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"Left wing kookiness"
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. |
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