In today’s edition, I take on the conservative movement by redefining the concept. Or rather, proposing a more traditional concept of conservatism. There’s also an extended weekly horoscope and a special offer for Light Bridge, the 2011 annual edition of Planet Waves. To read today’s issue as a one-time purchase, click here. For those who would like to read our Friday edition every week and conserve some resources in the long run, a six-month subscription is available here.
Eric,
Oops!
:::smacking forehead::::
I should have read FB first! :::laughing::: I have shared this article per FB. Thanks for setting that up!
Eric,
Most excellent piece. This is one edition I wish you had made public so I could link it to my FaceBook. Not only do people NEED to read this, they would see just how important your subscription service is.
As for the definition of conservative; I like to use “the interpreter” to help people out with today’s current Conservative Movement’s catch phrases:
“Less government” really means “less government regulations on big businesses so they can have even more leeway to wring out egregious profits at the expense of their workers and consumers.” Most average people don’t really understand that this is what it means. They seriously think it means government staying out of their private lives yet they are the first ones to want government to ban abortion, prevent gay marriage and to stop end-of-life directives (a la Terry Schaivo) despite the fact that all those isues are PERSONAL LIFE things. It is ok if it is someone ELSE’S life.
We must be “globally competitive” means “we must be allowed every way to profit from others no matter who it harms or how much of the environmrent we damage as long as it allows US maximum profit.” The average person thinks it is a competition much like we had between Russia and the US in the 60’s space programs.
This next one is especially weird because it is espoused by so many self-professed Christians who worship an avatar who preached REPEATEDLY that being rich prevents you from entering heaven and who preached REPEATEDLY to share what you have with the poor: We don’t want to “share the wealth” of our labors means “we don’t want any minorities to get what WE have worked for under a system skewed in our favor because we fear losing what we know we got under less-than-decent circumstances.” It also means “we don’t want to give up the pipe dream that one day we will get rich too; like the gambler is SURE he will be the next one to strike it rich even though subconsciously s/he KNOWS the house (rules) are really stacked against him/her.” The thought of giving up “the dream” is too much for these people. Yet they will not admit that the real reason they don’t want to “share the wealth” is that very selfish reason.
We want to “take back America” means “we want to take back America to a time when a Black person could NEVER be president and where white folks always have the best advantage in everything.” I know this because the people who repeatedly scream this are white and older.
You get the idea.
Emerson delivered an incisive lecture on the subject in 1841.
The ideas I wrote about were based on the way that certain values of American political conservatives were articulated to me in the 1970s, like the right to privacy and noninterventionist foreign policy.
For example, shortly after I wrote this exposé on Mohonk Preserve et al stealing the land of private individuals to make land conservancies, I was invited to give a talk to the Property Rights Foundation of America which I learned was a conservative group. I am, in theory, a liberal environmentalist. But I was happy to go after faux environmental organizations for the crimes they committed. And, I was a darling of the conservative property rights movement. This was a good example of values trumping labels. Notably, none of the environmental magazines who might have taken my prior work would even talk to me about this article, and I understood why — I had the Open Space Institute dead to rights in a real estate fraud scheme, there was a level of politics involved there. I was not trying to display my independence; I just had a great story. So what if I was aiding a “conservative” cause (individual property rights). Mohonk and OSI were stealing and shattering peoples’ lives.
Some of the other ideas come from the Netherlands. That is considered a conservative country, but you can go to a nice coffee house, get stoned out of your tree, go into the Red Light District and frolic with a sexworker, then ride your bicycle in specific lanes with their special stop lights which saves energy and pollution and that is considered a conservative place.
There is a common sense element to the Netherlands (and there are, for the moment, strong social programs). It’s stupid to put all this money into enforcing pot laws when people will do it anyway, and you can make taxes on the stuff if it’s legal. No Dutch person would say, “I’m a conservative, therefore I need a car that wastes as much fuel as possible.” In Holland such a person would be considered a fool, who has a right to exist but who nobody would really understand.
A few other ideas were based on principles of common sense that I can attribute to my Godmother, a conservative person in many ways by American standards, but in a way that was based on her sense of integrity; and she represented an age where it was okay to be frugal (out of necessity) and display some common sense, which includes not wasting tax dollars AND taking care of those in need; and recognizing that people are free even if you don’t like what they do. She was the kind of Catholic who loved Jesus and took part in her parish, not the kind who lectured anyone about the evils of abortion. And I am sure she thought abortion was wrong. But she would conserve her opinion in the matter and if I had to hazard a guess, she would agree that women have right to have safe, legal access to the procedure, if only because it’s better than the alternatives.
I’ve learned here that there is another conservative tradition back in there (from the UK, related to conserving the power of the Crown), and that is some interesting history and etymology; yet most of what I was articulating were actual tenets of conservatism drawn from various working definitions of the term. Others are a shade more libertarian, which is a kind of conservatism, and others resemble Rockefeller Republicanism.
There was a day — it seemed like it happened in one day — when Bush 41 turned “liberal” into a slur by referring to it as the L word. From that day forward it became synonymous with shit, and very few people are willing to admit to being liberal. This is akin to “conservatives” of today claiming the flag as their own partisan property. Conservative became a byword for political purity when in reality it represents the most meddlesome, corrupt kind of contempt for people and society. Linguistic strategies are used all the time in politics; it is a rhetorical field of reality, based on words.
As Bono said of Helter Skelter, “Manson stole this song from the Beatles. We’re stealing it back.”
Well, I dont know the history of this, but I think Candidate Coppollino’s platform is a brilliant “non-partisan” perspective.
It mirrored some of my own ideas about what I thought conservatism was (i’m not sure where they came from — I had a very bad blue-collar public school education — and I have even a worse memory /// but was it the Federalist Papers that I was “assigned” to read in high school?)
1) small government at the top 2) more control at state and local levels 3) government staying the f*@K out of my personal life, which leads into 4)separation of church and state. We dont “legislate” “morality”.
But I didnt want to label myself a “conservative”. I told my “liberal” friend, yeah I understand why that gay guy is conservative. He said WTF!?! And then I suggested these things.
His head spun around, his eyes popped out and and he started spewing something akin to green pea soup….
May your fine article have the same exorcism effect Mr. C.
‘So conservatism only dates to the 18th century? Really? It’s never been articulated before then? I cannot believe that.”
That’s right. It wasn’t articulated until then. The father of conservatism is Edmund Burke. Before him, conservatives were basically royalists without anything resembling a coherent ideological program. They were royalists because they had interests tied to the crown.
“If conservatism is a belief in the conservation of specific powers or principles, what demands that it always apply to the same sort of powers or principles? Or the same sort of racist and greedy people? Must it always stand for monarchism? Or capitalism?”
Nothing demands that it always apply to the same sort of power or principles. It’s that the people who possess the greatest power, wealth, and privilege in a society are nearly always fighting to redistribute more of it to themselves. WHO ends up having the most power, wealth, and privilege in any given period of history varies, as do the details specific circumstances. What does not vary is that whoever is at the top always wants more. And those are always the conservatives. The details of their political, economic, and social programs will vary over time and space, but those programs will always have the effect of redistributing power, wealth, and privilege in their direction.
So conservatism only dates to the 18th century? Really? It’s never been articulate before then? I cannot believe that.
Again, I’m advocating against a static interpretation of “conservatism” as solely a political word, and a word implying only certain (relatively recent) political views. If conservatism is a belief in the conservation of specific powers or principles, what demands that it always apply to the same sort of powers or principles? Or the same sort of racist and greedy people? Must it always stand for monarchism? Or capitalism?
The original Tories may have fought *against* Oliver Cromwell, but our current social conservative agenda is a direct descendant of Cromwell’s politically motivated Puritan power grab. So in 350 years, what, exactly, has actually been conflated here?
The so-called “classical” conservatives were in some respects even more racist, greedy, and authoritarian than the ones we have today.
As for currency debasement, conservatism predates those debates. The original conservatism — English Toryism — was a variant of royalism: support for rule by absolute monarchy.
Eric’s article today was a lovely articulation of conservation-oriented progressive thought. But conservation and conservatism are not the same thing. We can wish that they were, but that does not make it so. Conflating the two isn’t helpful.
astrodem,
I think the modern-day Republicans, the neocons and the corporatists have taken classic conservatism that I believe Shanna is referring to, and some of whose principles I admire, and turned it into a MacDonald’s version of itself, complete with trademark. Its not republicans per se, but the special interests that have made that political party toxic to the extreme.
Furthermore, we need to put whatever clowns thought to put Sarah Palin on the McCain 2008 ticket on a plane to one of the endangered island nations drowning due to global warming. They have allowed idiots to infest and further pollute the already extreme political discourse of the nation. They have committed treason against their own party, and more than likely the country.
This is from Len, yesterday…
Your premise is entirely correct as i understand it. The political use of the word conservative had to do with conserving the currency back when currency was a tangible thing with its own liquidation value that actually could be conserved.
Now that currency has no intrinsic value, it has become like an electron, a nebulous probability field with kinetic potential under favorable conditions. Hence those who call themselves conservative are adrift in existential absurdity and suffering the consequences. This makes them vulnerable and impressionable, attracted to any person and/or ideology that can provide them with meaning and grounding. Unless they are just plain corrupt, in which case they are essentially parasites, in the game for as much as they can suck.
“But that’s not what conservatism is, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be.”
That’s a pretty big statement.
I doubt the point was satire. I took it at face value, anyway. What an excellent idea to redefine “conservatism”. Like our Constitution, I consider English to be a “living” language.
Why not be proactive about our language? I’d rather spend my energy supporting and engaging with new ideas, tho’ I do realize this concept of “conservatism” is not new.
Damn the windmills, full tilt ahead.
I suppose it’s an amusing exercise in satire to imagine what conservatism might be like if it had anything to do with conserving things or conservation. But that’s not what conservatism is, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be. Here’s the definition of conservatism that I use:
Conservatism is the belief system which advocates for the redistribution of power, wealth, and social privilege to those who already possess the most power, wealth, and social privilege.
This definition has the advantage of predating both ideology (the word ideology originated in 1796) and modern democracy. In other words, it can be applied meaningfully to conservatives or conservatism that lived long before either ideology or modern democracy came into existence. Also, it can be applied meaningfully to fields outside of (but connected to) politics like economics, finance, religion, and culture.
It’s also a useful check on whether or not something is truly conservative. For example, the Tea Party meets these criteria. For a long time, a lot of very smart people were characterizing the Tea Party as populist, but if you used this definition of conservative, it was obvious from the moment it was born that the Tea Party was not in any way populist. It was obvious that it was a part of the conservative movement.
re your Virgo horoscope….You are so right on energetically! Just last night I was cussing out the stars, planets, and asteroids….used to be when i was really angry i’d find relief in telling god…jesus…whomever to fuck off…..now feeling so connected to the cosmos, telling god to fuck off seems impotent! i felt some release and very empowered imagining being in the sky having a face to face and fist to fist encounter with Mars, Venus, Saturn, and whatever other cosmic force who wanted to go toe to toe…….so, to speak …..HA!
“I finally joined the New York State Conservative Party a few weeks ago, with a plan to reform the organization from within. ”
Eric, this is one of the most brilliant things I have heard in ages.