Talk:Conservatism/Archive 1

message: The section "Conservativism as an anti-ideology" seems to have been written by an anti-conservative. The whole thing is POV. It says, in a subtle way, that convervatives are opposed to reason. That section needs to be rewritten (and re-titled) or else deleted.
: I'm not sure when this remark was added and as it is unsigned, it is really hard to take seriously an anonymous statement that such-and-such must be done. I don't see the statement that Conservativism is an anti-ideology as being anti-conservative at all. Although I am not a conservative, I see that anti-ideological position as conservatism's greatest strength and greatest contribution to society: a philosophy that says, basically: "Above all, no 'program'. Leaders with 'programs' are dangerous." Robespierre had a program. Hitler had a program. Stalin had a program. -- Jmabel 19:19, 25 Apr 2004 (UTC)

message: In response to jmabel  I see three people who would not identify themselves as conservative. I would like to say this purely for the article I consider most of these people to be conservatives but if someone denies they are can you still put them on the list? Is not political affiliation it most cases self-proclaimed rather than labeled? 
Bill O'Reilly openly states he is not conservative in fact he responded rather negatively (understatement) when it was suggested he was by Al Franken at a book expo for independent booksellers (see C-SPAN Booktv there may be video on it). 
Chris Mathews worked for both Democratic speaker of the house Tip O'Neil and President Jimmy Carter. Neither of whom were conservatives. Mathews espouses non-conservative views on his nightly program "hardball" on MSNBC (7pm E.S.T weekdays)
Christopher Hitchens, a polemicist who calls himself the heir-apparent to Gore Vidal (a VERY non-conservative person) is the man behing the documentary "The Trials of Henry Kissinger" in which he claims there was a conservative coup de ta' in Chile and that Richard Nixon and Kissinger were behind it to install Augusto Pinochet as dictator. He also attacked Mother Teresa as not being saintly. The reason he has been labeled one recently is because of his support for the war in Iraq. He also admits he was a trotskyist in his youth and wrote a book called "Why Orwell Matters" in which he critiques the power of the state. He also considers himself to be liberal by what I have seen of him on television-but he never calls himself conservative. He recently sparked controversey over Mel Gibson's new movie the passion by claiming it was anti-semetic and that the bible along with religion was nonsense.
Also Ayn Rand espoused the philosophy of objectivism which is atheistic and if practiced undermines allot of conventional and conservative beleifs.
Milton Friedman is an economist who espouses beleifs that would be more libertarian than conservative. In fact his proposed system would be closely identified as anarcho-capitalism. 
GrazingshipIV 21:05, Mar 25, 2004 (UTC)
: I don't know enough about O'Reilly or Matthews to comment. I agree that Hitchens does not belong on a list of conservatives -- I'd view him as a "lapsed" leftist, but no conservative -- and would second the proposal of removing him from the list.
: As for Ayn Rand, certainly her atheism doesn't remove her from being a conservative, any more than being a Christian minister made Martin Luther King, Jr. a conservative. All of her political alliances were on the right, usually with people who called themselves conservative, and she was tremendously influential on at least two generations of conservatives (from Barry Goldwater down to the '60s Young Republicans who are now old Republicans). Milton Friedman is a trickier case; I think it's a fair characterization of where his political allegiances lie, though maybe not his overt ideology. The Chicago Boys certainly played a role in the Reagan administration, which I presume we can all agree was a generally "conservative" administration, in the sense that word is usually used in America.
: I don't really feel a big stake in this, but I'd keep Ayn Rand on the list, drop Christopher Hitchens, probably keep Friedman, and have no opinion on the others. 
: By the way, nothing here expands your earlier remark, "this page ... definetly has a POV." What even do you see as its POV? -- 
Jmabel 21:48, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Talk 2

message: This section is a bit of a mess; would someone like a pass at it? In particular:
* Although this section claims to be a history, it deals almost entirely with a single period of 25 years.
* There is vague allusion to the English Civil War, but no clarification of its relevance.
* The copy currently reads, "It was not institutionally adopted until the Congress of Vienna..." I have no idea what "it" in this sentence refers back to. -- Jmabel 22:45, 5 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: We have a fairly long article about Joseph de Maistre, who seems to be the same dude.  That probably ought to be fixed, and the two articles merged. Smerdis of Tlön 00:12, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: History of Conservatism: Questions

message: A recent set of anon edits that mostly did a good job of removing POV material also killed the following paragraph in its entirety:
:The relationship of political conservatism to the religious right is a perennial source for commentary. It could be argued that the religious right is scarcely conservative: it is instead a movement for social reform with a strong ideological basis, wishing to remake society through forced obedience to its version of Christian values. The religious right is called conservative primarily because there is a strong element of nostalgia in its plan for social reform; it sees liberal, secular society as deviating from a better world that it believes used to exist. Its plan to remake the world involves reviving a purported older vision. Were reactionary a neutral term, it would apply here.
I do agree that the way this is written is rather POV, but there is some important content here. I suspect that someone more sympathetic than I to the politics in question should do a rewrite and return it to the article. I do think that it is important to say that a lot of what is called "religious conservatism" is actually a social reform movement, certainly not institutionally conservative, and arguably not simply socially conservative, since it wishes to change a great deal about actual social relations. -- Jmabel 19:15, 25 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: POV?

message: The article divided conservatism into "classical" and "modern" conservatism. I have never heard the term "modern conservatism" anywhere else. There are two problems with it. First, it is historically awkward, since among historians, "modern" means sometime after the Renaissance. Thus, Burke, the prototype of classical conservatism, is also modern. Second, "modern conservatism" sounds very point of view: many people would take some forms of conservatism in the US to be not modern at all -- indeed to amount to an assault upon modernity itself -- so calling conservatism "modern" would seem to be an attempt to preempt such a line of thought.
The introductory entry defined the main difference between the two kinds of conservatism as lying in one's being ideological and the other's not being ideological. So it is natural to call the one that is ideological "ideological conservatism", which is what I did; the phrase "ideological conservatism" was already used in the article. (Another possibility would be to use "contemporary" instead. But that has the disadvantage that it does not say anything about the content of the doctrine, and also that "contemporary" means "present day", so that it's meaning literally shifts from decade to decade, which is not what is desired.)
The article also bizarrely omitted linking to "liberalism", something that is especially strange given that Burke was largely responding to Locke's liberal philosophy. I've corrected the omission. Hyperion 19:13, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: What to call "non-classical" conservatism

message: I am massively revamping this. It is quite redundant, having three sections on the same topic (US conservatism) and repetitive in other instances as well, also exhibiting contradictions, no doubt added by people of varying politic persuasions. Amicuspublilius 02:09, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Messy

message: Similarly, this:
:"Reagan's immense popularity coupled with other factors caused Congress to rubber-stamp virtually every major policy incentive of his administration. Consequently, this time-period is often referred to as the 'Reagan Revolution.' However, insofar as rule of law was not breached, Reagan cannot be called a revolutionary. The contrast is between 'means' and 'ends.' The conservative opposes revolution on the grounds that rule of law must not be breached: in many cases, however, rule of law proves (as in Reagan's case) a more expedited tool of change than revolution."
1. What "immense popularity"? Poll statistics show Reagan as having had about popularity ratings about average for a post WWII-president. Those who liked him liked him a lot, probably more so than any other president since Kennedy, but the straight-out numbers aren't particularly impressive.
2. "coupled with other factors" means what?
3. "policy incentive": what the hell is a "policy incentive"? I'm guessing that you mean "policy initiative"? or do you mean something else?
4. "to rubber-stamp virtually every major policy incentive[/initiative?]": I happen to agree with this, bit it's very POV.
5. The rest of this seems to be playing on two meanings of "revolutionary", even willfully confusing the two meanings: (1) "making extreme changes rapidly" and (2) "engaging in violent political revolution". This rhetoric is either deliberately confusing or accidentally confusing, and either way it should be reworded. -- Jmabel 04:27, Jul 23, 2004 (UTC)
I'll simply rework a lot of this to remove the "hot topics." The point is not to be biased, and if some people disagree with the "immense popularity" part I can replace it with "perceived electoral mandate." The point is simply that Reagan dominated Congress to sweeping reform, but insofar as it was not "violent," the conservative would not consider it "revolutionary." The paragraph is intended to make it obvious that there are two meanings: if you picked up on it, the paragraph worked. I will change it though. Amicuspublilius 13:38, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Reagan's popularity?

message: In the course of editing some of this, I deleted the following and replaced it with some different, but related material.
:"The Communist Soviet Union opposed homosexuality. While many social conservatives may oppose homosexuality, the reasoning is different. The Communists opposed homosexuality because it did not fit in with the social construction of their state. Social conservatives tend to oppose homosexuality less on that ground (active construction) and more on traditionalist grounds (passive maintenance of the status quo). Some right-wing politicians do espouse active social change, but their motives are generally different than those of the social conservatives."
I deleted it because the characterization of the Soviet position on homosexuality is somewhere between POV and outright wrong. I've replaced it with what I believe to be a more accurate sentence that was in the article before: "For example, some Communist organizations and most Communist regimes have been very puritanical with respect to sexuality, arguing, for instance, that homosexuality was a bourgeois vice." This makes the "active construction" / "passive maintenance" no longer fit, so I dropped it. Also, the last sentence is so vague that I deleted it, but it might be worth restoring with a good example, as might the "active construction" / "passive maintenance". -- Jmabel 05:17, Jul 23, 2004 (UTC)
The dichotomy can still fit with the reworked sentence. It is, like so much, subtle semantics that stops the conservative from going over the edge to ideological right-winger. Perhaps that should be clarified. Amicuspublilius 13:38, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: A paragraph on homosexuality removed 

message: I've moved the following paragraph out of the article, because I think it is riddled with problems:
:Oddly enough, the earliest environmental legislation has its roots in the Republican party and in Conservative politics, in the US and UK respectively. Republican Theodore Roosevelt was a noted conservationist, and signed into being the first US National Parks. British Tories were among the harshest critics of the enclosure movement.
*I assume we can all agree to drop the purely POV "Oddly enough...". *What legislation is being referred to as "the earliest environmental legislation"? There were already, for example, sanitation laws in many cities before Roosevelt's time. 
*The implication that Roosevelt should be seen as a conservative is a bit tricky: his one-word description of his own politics woudl have been "progressive". 
*At least Yellowstone National Park predates Roosevelt's administration (our article says it was declared March 1, 1872, and I believe that is correct). 
*The point about the enclosure movement is on the mark and deserves expansion. I wouldn't have cut it, except with the rest of this paragraph gone it would be left dangling.
*Amicuspublilius, do you want to take a shot at rewriting the paragraph, which I believe was yours? If not, I'll do it eventually, but I'm really busy this next 2 weeks. -- Jmabel 21:47, Jul 24, 2004 (UTC)
It wasn't mine, but I will work with it. I agree with you about Roosevelt: progressive on many issues. However, it is interesting to note that the "first wave" environmental movement originated out of the upper class wishing to preserve their elitist stomping grounds. It wasn't until the 60s that "environmentalism" came to refer to issues of public health as well. Amicuspublilius 01:03, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Conservatism and environmentalism

message: (From the article:) "With the advent of the Thatcher administration, the Tories have returned to their roots." Hmm. Certainly they backed off from social democracy, but an interesting case could be made as to which was closer to the party's roots. The Tory Chartists would certainly have been more comfortable with Heath than with Thatcher; I suspect Disraeli might have been as well. Can we either expand this paragraph to deal with this complexity, or reword the sentence in a manner that avoids this claim about "roots"? Thatcher has a strong element of free marketeer in her which is not particularly close to the party's roots. -- Jmabel 05:12, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
I agree that "roots" was an oversight on my part. The Tories were the liberal party in the late 1700s ---supporting the monarchy and all that. The Whigs were the conservative party. I was referring to its early 1900 roots, prior to its conciliation with socialism. Amicuspublilius 01:06, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Thatcher and the Tories' "roots"