AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

Thomas, please see graphs. They show a general increase in household incomes 1967 to 2003.

Georgia congressman warns of Obama dictatorship

Georgia congressman says Obama shows signs of being Marxist, warns of dictatorship

BEN EVANS
AP News

Nov 10, 2008 19:46 EST

A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist dictatorship.

"It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he's the one who proposed this national security force," Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. "I'm just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may " may not, I hope not " but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism..."That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did," Broun said. "When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist."

...Broun said he believes Obama would move to ban gun ownership if he does build a national security force.

NOVEMBER 8, 2008 The Perils of 'Populist Chic'
What the rise of Sarah Palin and populism means for the conservative intellectual tradition.By MARK LILLAArticle
Comments
more in Politics »Finita la commedia. Many things ended on Tuesday evening when Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States, and depending on how you voted you are either celebrating or mourning this weekend. But no matter what our political affiliations, we should all -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- be toasting the return of Governor Sarah Palin to Juneau, Alaska.

The Palin farce is already the stuff of legend. For a generation at least it is sure to keep presidential historians and late-night comedians in gainful employment, which is no small thing. But it would be a pity if laughter drowned out serious reflection about this bizarre episode. As Jane Mayer reported recently in the New Yorker ("The Insiders," Oct. 27, 2008), John McCain's choice was not a fluke, or a senior moment, or an act of desperation. It was the result of a long campaign by influential conservative intellectuals to find a young, populist leader to whom they might hitch their wagons in the future.
And not just any intellectuals. It was the editors of National Review and the Weekly Standard, magazines that present themselves as heirs to the sophisticated conservatism of William F. Buckley and the bookish seriousness of the New York neoconservatives. After the campaign for Sarah Palin, those intellectual traditions may now be pronounced officially dead.

What a strange turn of events. For the past 40 years American conservatism has been politically ascendant, in no small part because it was also intellectually ascendant. In 1955 sociologist Daniel Bell could publish a collection of essays on "The New American Right" that treated it as a deeply anti-intellectual force, a view echoed a few years later in Richard Hofstadter's influential "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" (1963).
But over the next decade and a half all that changed. Magazines like the Public Interest and Commentary became required reading for anyone seriously concerned about domestic and foreign affairs; conservative research institutes sprang up in Washington and on college campuses, giving a fresh perspective on public policy. Buckley, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Peter Berger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz -- agree or disagree with their views, these were people one had to take seriously.

Coming of age politically in the grim '70s, when liberalism seemed utterly exhausted, I still remember the thrill of coming upon their writings for the first time. I discovered the Public Interest the same week that Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and its pages offered shelter from the storm -- from the mobs on the street, the radical posing of my professors and fellow students, the cluelessness of limousine liberals, the whole mad circus of post-'60s politics. Conservative politics mattered less to me than the sober comportment of conservative intellectuals at that time; I admired their maturity and seriousness, their historical perspective, their sense of proportion. In a country susceptible to political hucksters and demagogues, they studied the passions of democratic life without succumbing to them. They were unapologetic elites, but elites who loved democracy and wanted to help it.
So what happened? How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? It's a sad tale that began in the '80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an "adversary culture of intellectuals." It was a phrase borrowed from the great literary critic Lionel Trilling, who used it to describe the disquiet at the heart of liberal societies. Now the idea was taken up and distorted by angry conservatives who saw adversaries everywhere and decided to cast their lot with "ordinary Americans" whom they hardly knew. In 1976 Irving Kristol publicly worried that "populist paranoia" was "subverting the very institutions and authorities that the democratic republic laboriously creates for the purpose of orderly self-government." But by the mid-'80s, he was telling readers of this newspaper that the "common sense" of ordinary Americans on matters like crime and education had been betrayed by "our disoriented elites," which is why "so many people -- and I include myself among them -- who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism."
The die was cast. Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.
Back in the '70s, conservative intellectuals loved to talk about "radical chic," the well-known tendency of educated, often wealthy liberals to project their political fantasies onto brutal revolutionaries and street thugs, and romanticize their "struggles." But "populist chic" is just the inversion of "radical chic," and is no less absurd, comical or ominous. Traditional conservatives were always suspicious of populism, and they were right to be. They saw elites as a fact of political life, even of democratic life. What matters in democracy is that those elites acquire their positions through talent and experience, and that they be educated to serve the public good. But it also matters that they own up to their elite status and defend the need for elites. They must be friends of democracy while protecting it, and themselves, from the leveling and vulgarization all democracy tends toward.
Writing recently in the New York Times, David Brooks noted correctly (if belatedly) that conservatives' "disdain for liberal intellectuals" had slipped into "disdain for the educated class as a whole," and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I couldn't care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole. There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals like myself, are poorer for it.
Mark Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University and a former editor of the Public Interest.

The problem isn't the definition of marriage Fox. The problem is the way the law treats those married vs not married.

The constitution says that all people are to be treated equally under the law.
The law says that if people are married they get tax advantages under the law.
The law also says that people get other legal advantages if married. (contract law, medical access, etc.)

The law then says that certain people can't marry and take advantage of those benefits.
That is unconstitutional because they are not being treated equally under the law.

Quote:

Conservatism looks at a statute or law and asks: 1) Does this law infringe on anybody's unalienable, civil, legal, or Constitutional rights? and 2) Does the majority oppose it?

Your 2 requirements show the weakness in you argument. It can be clearly shown that something infringes on the constitutional and legal rights of a group but you are willing to overlook that or rewrite their rights to make 2 more important than 1 in your argument. In the US, if 1 is true then 2 is never asked under the constitution because we are a constitutional republic.

ican711nm wrote:

Thomas, please see graphs. They show a general increase in household incomes 1967 to 2003.

That is not in dispute. What is in dispute is your claim that America's lower middle class did better under Reagan than it did under Carter. The Census data Parados pointed to refutes this claim of yours.

Foxfyre wrote:

Certainly liberals do not advocate a smaller federal government.

Liberals advocate an efficient and effective government that provides for the common welfare. The role of government is to do for our society what we cannot do for ourselves. This includes, but is not limited to, building our infrastructure, providing for our national defense, and regulating commerce.

Foxfyre wrote:

The more social programs the government takes on, the better: social security, food stamps, welfare, all manner of government aid to folks who need it, universal health care etc. etc. etc.

If the people themselves or the private sector were wholly capable of providing for the common welfare, social programs would not be necessary. What kind of nation would we be if we allowed the most unfortunate among us to starve in poverty-stricken regions? Additionally, having chosen to fight two wars, we must take care of our warriors when they come home maimed and broken. We cannot allow the widows and children of our dead soldiers to go hungry or homeless. I know that you would prefer to give a couple of dollars to your local church and spend some time ladling out soup on occasion rather than pay taxes to support social programs, but your two dollars and soup ladling doesn't stretch far enough.

Foxfyre wrote:

According to Joe Biden, it is our patriotic duty to want to pay more taxes if we can afford to do so. According to Barack Obama it is a matter of fairness.

Our social compact requires that we pay taxes to provide for our common welfare. Paying taxes is not the sin you portray it to be. Providing for a progressive tax system is fair so that the burden of providing for our common welfare is not disproportionately shouldered by the middle and lower classes.

Foxfyre wrote:

Neither is suggesting that the government make do with less in anything other than defense. Speaking of defense, Liberals have not been big on peace through strength either. Many hold the military in contempt and probably the majority of liberals think too large a share of the budget goes to national defense and homeland security. And it is mostly liberals who don't seem to see the virtue in winning a war once we are in one.

Your false rhetoric doesn't carry any zing . , . The past is the key to the future. If we don't learn from our mistakes, we are doomed to repeat them.

Foxfyre wrote:

It is more likely liberals who think some deserve more from society than others or deserve special privileges that others do not enjoy whether it is lowering certain standards so some can qualify that otherwise would not be able to do so, or declaring some as victims in need of rescue by government policy and initiative.

So again, how is my definition wishy washy and how does it describe liberalism?

History and truth demonstrate that it was the conservative movement that presided over the greatest redistribution of wealth EVER from the lower classes to the richest echelons of our national society. The "conservatives" convinced you that this was GOOD. In the meantime, millions of Americans lost their jobs and the dollars they earned weren't enough to feed their families and pay their mortgages.

Your definition of "liberalism" is "wishy washy" because it is based on false rhetoric.

The definition also generally includes the provision that marriage in the USA is between one man and one woman because the majority of Americans believe this is an institution worth preserving and it is believed to be the most beneficial circumstances for children....

Equal protection is there because the rules and regulations apply equally and without prejudice to all persons without regard to race, religion, ethnicity, country of origin, social standing, financial standing, or sexual orientation.

As discussed below, upon review of the numerous California decisions that have examined the underlying bases and significance of the constitutional right to marry (and that illuminate why this right has been recognized as one of the basic, inalienable civil rights guaranteed to an individual by the California Constitution), we conclude that, under this state’s Constitution, the constitutionally based right to marry properly must be understood to encompass the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage that are so integral to an individual’s liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process. These core substantive rights include, most fundamentally, the opportunity of an individual to establish " with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her life " an officially recognized and protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage.

As past cases establish, the substantive right of two adults who share a loving relationship to join together to establish an officially recognized family of their own " and, if the couple chooses, to raise children within that family --constitutes a vitally important attribute of the fundamental interest in liberty and personal autonomy that the California Constitution secures to all persons for the benefit of both the individual and society.

Furthermore, in contrast to earlier times, our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation, and, more generally, that an individual’s sexual orientation " like a person’s race or gender " does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights.

We therefore conclude that in view of the substance and significance of the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship, the California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples....

One of the core elements of the right to establish an officially recognized family that is embodied in the California constitutional right to marry is a couple’s right to have their family relationship accorded dignity and respect equal to that accorded other officially recognized families. . . .

The California Supreme Court is obviously quite liberally populated with liberals who of course will take the liberal point of view. Incidentally, the conservative view is that it is not the prerogative of the court to decide what the law should be, but rather the court should limit itself to interpreting what the law is. Otherwise, the courts become the supreme law of the land with no checks or balances of any kind on them. And that, in the conservative view, is a very dangerous thing.

So long as nobody's unalienable, civil, legal, or Constitutional rights are infringed or jeopardized, Conservatism pretty much takes a live and let live attitude about most things.

Equal protection is there because the rules and regulations apply equally and without prejudice to all persons without regard to race, religion, ethnicity, country of origin, social standing, financial standing, or sexual orientation.

The only problem would be if the law required persons to be straight before they could marry. But it doesn't. It doesn't care whether people are straight or gay. Everybody is identically subject to the same rules and regs without prejudice.

When you factor in high fuel costs coupled with massive shortage and long lines at the pump during the Carter administration--this was not the case under Reagan--

When you factor in double digit inflation, double digit unemployment in some states and unacceptably high average unemployment, double digit interest rates exceeding 20%, staglation during the Carter administration--this was not the case under Reagan--

The California Supreme Court is obviously quite liberally populated with liberals who of course will take the liberal point of view. Incidentally, the conservative view is that it is not the prerogative of the court to decide what the law should be, but rather the court should limit itself to interpreting what the law is. Otherwise, the courts become the supreme law of the land with no checks or balances of any kind on them. And that, in the conservative view, is a very dangerous thing.

So long as nobody's unalienable, civil, legal, or Constitutional rights are infringed or jeopardized, Conservatism pretty much takes a live and let live attitude about most things.

The alternative is that your view is simply soextremely far to the right that everything thing seems extremely left. Ever stop to ask yourself if perhaps you are just out of touch?

Reminds me of an ancient German joke where a driver hears a radio announcement: "There's a vehicle driving in the wrong direction on interstate 55." Says the driver: "One? Hundreds!"