Tom Quackenbush wrote:

George Cleveland wrote:


"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is
true that most stupid people are conservative." - John Stuart Mill


OK, I have to confess ignorance here - I'm not very familiar with
J.S. Mill. When did he write that & did he mean "conservative" in the
same political sense that it's used today?

John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873, was one of the most
important English philosophers and political thinkers
of his age. He is noted as one of the leading
proponents of utilitarianism.

He wrote at a time when the previously revolutionary
thinking of the Enlightenment of the 18th century was
finding practical expression in Great Britain.
Conservatives, in Mill's day, were those who opposed
the basic principle of the Enlightenment philosophers:
that man is a rational being, and able to make
choices for himself without direction from higher
authority. Those who accepted the premise of man's
rationality and choice-making ability were the
liberals, and to this day in Europe, "liberal" largely
still has this meaning.

In the U.S., however, "liberal" has come to have the
antithesis of its original meaning. Liberal, in 20th
and 21st century U.S., means a belief that man is NOT
competent to make his own choices. He needs
self-styled enlightened elitists - Democrats, usually -
to decide what is good for him, what he should have,
what he should do, how he should talk and think.
Today's principled conservatives - the late Barry
Goldwater was an exemplar - believe that a powerful
central government is a dangerous threat to individual
liberty, and want to curtail it. They believe that man
ought to be free to decide most things for himself;
contemporary liberals are opposed.

People like John Ashcroft and Rush Limbaugh are not
conservatives; they are reactionaries, and would have
opposed the liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Someone like the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan
combined elements of classical liberalism and its
contemporary mutant derivative.


I only ask because it seems that being conservative, rather than
innovative, is a good survival strategy for those of us that aren't
brilliant. IOW, reliance on the "tried and true" methods seems to be a
safer bet than risking the unknown, which tends to have a high failure
rate.

FWIW, I'm all in favor of _someone_ risking the unknown, but if I
were responsible for feeding my wife & kids, I'd rather it were
someone _else_.

R,
Tom Q.