@MontereyJack,
MontereyJack wrote:
Of course liberalism can exist in the absence of something to deviate from.
If all the conservatives were raptured today and went to heaven
(tho of course the evidence points to them going the other way),
liberalism weould continue perfectly fine. It is, after all, a set of beliefs
and neither we nor the world at large need to have you guys to contrast with.
No.
Part of what u said is true, but u don 't seem to get the basic idea.
If conservatives disappeared, as u correctly indicated
:
the liberals might well implement their set of beliefs.
The philosophy of liberalism (as manifested by F. Roosevelt and John Kennedy)
is indeed a set of beliefs, as u correctly said. The
name of that
set of beliefs was not chosen at random. No one threw a dart at a dictionary
and hit that word by
chance, as a result of which it was applied to name those ideas.
The words "conservative" and "liberal" are both
relative words,
having meaning only insofar as thay relate to something else.
Thay both relate to and describe whether or not there has been
DEVIATION
from something, e.g., from an agreement, or a body of rules or a pattern of beliefs.
Conserving means keeping or
not giving up, whereas
liberal means straying from. Conservative means
ORTHODOX, inflexible, unchangingly rigid.
In this case the thing conserved or strayed from
is the social/political contract as manifested in the US Constitution.
Today 's Liberals of the left desire government to have more jurisdiction
at the expense of personal liberty because thay desire the political power to rip off
the middle class and rich for the benefit of the poor,
and the Constitution does not allow for that.
The Constitution provided for great personal freedom by crippling
and curtailing government jurisdiction.
The Bill of Rights cripples government 37 different ways.
Suppose that 2 guys make a contract by whose terms
one guy will do thus and so for the other,
in exchange for which the other guy will do something.
If one of the guys successfully performs his part of the deal
100% the way thay had agreed that he woud, then he has
not been liberal
because he did not deviate from his contractual duty.
If the other fellow also completes his side of the deal perfectly,
then neither of them were liberal as to that contract,
because no one deviated from it.
If one of them fell short in performing his contractual duty
and then declared: "
that 's close enuf" he is taking a liberal interpretation
of the contract and trying to foist it on the victim.
If liberalism had a motto setting forth its innermost essence,
it woud be "
that 's close enuf."
Conservatism is for perfectionists.
To the extent of failure, or of deviation, he
stops being conservative.
If a President of the US leaves office after exactly 4 years,
he is being conservative; but if he insists on staying in office
an extra week, then he is being one week liberal.
If men are playing poker n one rakes in the pot
alleging that he has a flush, when he has 4 clubs and a spade,
and when challenged on this behavior, he declares
the liberal motto: " hay,
that 's CLOSE ENUF;
don 't be too technical; don 't split hairs; just don t be a ball buster, OK ?
I had a fight with my cousin, yesterday I got a flat tire,
I belong to a minority group and my left foot stinks,
so gimme a break n deal the cards " he thereby advocates taking a
liberal vu
of the rules of poker for the reasons that he indicated.
Hence, he advocates the position that
logic shoud be SUBORDINATED to emotion
and that thay shoud take a
LIBERAL VU
of the rules of poker because his sob story
OUTRANKS
the
technical rules requiring 5 cards of 1 suit for a flush.
David
