Quartz11 wrote:
I recently seen in a couple posts here, and heard comments from my grandfather, about how liberals are destroying the country.
With that said, what then is the conservative of conservative ideal world? If there were no liberal ideas allowed to exist, what would you have left? Just curious.
Though I more often sympathize with conservatives than with liberals, this is becoming more difficult as time goes by, and I reject this idea that anyone who cannot be described as a liberal must therefore be a “conservative”. What if someone does not think there is much about the status quo worth conserving but does not agree with the liberal interpretation of what constitutes “progress” either?
What liberals call progress is often just social decay. I once read of liberals being described as a “biological type”, a type who tell themselves they are working towards the betterment of mankind but who in reality just want a society where people like themselves are “looked up to for their wisdom instead of despised for their puniness”. It’s one of the most accurate analyses of liberalism I’ve come across. It helps explain why liberalism is in practice an endless quest for ever more forms of degeneracy to glorify, for ever more normal, healthy attitudes to be offended by, and for ever more “oppressed” people to patronise.
Today’s conservatives meanwhile would be barely recognizable to the conservatives of a few decades ago, since they have adopted many of the attitudes that were, only a few decades ago, held solely by liberals and radical leftists. You might conclude that either they are not “real” conservatives, or (more likely) that constantly conceding ground to the opposition is an innate feature of conservatism itself, since its nature is inherently defensive. Conservatives will resist the demands from the liberal-left at first, but when the clamour becomes too loud, they will give in and then set about supposedly “conserving” the new status quo instead.
In practice, all that conservatives tend to succeed in “conserving” is their money. The sensible conservative support for concepts like self-reliance seems, for many self-described conservatives, to have given way to a sort of economic Darwinism and a belief that what is good is what is good for “business”. On social issues, whatever it is conservatives are supposed to conserve is constantly changing, which all too often leaves conservatism appearing incoherent. And so the sorry state of modern conservatism provides liberals with a feeling of superiority to which they are not really entitled.
At the same time the continued existence of people called “conservatives” means many liberals will refuse to acknowledge that, free market economics aside, their society (be it Britain, America or practically anywhere else in the West) has been moving almost constantly in a left-liberal direction for decades. This is surely either a tactical decision or an indictment of liberals’ lack of awareness. Really, the sight of liberals treating “opponents” who are only a few degrees less left-liberal than themselves as if they were the second coming of the KKK never ceases to amaze me.
Well, I probably haven’t answered the question, but here seems as good a place as any to describe my thoughts vis-a-vís liberalism vs conservatism.
05 Dec 2010, 12:22 am
