What ever happened to conservatism?

[jomar]

Not one word of that makes any sense. Stop posting in free verse.

That doesn't make any sense either.

Nor that.

Spearchucker can’t help it. He thinks he’s being clever and witty and that we’re too plebeian to appreciate much less understand his efforts. What he can’t appreciate is how truly annoying he is, including his passive aggressive responses to posts without quoting them.

 

[Politruk]

Willian Buckley's kind of conservatism was not conservative at all. Buckley was a reactionary who rejected the reforms of the New Deal.

Even that is gone now. Buckley's New Right looks intellectual and respectable compared to Tea Party/Trumpist populist nationalism.

 

[BookishBabe0]

Willian Buckley's kind of conservatism was not conservative at all. Buckley was a reactionary who rejected the reforms of the New Deal. President Eisenhower was a conservative. He recognized that the reforms of the New Deal had become part of the status quo and needed to be accepted. This is what he wrote in a letter to his brother:

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas.4 Their number is negligible, and they are stupid."

https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-edgar-newton-eisenhower/

The last conservative president in the Eisenhower tradition was Gerald Ford.

Ronald Reagan was a reactionary. He agreed with Eisenhower that the reforms of the New Deal were popular, but he did not like them. Reagan tried to make the reforms of the New Deal unaffordable by increasing the national debt.

As a political philosophy conservatism begins with Edmund Burke, whose Reflections on the Revolution in France criticized the French Revolution. In Reflections Burke wrote:

"Society us indeed a contract...

"It becomes a partnership not only between whose who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

Reagan popularized the idea that it was acceptable for politicians on the right - I will not call them "conservatives" - to live off of past achievements and to borrow from the future with deficit spending.

Seen this way, Donald Trump is a reactionary with authoritarian inclinations. He wants to repeal business regulations. He also wants to replace the graduated income tax with tariffs. During the nineteenth century tariffs, rather than income taxes, financed the federal government. There were few business regulations.

Tariffs are equivalent to sales taxes. They are regressive, which is why Trump likes them. Tariffs would shift the tax load from rich people to working class and middle class people.

As an authoritarian Trump is a right wing radical. He wants to have more power than any American president ever has had.

In his Reflections Burke also wrote, "No difficulties occur in what has never been tried. Criticism is almost baffled in discovering the defects of what has not exited."

In this case, authoritarianism has been tried in other countries, and still exists in some of them, with unfortunate consequences. Unfortunately, Trump and his followers are ignorant of world history and geography.

I recently told a maga relative we were in the Gilded Age 2.0. He asked what the Gilded Age was. This is someone who considers himself as educated.

 

[Politruk]

I recently told a maga relative we were in the Gilded Age 2.0. He asked what the Gilded Age was. This is someone who considers himself as educated.

Tell him it was a period in the 19th century when castration was all the rage.

 

[BookishBabe0]

Tell him it was a period in the 19th century when castration was all the rage.

That's not the first thing I think of on the subject.

 

[Politruk]

That's not the first thing I think of on the subject.

It's just a pun on "gelded."