Study: White Americans Are Becoming More Conservative

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I understood your point; it's just that barring people from an institution marked by voluntary invitation of nonessential government interference into personal relationships is at best incongruous as an illustration of government interference in people's lives. People who want to be civilly married want some sort of government interference in their personal lives.

Conservatism is a living, breathing sociopolitical ideology; it may be based on this generic conservatism, but the two are not synonymous. That is evident from Conservative politics; consider the things that Conservatives have eliminated or wish to eliminate rather than "conserve."

Furthermore, tomorrow's tradition is today's hot new idea, so whether people take a conservative or progressive perspective on an issue is in some sense determined by the political era in which they find themselves, rather than hinging on their tendency towards openness vs. stodginess. Anyone and everyone becomes a wholesale conservative when the world is the way they want it to be.


I don't quite know what you mean by "it would make sense." I argued that that conservatism does not imply closed-mindedness...and I think that you agree, so I don't get the point.

I think many of those fighting this fight are most upset by the fact that getting married is illegal for them based on the religious beliefs of government officials, sp the government is actually quite involved already.

Milton Friedman's response to the question of who are the conservatives ...

Quoted: "I never characterize myself as a conservative economist. As I understand the English language, a 'conservative' means conserving; keeping things as they are.
I don't want to keep things as they are. The true conservatives today are the ones that want ever bigger government. The people who call themselves liberals today, the
'New Dealers' - they are the true conservatives.....

So, in modern day he would presumably argue ...

the liberals, Democrat party are the conservatives who want to conserve 'Big Government' and existing taxation, and spending programs
the Tea Party, Libertarian Party, and some of the Republican party are the liberals who want liberty and to change to limited government and reduced taxes, reduced spending


Quoted from start of interview below ...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfdRpyfEmBE[/youtube]

So what exactly is a party that wants to go backwards to be called? Regressives?
That is what I would call the Tea Party and the vast majority of the Republican party. Back to the good ol' early 1800s.

As for the "Libertarian" Party, it seems to have widely abandoned huge swaths of the libertarian ideal in favor of gaining support from the Republican and evangelical crowd.

As I see it, the bastardized American version of the Libertarian party are anything but libertarian.
It should not be possible for an actual libertarian to be lumped in with in with those who have a political platform that is anti-science, anti-freedom for anyone who isn't christian, in favor of legislating all forms of morality, wants military expansion, calls for large scale military action folks, wants expanded government (albeit at the state level vice the federal level), socially regressive, anti-drug, anti-gay (on so many levels it's not even funny), overly invasive war on terror nonsense, pro expansion of all government spending on illegal immigration (regardless of merit or feasibility), authoritarian, and pro corporate welfare.

I think Friedman and his crowd of libertarians/conservatives/evangelicals are best described by the word reactionary.

To be fair, there isn't a single DC politician who could not be described as reactionary. It is more or less a survival tactic in terms of re-election. The American people want things in the news to be addressed RIGHT NOW, and if it isn't, incumbents will suffer the consequences.
Yet another argument in favor of severe term limits.