Talk:Conservatism/Archive 2

message: This article still doesn't really suit me, not that such should be its primary purpose.  Perhaps it is because of the inherent strain between the so-called "classic conservatism" which states that everything should be left alone and that it will get better and better on its own and the more typically American economic strain, in which "conservatives" are inherent activists, always working to lower taxes, remove governmental obstacles to productivity, etc.  To American conservatives, reactionary elements in the Chinese government will never be "conservatives";  neither will they see  the "Taliban" as such, because their social policies cripple the economy by denying particiaption in it to half the citizenry, the female half.  Also, few American conservatives see Theodore Roosevelt as a conservative.  He was more of a "conservationist", hardly the same thing.  He was socially conservative in that he wanted government to do "good things" in a moral sense; while an official in New York he vigorously enforced a ban on the Sunday drinking of alcohol that strikes most economic conservatives as a ridiculous attempt to enforce morality by government in a way which bans actions by what should be free people in a free marketplace.  His "Fair Deal" was in many ways a precursor to his cousin Franklin's "New Deal" and entailed considerable govermental intervention in the economy well beyond mere "trust-busting", which most conservatives do see as a necessity in a truly free market.  Perhaps because he was a vigorous interventionist and believed in the "Big Stick" policies with regard to Latin America he is considered to be a conservative by some measures; this perhaps makes him more of an early "neocon" as American conservatives have had within them a strong isolationist stream -- along with "Impeach Earl Warren" the first John Birch sign I ever remember seeing (displaying my age here) was "Get US out of the UN!"
Rlquall 16:14, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Tension Inherent in "Conservatism" 

message: U.S. conservatism is probably more anti-statist than is typical elsewhere, more "libertarian", but hardly equivalent to it.  Some of the harshest critics of post 9/11 measures like the "PATRIOT" Act have been from people on the "hard right" like Bob Barr.  Conservatives are generally against drug abuse, but many see draconian anti-drug laws as a larger threat to freedom than that posed by drug abuse.  Even social conservatives who want the government to ban things such as "gay marriage" are skeptical about things like "public-private partnerships" which they see as giving the monopoly power inehrent in government over to a few carefully (politically) chosen private hands, not "the market".  George Bush is not really a hero to most "true-believer" U.S. conservatives as he has presided over the largest expansion of government since at least LBJ's "Great Society" and Vietnam War, if not FDR's "New Deal" and World War II.  He is mostly regarded there as a "lesser-of-evils"; some conservatives are genuinely puzzled as to why he is portrayed by the mass media as a conservative when he is so unlike them.  This is becasue George Bush shows little tendency to be an anti-statist.  Most U.S. conservatives are less concerned about using the power of the state for conservative purposes than they are curbing its power.  Reagan's rhetoric was well to the right of his acutal record but he did succeed in reducing the rate of the growth of government.  Bush, far from this, has vastly expanded it.  Perhaps part of this is political naivete on his part.  By putting massive new federal funding into education, he apparently sought to appease his critics form his left.  Instead, he still faces the same and more (He doesn't really meant it!  It's nowhere near enough!) from the left and at the same point makes his core right-wing supporters, whose position is that education is a province of state and local government only, feel abandonned.
(unsigned, but this was User:Rlquall) (Correct.)
: I basically think that's true: now if you can find some well-known individual saying that, quote him or her in the article, with citation. Or publish somewhere that (unlike Wikipedia) welcomes original research -- say, an op-ed column somewhere -- and then it would be legitimate for the article to quote your own published writing. (Just in case it's unclear, no sarcasm intended. I agree with you completely: "W" has coopted the label "conservative", he isn't one in most meaningful senses, but our opinion doesn't belong in the article: we've got to find someone to cite, and right now I have higher priorities than researching this. A citation to that effect would be very welcome.) -- Jmabel 21:39, Aug 20, 2004 (UTC)
You hit it on the head.  The reason that I didn't touch the article and put this in "talk" is that I would think that it needs verification beyond "I know it's true" to belong in the article.  But I think that making what could probably characterized from a logical sense as "gratuitous assertions" is perfectly acceptable here in talk -- as acceptable as it would be unacceptable in the article.  Perhaps this will motivate someone to do this.  Sometimes this sort of thing has prompted me to be the one to do it on other issues, but this time I'll leave this to someone else.
Rlquall 20:00, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Anti-Statism 

message: In reading about the Second Great Awakening, I ran across these passages:
:William Williams delivered in 1843 a discourse entitled "The Conservative Principle", and Charles White one in 1852 more specifically named "The Conservative Element in Christianity".  These are merely examples of hundreds in the same vein, all calling attention to how previous empires had perished because they had relied entirely upon the intellect, upon "Political Economy", and upon "false liberalism".  White gave full praise to the voluntary principle [that churches exist through the voluntary support of individuals, instead of state support], but warned that it presented the danger of a combination which might become dictatorial, "while the conservative vitalities of the Christian Religion are undervalued and dispensed with."...  [A]s White phrased it, "The Christian religion, fitted precisely by its conservative qualities to such exigencies, communicates a silent, tranquil power into the interior among all the disturbing elements."
:Europeans ... could readily perceive that, though America might make a show of gentlemen, both in Boston and in Virginia, who expressed aristocratic scorn of the mobs who supported Jefferson and Jackson, there really was no interest in America which could be called "conservative" in the sense comprehended by restored Bourbons in Paris or High-Church Tories in London.  Practically every American of a religious temperament, whether Episcopalian, Unitarian, or Old School Presbyterian, accepted as axiomatic the separation of church and state and the competitive disorder of sectarianism.  Yet Schaff had the boldness to claim for this liberal anarchy the adjective "conservative"...
We see here the word 'conservative' being used, in the middle of the nineteenth century, in a way that was unrecognizable to Europeans. This suggests to me that nineteenth century American Protestant thought (specifically: revivalism) may have been an antecedent of the "ideological conservatism" discussed in the article.
Do people think this possibility is worth mentioning in the article? I've never seen this connection made in discussions of conservatism, but that should not be surprising, since political scientists tend not to know anything about the history religion. -- Hyperion 01:59, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it's interesting; I don't know quite what to make of it, because I am totally unfamiliar with Williams and White. So much of American intellectual tradition (left and right) goes back to Protestantism of one or another sort. This is as true of abolitionism and progressivism as it is of prohibitionism and today's Christian Right. -- Jmabel 08:00, Sep 7, 2004 (UTC)
I think that the uniqueness of American conservatism may well go back to this strain of thought. It is right in that, ACLU protestations to the contrary, unlike European conservatives who were generally "Establishmentarian", that is, in favor of a national church, no serious Amercian conservatives were ever in favor of a national church and it was the ideological forebears of today's conservatives, the Anti-Federalists, who only accepted the Constitution after the Bill of Rights was attached, and they put the non-Establishment clause in the First Amendment.  Madison really wanted the First to go farther and say, "Neither the United States nor any State shall make any Law regarding the Establishment of any Religion," but was convinced that it would not be adoptable with that language at that time.  American conservatism is small-government conservatism.
American conservatism is not descended from the idea of "divine right of kings".  It is descended from the American revolution, the world's first conservative revolution, in which pre-existing rights were defended from Crown encroachment.  The idedological underpinnings of the Confederacy were likewise based on attempts to use "state's rights" to justify a right of property in human beings -- which had been previously formally recognized in the Constitution and other documents.  So the American Civil War was a failed conservative revolution to that degree, and cemented the idea in the mind of the American public, at least the Southern public, that conservatism was segregationist.  But using government to prevent human rights is antithetical to what the American principle underlying conservatism is really about.
Rlquall 13:11, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

text: Some notice should also be taken of the fact that conservatism is also often used in religion in the United States.  Religious conservatism from an American pen usually means something along the spectrum of evangelicalism to Christian fundamentalism as those movements are understood in the USA. Jerry Falwell's annotated King James Study Bible claims to incorporate "conservative" views; but there is little political commentary in the book.  Its conservatism consists of accepting a literal view of Genesis, rejecting the findings of biblical criticism, and similar doctrines that US fundamentalists stress.  The phrase often implies sympathy for the religious right, which is in fact an ideological reform movement often hard to harmonize with Burkean conservatism. Smerdis of Tlön 14:48, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

text: . . . the liberal attempt at reconciling Christianity with modern science has really relinquished everything distinctive of Christianity, so that what remains is in essentials only that same indefinite type of religious aspiration which was in the world before Christianity came upon the scene. (J. Gresham Mechan, Christianity and Liberalism, 1923)
It's not really my place to voice an opinion on whether this should be worked into the article or a new entry on American conservatism should be started, since I am new to Wikipedia, haven't made a significant contribution to this article, and don't really know that much about the subject. That said, my initial inclination was against starting a new entry, because encyclopedias of philosophy don't treat American conservatism separately in this way. On the other hand, considerations of symmetry would seem to require a new entry, given that a separate entry already exists for American liberalism. -- Hyperion 03:18, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Use of the term 'conservative' in American Protestant thought 

message: Moving Santayana made me think --- are Edmund Burke, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison philosophers, or would they be better included among the politicians? Smerdis of Tlön 19:40, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Philosophers and politicians

message: Near the end of the article "A growing strain has appeared in the conservative movement in the United States.  This strain takes the form of the divide between the paleoconservatives and the newer neoconservatives." 
# what evidence (if any) is there that the strain is "growing"? In what sense is it any bigger now than in 1992 (I deliberately pick the first presidential election year after the end of the Cold War).
# in what sense (other than a pleonasm about the etymology) are neoconservatives "newer" than paleoconservatives? The term "paleoconservative" is certainly of more recent vintage and was a response to neoconservatism. 
# Are these two sentences useful at all in the context where they appear? I'm inclined to delete them, unless someone can give a good reason to the contrary. -- Jmabel 07:20, Sep 10, 2004 (UTC)
I would sense that the "growing strain" is this:  Many "paleos" are basically isolationists, the "neos" are emphatically not such.  This really didn't matter as much in times of peace (by '92 the first Gulf War was pretty much all over) as it does now.  Some "paleos" still have something of the Fortress America mentality.  They aren't interested in "Old Europe" or "New Europe" to any great extent, and are similar to the "America Firsters" of the 1930s.  However, this strain is rejected as increasingly unrealistic by many, even many who once felt that way themselves, as unreflective of 21st century realities.  Most "paleos" are still deeply disturbed by Bush, as they most assuredly were his father; they support him only as the "lesser of two evils", whereas the support of the "neos" is still fairly enthusiastic for the most part.  On the whole, I would say that true conservatives are only slightly more accepting of GWB than true liberals are/were of Bill Clinton.
Rlquall 14:31, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  A growing strain...? 

message: It'd be nice to have more sources claiming the listed entertainers are conservative. I find it hard to believe that, for example, David Lynch is a conservative.
:I don't see the relevance of including entertainers at all, unless they are active political commentators. How does Bo Derek's conservatism affect anyone? It would make as much sense to have a list of conservative architects or football players. Pi9 06:37, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: David Lynch is a conservative, because Blue Velvet depicts decidedly traditional forms of S & M. Rlquall 04:28, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Dennis Miller, Mel Gibson, and a few others are known as conservative activists. Entertainers who simply give a thousand bucks to the local congressman are not notable for their conservatism. Unless someone makes a strong defense for the section, I'm going to cut it down and make it Others or something similar. -Willmcw 06:58, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Perhaps rather than deleting information from the article, could you do a few minutes of searching and find some well known entertainers who happen to be conservative?  There are a lot of liberal activist entertainers, and I admit there are fewer who come to mind for the conservative end of the political spectrum, but surely there are notable ones anyway.  Dennis Miller hosts a conservative news talk show, for example.  My point is: if you feel the celebs listed aren't known for their conservative advocacy of issues and politics, find some who are.  It's always better to add/correct information than to delete information (i.e. replace with "others").  --ABQCat 07:13, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I tend to agree that it's better to add than substract. Looking at it again, it occurs to me that the base problem is with the heading. It should specify entertainers who are also well-known for their conservative statements or activism, instead of people who are famous for entertaining and are not outspokenly conservative.   -Willmcw 07:29, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Conservatives in Entertainment 

message: Number 4 in the introduction is extremely biased, first in its implication that conservatism and compassion are the same, and then by its flowery praise of Bush administration policy.
:The connotation is the conservatives may in the main believe this with regard to "comapassion" and "conservatism", not necessarily that it is true.  Also, I would dare say that many if not most conservatives do not regard the comments about Bush as being necessarily "praise", but, far from it, condmenation in that he has "liberally" mounded up debt on social programs; the point is that it is his rhetoric, not his policies, which are "conservative".  (Feel free to go back and sign your comment.)
Rlquall 13:51, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bias 

message: "Economic liberalism coupled with social conservatism is typically referred to as populism or fascism."  This sentence is very confusing.  In British usage, the term "economic liberalism" means laissez-faire!
Bear in mind that laissez-faire was originally a liberal philosophy.  There is nothing inherently anti-statist or anti-government about conservatism, at least in Europe. (anon)
: Yes, actually "Economic liberalism" means the same in the U.S. (although it isn't used much). What this person obviously meant was "fiscal liberalism". I'll fix that. -- Jmabel 00:40, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)
:: Libertarians don't champion free markets because of ideology, at least most of the people I've met have purely utilitarian reasons as well. --Tmh 14:07, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ambiguity 

message: David Lynch is listed here as a conservative. Does anyone have a source for this? It seems a little unlikely, given the style and content of his films.(anon 195.92.67.209, unsigned)
*May I second that? If this doesn't get a citation within a week, I'm inclined simply to remove it. -- Jmabel 17:16, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)
:I deleted Lynch a while back and he was re-added anyway. The best support I can find is that he was friendly with the Reagans, but that does not automatically make someone a conservative. These lists....ah well. Cheers, -Willmcw 05:24, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  David Lynch? 

message: I find some of the recent edits by User:24.6.127.24 mostly to be either hairsplitting or misleading. However, they are not actually false or imbecile. Would someone else please weigh in on whether these should be kept, reverted, or some of each? -- Jmabel | Talk 05:41, Oct 17, 2004 (UTC)
: I'd have to agree, they do come off as pro-conservative to me. The content may have a place, but not in the way it's currently presented. ShaneKing 05:48, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recent edit by 24.6.127.24 

message: I didn't much care for the idea in a new paragraph that was anonymously added about how one's view of the U.S. constitution was a test of one's conservatism.  That seemed to assume, among other things, that Wikipedia was entirely aimed at a U.S. audience.  Rather than attempt to saw off someone who may prove to be a valuable newcomer at the knees, I chose to rewrite that paragraph rather than just delete or revert.  This may well belong somewhere else or not at all, I leave it in the capable hands of others.
Rlquall 14:33, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Classical Conservatism

message: Someone might want to break out country-specific information into separate articles, as has been done with Liberalism. -- Jmabel | Talk 23:39, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)
* With the section on Conservatism in different countries I added in about a paragraph of info. on the history of Canadian conservatism, and I added on the names of famous Canadian conservatives to you're list such as Sir John A. Macdonald, Borden, Diefenbaker and Mulroney, why was it all taken off this article?????? - Chris Gilmore
** You are editing anonymously, so its hard to know what edit you are referring to, but I don't see in the history any indication that anything like that has been deleted. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:41, Dec 10, 2004 (UTC)
* Oh sorry, I've had some computer problems, maybe it just didn't load what I added. I'll rewrite it if thats alright, I thought it might be interesting for some people to have a reference to Canadian conservatism which definately qualifies as one of the most unique brands of conservatism.
I agree with the proposal to separate country-specific info. A related issue is that the American stuff is creeping over the whole article. For instance, I see that neoconservatism and compassionate conservatism are listed as types of conservatism, though they are both uniquely U.S. movements (And neocon has a second long reference under US as well). -Willmcw 00:50, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Country-specific information 

message: Is it appropriate to include Adam Smith in the list of conservative philosophers? He has inspired modern conservatives but was the antithesis of conservatives in his day.
:That's a good point. You could add a short note to Adam's entry explaining that paradox. -Willmcw 06:42, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Adam Smith

message: The list of people (especially entertainers) was getting overwhelming. As with some other movements and philosophies, conservatism now has a list of its own. Cheers, -Willmcw 05:22, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: People moved to [[List of conservatives]]

message: "Social conservatives generally wish to preserve the current state of their society and impose their society's values on others societies, as opposed to supporting the natural advancement of societies, as liberals do. A notable contemporary example is the Second Iraq War, whose supporters (conservatives) wish to impose their values (such as democracy) on the various societies of Iraq. The opposition (liberals), on the other hand, believes that imposing something on a society that is not ready for it will actually hurt that society, as it will react negatively towards what is being imposed on it(in this case democracy)."
I believe this particular passage needs to be changed as it is seriously lacking in neutrality.JetsLuvver 00:38, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Iraq and NPOV 

message: This article is a bad example of over Wiki-linking.  At its length, it would be fine for the same people and things to be linked more than once, I'll admit, but several times in the same para for things like Republican Party and Edmund Burke is a little bit much.  Remember that style guidelines dictate that if the same person or thing is to be Wiki-linked more than once within the same article, there should be enough space between them that they are not both within sight of one another; i.e., repetition should not occur until the first link has been scrolled completely past and is out of sight in a normal view.   Rlquall 03:40, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Over Wiki-linking 

message: Nothing about Leo Strauss under the neo-con section? I think he deserves at least a passing mention. Without Strauss, we'd have no neo-conservatives (oh, if only :) ). --195.93.21.2 01:55, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Leo Strauss

message: conservatism=nazism
Conservatism equals WHAT?  Excuse me but do I compare liberals to Communists?  Conservatism is treating minoraties the same as majorities, not better like some parties I could mention.  Why am I the only one complaining here?
---------------
Also the two sections of text right under the contents is very biased and are not very NPOV. All the subjects talked about in those parts are discussed later in the text, and there much more neutral. I tried to edit it to be a little more neutral (for an example i removed the text that said that conservatism is neccesarily oppresive, and added a part explaining the relationship between conservatism and facism. But I believe that the sections should be removed in their whole (except perhaps the first part of the first subject), since they do not add anything new to the text and is very non-NPOV written.
I don't want to do that myself before others have had an oppertunity to either better it or explain why it should be kept in. (unsigned user)
Please note that most of this talk page now refers to an older version of the article, that was primarily about U.S. conservatism. The article is no longer about the United States, it is about conservatism as a global phenomenon. That includes things like the Franco regime in Spain in the 1950's, and Ayatollah Khomeiny. I re-inserted the point that value-conservative regimes - such as those of the Ayatollah - are inherently repressive. There is no other way for them to function.
Nowhere does it say that conservatives are fascists, so it was unnecessary to insert a disclaimer. Nevertheless, I added the point that many conservatives are unhappy with the association, and clarified the historical and current ideological relationship. Once again: the article is not about the United States, it is not a disclaimer article, and the global history of conservatism is not always filled with nice people.Ruzmanci 11:55, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Relation to nazism 

message: Please DO NOT INSERT COMMENTS IN THE MIDDLE of this text, but under it.
The factual accuracy of the entire article is disputed, because it is not what it purports to be, namely an overview of conservatism, but an article on Anglo-American, and substantially US-American, conservative traditions. As a result of the anglo-centrism of the article it contains factual errors in its description of conservatism, for instance..
* the claim that conservatisms are historically related: in fact there are conservative traditions in other major cultures (China) which arose independently
*it describes conservatism as an intellectual tradition arising around the time of the French Revolution, and ignores the great importance of conservatism in Classical Antiquity, among others 
* it greatly exaggerates the role of Edmund Burke, who can not in any way be seen as a founding father of an intellectual tradition, that already existed 2000 years before his birth.
*with the exception of a few figures (who sometimes published in English anyway), it ignores the bulk of the European conservative traditions, especially southern European conservatism.
*the categorisation of conservatisms is therefore inaccurate (because it is a categorisation of part of conservatism only), and would be substantially different if it included all ‘continental’ European conservatisms
*the claimed relationship to the political right is false, and would be different if all European conservatisms were included, and if conservatism was used in the European sense.
The article in its present form can not be amended and that is not necessary. The simple solution is to give the existing article a new title, such as ‘Anglo-American Conservatism’, and to create a new overview article, on conservatism as a global and historical ideological and cultural phenomenon.
Ruzmanci 11:41, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Factual accuracy disputed 

message: A short draft replacement, a new general overview article on Conservatism, is now linked from the main page. The present article would be renamed "Conservatism in America' or something like that.Ruzmanci 17:27, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Draft replacement