Who Are The Conservatives?

[Detroitej72]

As I read about faux conservatives and their phony crusade against abortion, I wonder, who are the "real conservatives"?

Are they the neo-cons who've taken over the Republican Party?

Or are they partisan hacks who stood behind G.W.Bush while he sent the federal deficit to the stratosphere?

Are they the tea bagger's who sat on their hands during Bush II's regime?

Are they the folks who think Reagan is a demigod?

Or, are they folks who believe in smaller government, less intrusion into our personal lives, and want to protect our freedoms?

Enlighten us, the little people who, after 20 years, are feeling the effects of your policies...

[Big Dog]

It appears, they may have become a myth.

[Mikeg]

Or are they partisan hacks who stood behind G.W.Bush while he sent the federal deficit to the stratosphere?

Who are the liberals - are they partisan hacks who point fingers while quietly standing behind B.H. Obama and the Democrat-controlled 111th Congress while they send the federal deficit to levels that make G.W. Bush and the Democrat-controlled 110th Congress look like pikers?

White House to paint grim fiscal picture

WASHINGTON [[Reuters) - Jan. 31, 2010 - The White House will predict a record budget deficit in the current fiscal year and more big shortfalls for the next decade in its upcoming budget proposal, a congressional source told Reuters on Sunday.

In its budget proposal to be released on Monday, the White House predicts a record $1.6 trillion budget deficit for the fiscal year that ends September 30, the Capitol Hill source said.

According to the estimate, deficits will narrow to $700 billion by fiscal 2013 before gradually rising back to $1.0 trillion by the end of the decade, the source said...... [read the rest]

Let's put those 110th and 111th Congress deficits into perspective:
Attachment 5242
[source]

Which leads us to this trenchant observation:
Celebrity Jeopardy
Attachment 5243
[source]

[rb336]

there are maybe three liberals in congress - kucinich and two others.

there are maybe three real conservatives, not the "give the rich a free ride and ban abortion" conservatives.

the rest are either neo-liberals or neo-cons. two different shades of the same corporatism

[Big Dog]

The rest are money greed hoes.

[oladub]

The title of this thread is "Who Are The Conservatives?" The Conservative Political Action Committee is having its annual meeting. As I understand it, it is a who's who gathering of everything from neocons to Ron Paul. This is Ron Paul's answer to this thread's question in which he attacks neocons [[part 2) and cites the bygone Republican history of a humble foreign policy and protection personal liberty. He cites Harding releasing Eugene Debs from the prison President Wilson put him in, Republicans who tried to keep us out of WWI, Eisenhour denouncing and coining the term "military-industrial comples, Eisenhour keeping us out of a Suez War, Taft denouncing war and the draft. In short, Paul presents a very different history of Republicans than we have known since Nixon. 3,100 mostly younger Republicans packed his lecture and 1,100 others were turned away. Some of the older Republicans in the audience don't seem to approve of his Constitutional libertarian message.

He also attacks the Republican Party establishment as not supporting personal rights and liberty. [[part 3) Except for Sarah Palin, Ron Paul is about the only other Republican who brings out passion. I see the conservative movement, at least as found in the Republican Party, as having two different directions in which to go - Palin or Paul. Palin has the numbers but Paul's gospel message is spilling over into much of the Party so much so that neocon operatives like Beck and Palin are having to try to subvert Paul's message and followers like Medina in Texas.

[Jimaz]

Kirk Walters summed it up nicely in this recent political cartoon.

[Mikeg]

Why does anyone care about "who are the conservatives?"? They have no majorities in Congress and neither do they control the Republican party.

The real concern should be about which political philosophy is guiding the decisions coming out of the White House, Congress and the Democrat party headquarters. Based on the results over the past 13 months, it can sometimes be hard to tell.

I read this article yesterday and I think his two-dimensional political philosophy model is quite useful in providing greater understanding and precision for discussion of topics like this.

[barnesfoto]

good article, Mikeg.

Ron Paul is pretty sensible, [[for a conservative),[[too bad about his son!) and it looks like he polled high amongst those in attendance,which really puzzled me, given the fact that most of the stars at this cult gathering were the usual war criminals and hypocrites who have proposed third world social spending and regulatory policies, more government in our bedrooms, less government in the boardrooms and endless blank checks for endless, pointless wars for decades...

I'm guessing that Paul brought in a lot of his followers and that they skewed the polling.

If not, maybe after years of failed policies, [[but no admission of responsibility, because as we all know, responsibility is for everyone who's not conservative) there's really some kind of split going on.

Naturally, in his praise for Eisenhower, Paul forgot to mention the Eisenhower admin's overthrow of two democratically elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, but that almost certainly would have guaranteed him an automatic ejection from Concon...

[oladub]

The corner on in the diagram on Mikegs' link listed 'liberal' is actually libertarian with what we usually think of as liberals called progressives.


Ron Paul, pretty much a libertarian, received more votes at the Conservative Political Action Committee than the next two vote getters, Romney and Palin combined. The neocons went nuts and booed when the results were announced. It was mostly the young people who voted for him. Salon magazine just published an article dealing with the incompatibility of neocons and libertarians. It makes some good points. excerpt- What makes this deceit particularly urgent for [[Republicans) now is that their only hope for re-branding and re-empowerment lies in a movement -- the tea partiers -- that has been [[largely though not exclusively) dominated by libertarians, Paul followers, and other assorted idiosyncratic factions who are hostile to the GOP's actual approach to governing. This is a huge wedge waiting to be exposed -- to explode -- as the modern GOP establishment and the actual "small-government" libertarians that fuel the tea party are fundamentally incompatible. Right-wing mavens like Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin and National Review are suddenly feigning great respect for Ron Paul and like-minded activists because they're eager that the sham will be maintained: the blatant sham that the modern GOP and its movement conservatives are a coherent vehicle for those who believe in small government principles. The only evidence of a passionate movement urging GOP resurgence is from people whose views are antithetical to that Party. This is going to be interesting.
-The GOP's "small government" tea party fraud Jeff Greenwald, Salon 2/21/10

[Mikeg]

The corner on in the diagram on Mikegs' link listed 'liberal' is actually libertarian

No, that upper corner is labeled correctly. Depending on their personal "flavor", a libertarian would plot themselves somewhere within the upper bounds of the two-dimensional diagram.

Here is Ferris' 2D diagram marked up with my interpretation of approximately where most of the political philosophies of the DYes community seem to cluster, along with their relative size.
Attachment 5250

[Hermod]

One problem with the right-left labeling is that the model should be three dimensional with each pol and voter measured on three axes [[economic, social, and foreign policy). A real hard over feminist may view watching porn as the equivalent of planning rape while a very radical libertarian might view watching porn as his birthright. A very staunch pro-union blue collar worker might be economically liberal, but a war hawk and violently opposed to abortion and the LGBT agenda. A very conservative member of the religious right may be against corporatism.

A voter has to gauge where he stands in this three dimensional model and where he thinks a pol stands in the model in making up his mind.

1964 and 1972 provide examples of what happens when single-issue politics takes over a party.

[oladub]

No, that upper corner is labeled correctly. Depending on their personal "flavor", a libertarian would plot themselves somewhere within the upper bounds of the two-dimensional diagram.

Here is Ferris' 2D diagram marked up with my interpretation of approximately where most of the political philosophies of the DYes community seem to cluster, along with their relative size.
Attachment 5250

I pretty much agree with where you located and how you sized the circles. However, I am going to hold that the word 'liberal' on your graph = anarcho libertarian for the following reasons.
1. The opposite of authoritarianism is libertarianism in its most extreme form of anarchism.
2. The author of your linked article defines his use of the word 'liberal' as "By liberalism I mean the original political philosophy called by that name--the one espoused by John Locke and embodied in the Bill of Rights. Liberalism is based on the hypothesis that people ought to be maximally free, with the government intervening only to the extent required to protect their freedoms against abridgment by their compatriots or by enemies abroad."

The colored chart above is a variation of your chart.

A) It measures social authoritarianism/libertarianism from top to bottom so Ron Paul, for instance comes close being as much of a social libertarian as Nader or Kucinich.
B) It measures economic authoritarianism/libertarianism from left to right so Paul is the most economically libertarian while Nader is the most economically authoritarian.
C) The left/right political equation we are used to thinking in is measured from the SW [[progressive, liberal, Democrat corner) to the NE [[conservative, Republican corner)
D) The authoritarian/libertarian measurement is measured from the NW [[authoritarian corner) to the SE[[anarchistic libertarian corner). Combining social and economic scores, Joe Biden ever so slightly edges out Chris Dodd as being the closest to the authoritarian corner while fellow Democrat Mike Gravel is closest to the anarcho libertarian corner.

I think this model is fairly consistent with reality. It shows Republican candidates closer than Democrats to the socially authoritarian upper edge and closer than Democrats to the economically libertarian right edge.

You can chart yourself on this graph at http://www.politicalcompass.org/index . This has been posted before on this sight and is somewhere in the archives. Most of the posters here identifying with Obama, at the time, actually registered scored in the vicinity of Kucinich and Nader.