POUNDS and law geek have been battling it out in the last thread, and I invite all those interested in a bright argument to review those exchanges. POUNDS, I should have you know that I\u2019ve promised law geek that I will appoint him Chief Justice of the Supreme Court just as soon as I\u2019m elected president, so please keep that in mind.<\/p>\n
Watching those two battle it out reminded me of an argument that POUNDS used to have with any and all comers about the greatness, or lack thereof, of political conservatives.<\/p>\n
Put simply, according to POUNDS, there aren\u2019t any, because conservatives fight change, while liberals embrace it. The people who are remembered as great leaders are those who shook up the establishment, he would say. You can\u2019t do that if you\u2019re protecting the status quo.<\/p>\n
Because of that, he insisted, it was impossible to name three great conservatives. He\u2019d give you one freebie \u2013 Benjamin Disraeli \u2013 and then insist that it was impossible to round out the list. I tried, though \u2013 I put Ronald Reagan on my list, and then I threw in Dwight Eisenhower. POUNDS rightfully found Dwight Eisenhower to be pretty thin gruel as far as great conservatives go, although I didn\u2019t want to admit that, at the time, I had no idea who Benjamin Disraeli was. (The first and only Jewish Prime Minister of Great Britain. Wikipedia article here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Anyway, this greatly disturbed me at the time, but as I\u2019ve mulled it over lo these many years, I\u2019ve come to realize that POUNDS was, intentionally or not, running an intellectual bait and switch.<\/p>\n The first definition of \u201cconservative\u201d from dictionary.com is as follows:<\/p>\n Conservative: adjective: Using that definition, then POUNDS is absolutely right. But notice that this definition doesn\u2019t contain any real political ideology. If your traditions and institutions are solidly Leftist, then you can be termed a \u201cconservative\u201d if you act to preserve them. Thus, when Mikhail Gorbachev\u2019s reforms were undermined by a botched military coup in 1991, the media labeled those behind the coup as \u201chardline conservatives\u201d in the Soviet Government. Same with Tiananmen Square in \u201989 \u2013 it was supposedly \u201cconservative elements\u201d in the Chinese government that used tanks to mow down the pro-democracy demonstrators.<\/p>\n Looking at these examples, unless you questioned the underlying definition of the word \u201cconservative,\u201d you\u2019d think Leonid Brezhnev and Ronald Reagan were essentially the same person.<\/p>\n And let\u2019s take another look at Reagan, shall we? By this first definition, can he truly be termed a \u201cconservative?\u201d One who wants to \u201cpreserve existing conditions\u201d and \u201climit change?\u201d The guy came in and radically altered how Washington did business, both domestically and overseas. They didn\u2019t call it the \u201cReagan Revolution\u201d for nothing. Newt Gingrich in 1994 overthrew 40 years of Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives and turned the status quo on its head entirely. How is that \u201climiting change?\u201d<\/p>\n The fact is that the word \u201cconservative\u201d also has another definition in the political arena, one that reflects a worldview of limited government and skepticism of statist solutions. It has nothing to do with \u201cresistance to change.\u201d It has everything to do with faith in the private sector, not the government, to produce the kind of solutions that will be of most benefit to society. If the US continues to move toward European-style socialism, then you\u2019re going to see a growing number of political conservatives screaming for change with ever-increasing volume.<\/p>\n If they were alive today, how many of the founders would be registered Democrats? You think Washington and Adams and Jefferson would be thrilled with the metastasization of the state? And even by POUNDS\u2019 initial definition, Lincoln could still be termed a great conservative \u2013 true, he took the radical step of freeing the slaves, but he did so largely to achieve the goal of holding the union intact. To \u201cconserve\u201d the union, if you will.<\/p>\n Sadly, too many Republicans have abandoned second-definition conservative ideology at the altar of first-definition conservative intransigence \u2013 preservation of power over principle, of status quo over small government. It\u2019s time the Republican party got revolutionary again. THAT would be a change I could believe in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"POUNDSand law geek have been battling it out in the last thread, and I invite all those interested in a bright argument to review those exchanges. POUNDS, I should have you know that I\u2019ve promised law geek that I will appoint him Chief Justice of the Supreme Court just as soon as I\u2019m elected president, ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
1. disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n