I found this essay on conservatism intriguing. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. Any comments from the peanut gallery are most welcome…
http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/conservatism.html
–sam
I found this essay on conservatism intriguing. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. Any comments from the peanut gallery are most welcome…
http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/conservatism.html
–sam
I haven’t had a chance to read this article at length, but I plan to.
Off what I skimmed, the analysis of Burke sounds pretty thin, like perhaps there’s more knowledge of twentieth-century commentary on Burke than Burke’s own writings. Plus, the author at one point equates “decent people” with liberals and lines the “decent” folks up against the “conservative artistocrats”–which is a pretty frightning, neo-Victorian argument that I just don’t buy.
Yeah… I’m going to re-read it this weekend and get a better grasp of it. I haven’t read any Burke… or many of the others noted for that matter. Makes me feel a bit behind on some of what he’s talking about.
Still… I agree that there are some instances where the writer seems to be somewhere in the “all conservatives and aristocrats are bad” zone. I’m not really biting on it, but I think there are also some valid points strewn throughout the essay.
Overall… it’s a bit of mishmash, but I want to “get it” so I’m slogging through to give my brain a chance to form logic-based opinions on the various points he brings up.
I really need to start reading “serious” books again… :/ (Mr. Brain… meet Mr. Atrophy)
–sam
Aight man, I’ve got a cup of coffee and I’m going to read this entire article, making comments to this post along the way.
what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple
I don’t think that the answers to any political questions are quite this “simple.”
Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves “conservatives” have little notion of what conservatism even is.
I think this is true. I think conservatism has lost sight of what it has been traditionally, and the neo-con movement especially has more in common with Marxism than anything traditionally conservative.
This alliance between traditional social authorities and the business class is artificial. The market continually undermines the institutions of cultural domination. It does this partly through its constant revolutionizing of institutions generally and partly by encouraging a culture of entrepreneurial initiative. As a result, the alliance must be continually reinvented, all the while pretending that its reinventions simply reinstate an eternal order.
Exactly. Good point. See my previous point.
Conservatism has opposed rational thought for thousands of years. What most people know nowadays as conservatism is basically a public relations campaign aimed at persuading them to lay down their capacity for rational thought.
Classical Englightenment political thinking. Also highly debatable, and certainly not as “simple” or cut-and-dried as he makes out.
More to follow:
Part II
the famous memo from Newt Gingrich’s (then) organization GOPAC entitled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control”. It advised Republican candidates to associate themselves with words like…
What this guy doesn’t mention (I did a search) is how Democratic candidates have picked up on this list and started using it too. Haha, the corruption spreads! It’s a meme!
Reason occurs mostly through the medium of language, and so the destruction of reason requires the destruction of language. An underlying notion of conservative politics is that words and phrases of language are like territory in warfare: owned and controlled by one side or the other. One of the central goals of conservatism, as for example with Newt Gingrich’s lists of words, is to take control of every word and phrase in the English language.
See above, plus, I think it’s far beyond a partisan effort to debase and control language. It’s more or less one of the cornerstones of contemporary society.
Rush Limbaugh asserts that “they [liberals] think they are better than you”, this of course being a phrase that had historically been applied (and applied correctly) to the aristocracy.
If my friends list is any indication, most liberals do, in fact, think they’re better–more education, better thinkers, more sympathetic and less duped by the media–than the “ordinary” people who voted for Bush. (Sam, you’re one of the exceptions! I chalk it up to having grown up around “ordinary” people.)
Likewise, I have never heard the phrase “political correctness” used except to disparage the people who supposedly use it.
While it’s probably true that the enemies of PC named it in order to attack it, PC is definitely one of those attempts to control language that he disparages when the Right does it. The real difference is that the Left does it piecemeal–one group advocates for a few words, and another advocates a few more, and they support one another–while the Right does it more systematically, en bloc. So what he’s really saying is, “Evil will always win because Good is dumb.”
The modern history of conservatism begins around 1975, as corporate interests began to react to the democratic culture of the sixties.
The “democratic culture of the sixties”? Please. A bunch of spoiled university students smoking hash and listening to comparatively-expensive Beatles albums can hardly be called “democratic.”
Humanity has struggled for thousands of years to emerge from the darkness of conservatism. At every step of the way, conservatism has always had the advantage of a long historical learning curve. There have always been experts in the running of conservative society. Most of the stupid mistakes have been made and forgotten centuries ago. Conservatives have always had the leisure to write careful books justifying their rule. Democracy, by contrast, is still very much in an experimental phase. And so, for example, the 1960’s were one of the great episodes of civilization in human history, and they were also a time when people did a lot of stupid things like take drugs.
I’m really starting to lose interest in this rhetoric: “for thousands of years, people have struggled to see the light…the sixties were totally revolutionary because people were seeing the light for the first time…”
Blech.
Okay, I skimmed the rest and I wasn’t really impressed. I’m done.
Summary
I learned a great deal from the many facts and examples in this article. But the theoretical side–that is, the side which purported to describe the differences between conservative and liberal ideology–I thought was pretty thin and weak. Like I said yesterday, much of the analysis seemed oversimplified.
So, read it, learn something from it, move on. Heh. Sounds like pratically everything I’ve ever read!
Re: Summary
The good side is that I feel like I need to get the source material and read up so that I can form a better opinion. The bad side is that I feel like I need to get the source material and read up so that I can form a better opinion. ;p
In other words, he didn’t always convince me of his point.
He brings up some valid points, even though he doesn’t always follow through on the analysis side. His most valid comments are made toward the end in the section… How to Defeat Conservativism. But even there I found some things that left me wondering… WTF? Why a motherfucker wanna player hate on Snoop?
–sam
Re: Summary
Why a motherfucker wanna player hate on Snoop?
YEEEEE-uh!
Re: Summary
And, you know, he can rag Snoop but he better not mess with Eric B and Rakim…
Re: Summary
So I dig into my pocket, all my money spent
So I dig deeper, and still comin’ up with lent
Start my mission, leave my residence
Gotta get my hands on some dead presidents