{"id":35586,"date":"2016-08-17T02:00:25","date_gmt":"2016-08-17T06:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35586"},"modified":"2016-08-15T17:36:32","modified_gmt":"2016-08-15T21:36:32","slug":"american-conservatives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/08\/17\/american-conservatives\/","title":{"rendered":"American Conservatives"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Warren<\/a> helpfully outlines the job description of US conservatives, based on the last century or so of progress:<\/p>\n

Often I am asked by correspondents to define something they call \u201cconservatism.\u201d I rather thought I\u2019d answered this question before, though it is always possible I was mumbling. So lest there be confusion, or perchance new readers, let me give the definition again.<\/p>\n

Conservatism is a form of embarrassment or timidity; in an American context, the politics of the cartoon character, Caspar Milquetoast (see here<\/a>). It is a way of standing astride history to say, \u201cPlease watch where you are going,\u201d while being run over. It is a form of apology for being alive.<\/p>\n

And no, Trump is not a conservative. He is what is called a \u201cpopulist,\u201d or to use the older term, insane<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The problem with these \u201cconservatives\u201d today is that they are too conservative. They merely oppose change. Each new generation of them becomes the rearguard for the previous liberal vanguard. They accept the revolutionary advances imposed by the last team of social engineers as \u201ca fact of political life,\u201d that only a fool would gainsay. They survive by breeding, I suppose, but also by adding new constituencies to their ranks, as the liberals safely discard them; then selling out each in turn.<\/p>\n

\u201cFree trade\u201d was an example from decades ago. The liberals didn\u2019t want that any more, so the conservatives became the free trade party. Skip forward another three score and ten, and the conservatives are now becoming the \u201cgay\u201d party. They are defending the right of homosexual persons to stay gay on their own terms, as the liberal agenda \u201cmoves on.\u201d Along the way they (the cons) bought into second- then third-wave feminism, and now they are the old-fashioned, liberated women\u2019s party, too. In another generation they\u2019ll be defending old-fashioned mixed bathrooms, and the old-fashioned post-sexed against \u2026 what? (We must wait and see.)<\/p>\n

The function of the modern conservative is to be sincerely appalled by the engineers\u2019 latest proposal, without being able to remember why. And they will resist, cautiously, in the certainty that they will lose. Whenupon their children will go to work, consolidating their loss, to prepare for surrender in the mop-up round.<\/p>\n

I hope I have made their position clear.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Warren helpfully outlines the job description of US conservatives, based on the last century or so of progress: Often I am asked by correspondents to define something they call \u201cconservatism.\u201d I rather thought I\u2019d answered this question before, though it is always possible I was mumbling. So lest there be confusion, or perchance new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,53,13],"tags":[431],"class_list":["post-35586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-politics","category-usa","tag-conservatism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9fY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35586"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35587,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35586\/revisions\/35587"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}