicial activist type judges, which means they don't make it up as they go along. But I suspect there are conservatives who do want judges to make it up as they go along - just the "conservative" way - whatever way that is.

As for Kirk's definition - I agree with it completely. But there are plenty of Democrats who would also agree with it. No, not the gay rights, feminazi, race-baiting, "progressive" socialists. But while they make all the noise, they are not the whole Democratic party, either. There's lots of conservative, Catholic, blue collar, Reagan democrats out there still.

So...in what way are FReepers "conservative"? And how many different definitions do we have? And why have we failed to pull in the Reagan democrats? (And we have failed - or the government wouldn't be so closely split.)

[x]

Great questions. I think the Reagan Democrats started to desert in the short recession of 1991-2 and as the culture war died away more of them left. Pretty remarkable that with someone so symbolically on the wrong side of the culture wars as Bill Clinton running, conservatives couldn't make more of moral and social issues, so there's some factor I don't see. Maybe the country was tired of eternal conflict, or maybe economic opportunities interested Americans more. Maybe we recognized that we have more in common with each other, or maybe we recognized that the big social changes had already happened and got used to some of them.

The other thing is that a lot of Reagan Democrats probably did go over to the GOP permanently. Today's Democratic base is very different in terms of sex, generation, race, region and profession from what it was in 1940, 1960 or 1980. They've made up for the loss of older, middle class white men with minorities, a younger generation, the more affluent, and, especially women.

I suspect most conservatives are pretty clear on what they want from politics. But many Americans today aren't very much like those voters of past years who only thought about politics once every four years. We are more like New Yorkers with a dozen parties on the ballot than old time Middle American straight ticket voters. We have all manner of media to agitate us and get us to think about the big picture. It's a characteristic of a rich country with affluence and many media outlets. So we're not just looking at the picture of what a President or Congress can realistically do in 2 or 4 years. We're looking at the big picture of what we'd ideally want the country and its governing philosophy to be, rather than about the questions that any President or Congress is likely to resolve.