from New York Magazine
I’ve been saying for a couple of years that Bush is not a conservative. He’s what I call a flag conservative, a Flag-Con. He’s not as interested in conservative values as in empire-building. The classic conservative, someone like Pat Buchanan or, to a more complicated degree, Bill Buckley, does believe that certain values in society must be maintained. The classic conservative believes in stability. You make changes grudgingly and with a great deal of prudence. Don’t move too quickly, is the rule of thumb, because society, as they see it, is essentially a set of compromises and imbalances that can be kept going only by wisdom and, to use the word again, prudence. So you don’t go off in wild, brand-new directions. None of this characterizes Bush. As a Flag-Con, he is surrounded by the tycoons of the oil industry, plus neoconservatives, plus gung-ho militarists who believe that since we’ve created the greatest fighting machine in the history of the world, it’s a real shame not to use it.
- Norman Mailer
6 comments:
Ryan,
It seems like you have been trying to bridge the gap between "liberal" and "conservative" in your mind. I think you are trying to solve pi.
What you are really getting into here is semantics (one of the coolest areas of linguistics, but also one of the most allusive.)
If you think about it, language is an extremely democratic concept based totally on generalizations and associations. If enough people generalize about a concept the same way, then there's consensus about the meaning. Words can mean anything, so long as people agree to those meanings.
Trying to categorize concepts is an inherent part of cognition, and in fact you can't expand ideas if you can't limit them first. But dig as deeply as you want, you will never find an absolute definition to "conservative" or "liberal." Just like people cannot define "love." There can't be an absolute definition, unless people agree to a single meaning, and there will never be universal agreement on what those words mean.
PS The reason why it's just as well that we not define these concepts as absolutes is because they are UMBRELLA CONCEPTS for a lot of subset ideas.
I might agree to 80% of the subset ideas for "liberal," but I would feel intellectually dishonest if I had to commit to the other 20%. I don't think intelligent people ever fully fit into pre-set categories.
Really, I think they're peripheral considerations. The central conflict is not between liberalism or conservatism, but between corporate and popular mandates. In other words, corporations owning the world's wealth, instead of people. Liberalism and conservatism are value systems, and they can be used tactically in one of two ways--either to justify power or to undermine it. There are CEO's who are liberal just as there are fundamentalist Christians who are anti-war. I think the importance lies in first identifying where real relationships of injustice lie, and then aligning oneself in broad alliances to challenge them. I would support conservative groups to the extent that they resist injustice just as I would criticize liberal groups to the extent that they reinforce it.
I'd define the problem as concentration / polarization of wealth, but certainly corporations facilitate that. Too bad wealth isn't as diffused as internet blogging, eh?
Blogging is great!
You have a positive attitude. :-) That's always refreshing. Stay that way, eh?
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