Re:The evil "American Right"...yup (Score:5, Insightful)
No, just evil people who grab and increase their power over us because we are dumb enough to let them. We've even let them destroy the language -- liberal used to mean something a lot more like "libertarian"
No it didn't. The libertarian position is one that honestly did not exist in politics until about 50 years ago.
I know, in conservative mythos, the founding fathers were libertarians, but they were not. Liberal, in that day, was basically anti-classism and anti-crown, a position that really doesn't exist anymore in modern politics.
Once the crown was gone, it continued to be anti-special-rules-for-the-ruling class, a position it still holds, at least in theory. (As we don't actually have any liberal political party, it doesn't really hold any position anymore.) All liberal fights, though the entire history of this country and back to John Locke, are to stop one group of withholding power-sharing from another group, with the groups being the crown, nobles, slaveowners, the superrich, the corporate owners, the whites, the straights...and, apparently, the superrich again. Except now the superrich have intelligently bought both parties.
(Please note when I say 'liberals', I am, indeed, aware that liberals used to be on the right, and flopped to the left around when I said 'the whites')
Libertarianism is not classical liberalism, it is neo-classical liberalism. It reinvents the idea that the problem is 'the crown'. Which, frankly, would be a rather strange idea to various classical liberal thinkers, whose biggest problem with the government is the fact that it often failed to enforce laws equally, and not that those laws existed at all!
and "conservative" used to mean, you know, look before you leap, spend less than you make, stuff like that. Or even "not all change is for the better, so examine it first before deciding".
Here, you're right. Conservatives, to paraphrase something David Brin wrote on the topic, used to be the serious guys in suits at NASA who did the math. The guys running around in the background monitoring stuff that seemed entirely pointless (Until it was wrong, then they calmly and efficiently saved everyone's life.), and wasn't glamorous, and they went home to their family and read the paper each evening. Whereas liberals were the astronauts and the sci-fi writers and the dreamers, and got all the credit, but without the guys in suits, wouldn't know how to do what they were trying to do. There's the guys who try to do everything, and the guys who figure out what can and can't happen and managed to get some of it done, while otherwise raining on the parade.
But that ended about two decades ago, when it was decided that the best way to rule the country is not to point out the parts of the left's plans that can't work, and invent better ways...but to simply assert, very loudly, that anything the left wants is wrong. Morally wrong, politically wrong, won't work, every single possible objection.
Even stuff like cap and trade or the public mandate for health insurance, both of which were conservative alternatives to the left's previous plan. Or stuff like bills attempting to stop child 'marriage', which the Republicans shot down for absurd reasons two week ago. (Apparently, educating women that it is not acceptable for them to be sold to older men when they're 13 as his 'wife' is...um...pro-abortion.)
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