Why I'm conservative
I thought this James Delingpole opinion piece in The Spectator ("The right to swear is integral to being a true conservative")is at times dead-on, and no more so than when he writes:
The reason I am a conservative is not, as my left-liberal friends’ caricature version so often has it, because I’m a closet fascist who loves making rules and bossing people around.OK, for my liberal friends reading this, you may disagree with that characterization. But it's a reasonable approximation of my feelings as a conservative.
Quite the opposite. I’m a conservative because I believe that we are, every one of us, so magnificently special and delightful that only under the most extreme of circumstances should our most precious possession of all — liberty — be stolen from us by the overweening state.
This, when you think about it, is a much more generous response to the messy human condition than that of left-liberals. In their ugly, begrudging, bossy weltanschauung, man is so utterly incapable of doing the right thing that the only way to create a fair and just society is for a higher agency (big government) to steal half his money and spend it as it sees fit, while micromanaging his behaviour with all manner of pettifogging social regulation.
4 comments:
Does that mean you're opposed to the overweening state taking away an individual's liberty on the issue of gay marriage? Abortion? Domestic surveillance? Guantanamo detainee's rights to habeas corpus?
Libertarianism is an ideologically consistent position. I don't agree with it, but I respect it. "Conservatism" can mean a lot of things. In particular, a broad but inconsistent definition of what constitutes an "extreme circumstance" that justifies an exception often turns the ideological consistency that Delingpole smugly trumpets into Swiss cheese.
I wouldn't say I'm libertarian, but I'm sympathetic to it.
As for Swiss cheese, that accurately describes the political convictions of everyone I've ever met. That's just how life goes: it's messy.
Yeah, I'm in Nony's camp on this one … this feels more like an endorsement of "why I'm a Libertarian" or "why I'm a laissez-faire righty". "Conservative" has been co-opted by so many different camps to be, almost, meaningless.
Though, whenever I think of the conservative/liberal dichotomy, I can't help but think of this excellent TED Talk: The Moral Mind.
In that context, I'm a conservative. In most others, I'm centrist or a friggin' commie.
bizarre quote... "micromanaging behaviour with all manner of pettifogging social regulation" describes conservatives, not liberals!
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