What’s Wrong with America Part 2: Conservatives

[hohotread]

  I noted in Part 1 that liberals were anti-democratic, attempting to use an illusion of majority support to institute policies against majority opinion with a loveable underdog image.  The following essay about conservatives might seem more positive.  The reason for this is that conservatives use more straightforward tactics, making the

Comments

[qfish]

Again, I think you ignore the great variety within the Conservative movement, which may be even worse than with the liberals, as modern conservatives are at least divided into two strong camps, the economic conservatives and the religious conservatives. The third camp, the foreign policy conservatives, probably cannot be sufficiently separated from the other two, as, although it is a legitimate intellectual viewpoint, any one who holds it is likely also to be either a religious or an economic conservative. As for people who are both economic and religious conservatives, I suspect that most of them are, in the end, fundamentally more one than the other. Now, with regards to both camps, I do not think either group really wants things, as a whole, to revert to the ways things were, and they certainly don't want things to stay the same. They may want to roll back certain things, economic conservatives want less industrial regulations, but many of them are perfectly happy to support civil rights, religious conservatives often want us to

I think I see the problem, here.

[hohotread]

Once again, you are using your view of the term "conservative," dividing America into either "liberal" or "conservative" viewpoints. Your points are mostly valid, but miss the thrust of my argument

Re: I think I see the problem, here.

[qfish]

Again, the reason I am using my own definition of conservative is because I feel that the definition I am using accurately characterizes the state of America today. I feel that your definition of conservative misses the nature of actual conservatives to such an extent that there is no clear connection between the causal chains you associate with conservatism and what actual conservatives strive for. That is, it may be an interesting definition, but it is not clear that a significant enough group of people actually fall under that definition in order to constitute something that is wrong with America. Clearly many people in America do call themselves conservatives, just as many people call themselves liberals, but I think an extreme minority would really fall under the definitions you have provided. I merely continually point this out

Re: I think I see the problem, here.

[qfish]

As for your statement about the opposition of the Christian Right to cloning and stem cell research, that is of course correct, but it is unfair in a couple of ways. Firstly, by saying they oppose it merely because it makes them feel uneasy is to trivialize the very real moral questions behind those technologies. Almost no one would say that we should allow the practice of Nazi style medical research merely because it makes some people uneasy. We reject it because we find it immoral, and the Christian Right feel the same way about embryonic stem cells and cloning. Their moral concerns on this matter at least deserve a greater amount of respect