Posted on 02/17/2012 5:48:02 AM PST by Kaslin
As others here have quite correctly pointed out, Reagan was not a libertarian, was not pro-gay, and strongly believed in the need for a moral foundation for society.
Was Reagan a member of the Christian conservative religious right movement as defined today? Probably not, though I've read the people who are able to make a credible case for Reagan's personal faith. He certainly wasn't bashing Christian conservatives, however, like some in the modern Republican Party.
It simply is not fair to assume that someone whose primary political activism ran from the 1950s to the 1980s will have views that fit nicely into the categories of 2012 politics.
What **IS** important to say is that it is not a violation of the Reagan legacy to say that being conservative is more than “get government off our backs.” Reagan believed in the need for a moral foundation for society.
Libertarianism simply does not work. If people aren't taught to run their own lives in a decent moral manner, the society falls apart. When people don't have a shared morality, government is forced to step in to prevent chaos, and that means government starts to regulate things people should be regulating for themselves.
On that point, I don't see Rick Santorum saying anything Ronald Reagan would not have said.
You can argue about definitions and what or what is not a misnomer in our modern political context but Reagan very famously quoted himself “I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”
Glad I can make you laugh because no one is capable of making you see what you refuse to see.
Deception/evil is that ugly and deceitful politicians NEED your type to survive so consider yourself a useful idiot to them as they are laughing at you while America weeps.
I think we concur that he who defines, wins.
I believe a credible argument could be made that the libertarianism represented by Freedom Communications and the Orange County Register, an early backer of Ronald Reagan, is very different from the amoral or even anti-morality libertarianism we're seeing today. The older libertarianism taught that there is such a thing as social morality that's necessary to govern people's personal lives to have a functioning society, but taught that it's the role of the family and the church to teach morality, not the role of the government.
I might be able to concur with that point of view in the 1950s or earlier when we still had a common moral consensus, but today we're seeing liberals who, when they have taken over government, actively use it to go to war against traditional morality. In our current context today I believe we must fight against libertarianism as a steppingstone toward liberalism, but I'm not sure I would have said that a few decades ago.
I used to work for Freedom Communications, BTW, and I'm not unaware of the influence of people like that in the history of the Republican Party in California and more generally in the West. Freedom Communications was in many ways the last significant conservative media operation in the United States after the Pulliams sold their newspaper company centered in Indiana and Arizona, and I've been disappointed to see what's happened to the company as the newspaper industry has collapsed.
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