InquiryLabs
Politics, Programming and Possibilities
New Definition of Conservative?
Author: Duane Johnson30 Apr
I used to think that conservative meant that a person tends towards upholding traditional values—things like kindness, humility and honesty. But lately I’ve been rethinking what it means to be “conservative”, especially in light of comments by people like Rush Limbaugh.
I picked up a copy of Time magazine today that highlighted Limbaugh’s take on Cho Seung-Hui: “If this Virginia Tech shooter had an ideology, what do you think it was? This guy had to be a liberal.”
Limbaugh’s worldview seems to be pretty simple: “If he’s not conservative, he must be liberal.” If that’s the case, then maybe it’s time I update my definition of “conservative.” How about, “You are conservative if you believe that anyone who does not share your beliefs must be liberal.”
Perhaps Liberals, on the other hand, uphold values such as caring about, conversing with, and including others?
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9 Responses for "New Definition of Conservative?"
Take a look at the History. Do you really think kindness, humility and honesty have ever been dominant values?
Also, keep in mind that this distinction is very specific to Northern America. Cho Seung-Hui was certainly neither conservative nor liberal.
Fortunately, since I’m from the UK, I can be both conservative and liberal and remain semantically correct!
Bonanza.
The whole thing’s a sham. “Conservative” used to mean something. At best they were admirable and at worst a worthy opponent. It was Kerry and Clinton who balanced the budget in the 90s.
Now it’s just Coke or Pepsi. It’s a way of capturing consumers. It’s not a way to define debate, but of avoiding it.
Great book on this is “What’s The Matter With Kansas?” by Tom Frank. Tom Frank is easily one of the smartest people in the world that I’m aware of.
I don’t know where you get kindness, humility and honesty from. First, honesty has nothing to do with politics, there is no party of honesty, they’re both equally corrupt. I don’t think humility has much to do either, unless you think flushing the country down the toilet is a form of humility. Kindness is entirely subjective. I’m sure you see the Iraq war as mean and cruel, blood for oil and all that nonsense. I thought we were doing something nice for Iraq, the liberals and you (are you a liberal now?) want to dump the Iraqi’s to save a few American lives, and dollars. We built democracies in Germany and Japan, now we’re a hop and a skip from stable democracy in Iraq and you want to pull the plug. Kindness?
Maybe you have to agree with Limbaugh’s political ideology in order to see the humor in his comment. He is an entertainer, you know. I think Jon Stewart is a better example of ignorance. He brings people on his show to ridicule them in front of a drunken audience.
It’s a Venn diagram. You’ve got Christian conservatives (against abortion, gay marriage, the breakdown of “family values”, evolution, etc.) and cheap-labor conservatives. There’s some overlap between the two. Isn’t that the structure of “conservatives” in the Republican party?
Then you’ve got other Republicans that are just out and out elitists and corporate business people (along with Lodge Cabin Republicans).
But, cheap-labor conservatives is such a catchy and precise phrase. That’s what the Bushes are. Cheap-labor conservatives. That’s what Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are.
Well, you’ve got two schools of thought in the conservative camp. There are paleoconservatives (the true conservatives) and neoconservatives (the current flavor of conservatism).
Who wants to guess which type applies to our current administration>
We can never win this debate as long as the vast majority of the population calls itself ‘conservative’ without even knowing what the word means and the dangers it invokes. You might as well say you have the plague as say you’re a Liberal, which indeed means ‘compassion and kindness towards your fellow humans.’ Fear of change is the hallmark of conservativism and the staus quo sucks too much for me to be in that camp. We need change, seeing that we have somehow become the new Nazi’s on the world stage. Y’all need to smoke a damn joint or something. It might cushion that fall from your soap box of hatred and self indulgence.
I found this. This seems to have been written with a Liberal/Conservative comparison in mind. This is what a Liberal is, so I guess the opposite is what a Conservative is.
http://www.targetofopportunity.com/are_you_liberal.htm
That’s a laugh….Democracy in Germany and Japan? WWII got started because Hitler rose to power in a government EXACTLY mimicking ours. We even wrote their Constitution & Bill of Rights the same as ours after WWI. Great Democracy! The only thing which made it work in those nations was to remove or limit their military capability; so, they couldn’t enforce their empirialistic tendencies on the rest of the world, which we in the U.S. seem to feel we are entitled to do.
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