Asymmetrical Information

Let's not forget to add Viet Nam, Korea, the "devil made me do it" legal defense (I'm poor, therefore I can't be held responsible for my actions)...

As a start... if you're not speaking Russian, you can thank conservatives. :)

I'm exaggerating, if you couldn't tell... But I don't think the "conservatives beat the Russians" line is any less true than "liberals give you drinkable water."

Don't forget these:

If you have shut down your business or laid off workers due to red-tape and increasing regulation - thank liberals

If you your employees expect more benefits and pay for less work - thank liberals

If your business costs are rising due to government policies and not market economics - thank liberals

If you pay more for everything you buy because businesses have passed their tax increases on to you - thank liberals

And finally, if you know lots of people who want don't take responsibility for their own actions because they think the government should do something about all their problems (as opposed to solving their own) - thank liberals.

People aren't born equal. No matter how hard the liberals try to makes us all equal, some by nature or nurture will always be smarter, more attractive, in better shape, taller, slimmer, come from a wealthier family, etc. But rather than doing the best we can with what we have, liberals have taught us to be pissed off that others have more than us.

Not silly, Jane. Take a look at the history of these things.

It's a fact that conservatives strongly defended segregation, and have generally opposed environmental legislation and various labor protections.

I suppose we're going to hear the usual rant about how the market would have solved all this better, quicker, etc., but that's pure fantasy.

As far as Yak and Mev are concerned, let me point out that rich criminals seem to get away with more than poor ones, and that containment of the USSR was a bipartisan policy, initiated under Truman.

The essential point remains valid enough: "liberal" ideas move society forward by challenging the status quo. A distinction should be made between "liberal", "leftist", and "populist" These are not all the same. (the former most and latter can be of the presumed "right" or of the "left". E.g. the term "liberal" could be applied to free trade but neither of the latter two could.) When you lump the three together under one label you get an almost useless hodge-podge. Are all such "liberal" ideas necessarily good? No, of course not - leftists and populists tend to suck (pardon my French). But "liberals" (i.e. progressives / the opposite of conservatives) of their day gave us the American Revolution, ended slavery and expanded the vote to include women. (Didn't I read recently that Ann Coulter stated that it was a mistake giving women the right to vote?)

Those of us who seek liberty for all are forced to use "libertarian" since the right polluted the term "liberal" by adding groups that are not our fellow travelers. We know that an "illiberal" regime is a terrible evil, but we've lost an effective word to describe the opposite because illiberal leftists have been termed "liberal" by the right.

Jane,

And he is wrong, how, exactly?

IIRC all the things Conason mentions were, in fact, pushed by the liberals of the day and opposed by the conservatives. Over time conservatives came to accept and no longer reject them but that doesn't change the fact they originally they did.

You vote, right? And you are a woman?

Who fought to give you (or your grandmother as the case may be) the right to do so?

Liberals or conservatives?

And who fought to deny women that right?

Liberals or conservatives?

Jane, you know what Joe Conason's point was and it was in fact a true and correct point. Conservatives generally want to keep the status quo...and that's fine, while "liberals" seek to "challange" it in the hopes of improving society. Each one of Conason's statements is literally correct. No one denies that liberalism has, in fact, caused many harms. For each one of these "benefits" there has been some corresponding "harm." Some of us feel that liberalism caused more good than harm. I know others, especially people who frequent this board, disagree with me. But your flip remark about Abe Lincoln, which is obviously not what was meant and, more to the point, a fairly sad attempt in my opinion not to debate the point was beneath you.

I expect more insightful comments from you than, what is in effect, "I know you are, but what am I?" taunting.

Also note that Conason didn't say we had Democrats to thank for these things or that Republicans opposed them. He said they were all opposed by conservatives. Abraham Lincoln's policies hardly counted as conservative in the 1860s though today, of course, his views on race would be considered pretty retrograde.

"If people of all races can share the same public facilities;"

Democrats implemented Jim Crow. Democrats implemented segregation. Democrats fought integration.

if everyone has the right to vote;

Blacks gained the right to vote immediately after the Civil War. Democrats took it from them.

if couples fall in love and marry regardless of race;

Democtats created the miscegenation laws. Democrats enforced them

The huge Klan rallies of the twenties were in support of Democrat candidates

if we have finally begun to transcend a segregated society -- you can thank liberals.

You can thank Republicans. Lincoln was a Republican. Republicans helped overturn the Democrat filibuster of tyhe Civil Rights act. A Republican president implemented Affirmative action.

Simple facts that put the lie to such foolishness

It seems liberals like to claim credit for any positive change. Women's suffrage in the pioneer populist west beat the supposedly progressive east by decades. Who knew Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Idaho could be so "liberal"?

Yo - just because Jane closes with a snarky comment, it does not mean you get to infer her position on this - some of you seem to be claiming mind-reading abilities based on a very few words.

I assumed that Jane was pointing up the rather overblown tone of the rhetoric, and was looking to the commentors to judge the merits (and possibly trolling for comments!).

But I know these to be assumptions, so I don't treat them as revealed truths - until and unless Jane tells us we DON'T KNOW what she thinks of the merits of the quote.

I find reading what you all have written to be interesting - but find your willingness to impute Jane's opinion based on your own assumptions to be unhelpful.

GT, Bernard, et al, what's wrong with Joe Conason's praise of liberalism is that it is overly simplistic. To take two examples: On civil rights, The Voting Rights Act could not have passed without Republican (conservative) support -- as a percentage, more Republican's voted for the legislation than did Democrats. On the environment, National Parks and the EPA are both creatures of Republican presidents. So, while Conason gives ALL of the credit to liberals, much of it belongs with those GT and Bernard say fought against all of these social goods.

Another problem with this type of liberal v. conservative debate is the meanings of the labels have changed. As GT points out, many of these "liberal" positions are now supported by conservatives. Does that mean the positions are no longer liberal -- particularly when liberals no longer support them? Take segregation which was opposed by liberals in the 50's and 60's. Today, many college's are being encouraged to provide dorms reserved for members of a particular race (a/k/a segregation). Since it is today's liberals that are encouraging and today's conservatives that are opposing this move, is segregation now a liberal position?

I think Conason's right. The part he forgets is that the liberals who brought us most of these advances have absolutely nothing to do with today's politics. This sort of sloppy analysis is the continuing effort of current "progressives" to claim credit for every positive movement ever organized, and at the same time taint "conservatives" guilty by association with 100 year-dead politicians who held completely different views.

GT is also wrong. Old conservatives didn't begrudgingly accept these things. They died. Different people were born who recognized these wondrous advances, yet refused to accept the changing liberal position which appears to be "these changes were good, therefore all change is good". We should argue the merits of each case, but statements like Conason's and GT's are an attempt to avoid the merits and blanket-slander entire groups based on positions they are demonstrably against.

So today, I am a classical liberal which in current American political terms makes me a conservative or libertarian.

So who fought to deny women the right to vote? Some misguided group of dead people. What relation to today's conservatives? None at all.

This is why today's liberals love group analysis. Such analysis allows them to paint their opponents guilty of supporting events which ocurred decades before our births. So Robert Byrd isn't racist because he had an epiphany. But I fought against women's rights because I'm a conservative.

When I see this crap I just have to wonder why mass murder isn't included on the liberal accomplishment list. After all, Lenin was progressive. It's interesting that the list has to be edited to remain seen in a positive light. Is it possible that liberals recognize the invalidity of this analysis but engage in it anyway? Say it isn't so.

Liberals today have exactly the same amount of guilt of Soviet mass murders as conservatives do for denying women's suffrage. Which is to say, none, unless you speak solely of individuals who expressed support for either. And liberals' credit for Conason's list is exactly the same.

We seem to generally recognize this failure of group analysis in today's society. We don't think of Jews as christ-killers, regardless of whether some small group of them were involved in his death 2,000 years ago. But there seems to be an exception for non-PC groups.

jack - read Matt Y's post above you. Political parties change ideology over time. Conason is talking "Liberal" vs. "Conservative", not Democrat vs. Republican

Democrats of the 1860s were conservative.... southern Democrats in the 1960s were conservative, in fact Democrats dominated the south for generations in response to Republican reconstructionism after the Civil War. In response to the northern democrats pushing for civil rights, the still racist, still conservative south switched from the Democratic to the Republican party (see Strom Thurmond). Republicans today owe their dominance to the racist south's switch to the Republican party.

MJ is smart.

A possibly relevant comment from the late R. A. Lafferty on political categories: "...the opposite of radical is superficial, the opposite of liberal is stingy, the opposite of conservative is destructive."

One could thank businessmen and technological and economic advance just as much for most of these advances as liberals, of course. Increasing worker productivity, increasing returns to education, and increased wealth made all of these things affordable. Many of these laws merely ratified and codified trends that had already started. Naturally, of course, since otherwise they wouldn't have passed.

Children had already started going to school in larger numbers (since it became more economic to do so) before compulsory laws were passed. Note that in poor countries children often still work. It was Henry Ford who helped institute a living wage for autoworkers, because it became profitable to do so. The work week was already shrinking for most people before the imposition of the laws. Etc. These laws helped make these trends affect everyone. (For people for whom these choices were less efficient, mainly the poor, the compensation was things like welfare.)

One might as well write a similar paean to business and capitalism instead. Or, if you like, to science and scientists.

Kate...you say "Conservatives generally want to keep the status quo...and that's fine, while "liberals" seek to "challange" it in the hopes of improving society." This is of course true of liberals and conservatives as these terms were traditionally used; however, this has little to do with "liberalism" as it is practiced today. Liberals, for instance, will defend the status quo of the public education system, regardless of how dysfunctional it is proven to be. In many ways, today's "liberals" act like Tory landowners in Jane Austin's England.

I don't question that old-style liberalism has much to its credit. But the quoted passage seems to ignore some basic realities. If we still had the technology of the 1890s...then we would still have 12-hour workdays, with incomes that would be far below "living wages" by today's standards. It wouldn't matter how many unions there were or how many laws were passed.

One problem with many of today's liberals is that they seem totally blind to the existence of forces beyond the closed political world.

Some commenters have made the claim that Conason was talking about 'liberals' as those who are 'progressive' and wanting to 'improve society'.

That might have been true of those who called themselves liberals over a hundred years ago. But it is not true of most of those who call themselves liberals today (illiberals). For example, the public school system is by most measures an abysmal failure, yet rather than allowing independence of technique and evolving strategies for education, illiberals simply want to throw more money at the same failed system. The entitlement programs that make up the bulk of govt spending are nothing more than Ponzi schemes that are going bankrupt, yet illiberals just want to maintain the status quo with more 'infusions' and 'restructuring'.

Today's liberals are not liberal at all.

I hope every Democratic officeholder in the country reads Conason's piece and takes it to heart. If they do decide to associate themselves more closely with the glories of 1960s liberalism, that will be a great thing for the country and they should be given every possible encouragement-- though the Democratic officeholders themselves may have trouble seeing it that way after the election as they look for new careers in the private sector.

Someone said that the Civil Rights Act passed with the support of "Republicans (conservative.)" Not true. It passed as a result of a coalition of liberal and moderate Democrats and liberal and moderate Republicans. Conservative Republicans and Dixiecrats opposed the bill.

I think the burden is on Jane to demonstrate how these policies weren't liberal policies. Their proponents considered themselves to be liberal. Their opponents considered the proponents to be liberal. And the conservatives of the day opposed the policies. She should also explain why conservatives of any stripe should share credit, when the conservative movement as it exists today was godfathered by Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and their contemporaries, as a result of opposition to fair labor standards and civil rights bills.

Don't forget these:

--If you lose all significant use of your land because some environmentalist noticed that the endangered spotted cockroach was living there before you could reach for the Raid (or a blunt object), thank a liberal.

--if the guy who mugged you and swiped your wallet gets cut loose because someone made a mistake on the search warrant or something got momentarily misplaced in the evidence room, thank a liberal.

--when textbooks devote more space to Sacagawea than to George Washington, and "evil" is replaced with "ethically challenged," thank a liberal.

David,

“Liberals, for instance, will defend the status quo of the public education system, regardless of how dysfunctional it is proven to be.”

There is a difference between agreeing with the contention that the public education system is this country is deeply flawed and agreeing with the way the “right” thinks the problem should be solved. Not that “lefties” came up with any better options. But I suspect you will hardly find a Democrat here in New York who wants to keep the school board here the way it has been traditionally run (except the people directly effected by it, and even then you’d be surprised how many are looking forward to change).

“I don't question that old-style liberalism has much to its credit. But the quoted passage seems to ignore some basic realities. If we still had the technology of the 1890s...then we would still have 12-hour workdays, with incomes that would be far below "living wages" by today's standards. It wouldn't matter how many unions there were or how many laws were passed.”

Is that really how it works? I don’t think so. Look at what I do for a living. I’m an attorney. If I were working 30 years ago, aside from the fact that I probably could only get a job as a legal secretary, I would have no computers, no access to electronic research. No fax machines. Anytime I wanted to redraft a document it would have to be retyped. My office might have gotten one, very expense, very slow copy machine which cost thousands of dollars. I would be unable to work many weekends or late nights. If I wanted to send a document to a client who was out of town for their review I would have to send it by personal courier or “flying tigers” or FedEx. They would get it the next day, review and make changes, and then send it back to me the same way. I would be expected to bill 1700 hours per year. A “late” night would be 7 or 8pm. Over the past few decades the legal profession has become a great deal more efficient. So why is it my minimum billables have gone up to 2200 per year? My relative salary has not increase by 20% …but I’m expected to work 20% more. Increase in productivity does not necessarily mean a decrease in hours worked or and increase in salary.

“One problem with many of today's liberals is that they seem totally blind to the existence of forces beyond the closed political world.”

I agree. I also think that one of the problems with conservatives is that they view the world the way they wish it would be and not the way it is. Examples of this are: "every family should have a mnother and a father." and "Teenagers should practise absenance." That leads to a pretty closed world in general.

Kate,

I agree. I also think that one of the problems with conservatives is that they view the world the way they wish it would be and not the way it is. Examples of this are: "every family should have a mnother and a father." and "Teenagers should practise absenance." That leads to a pretty closed world in general.

Another closed view of the world is believing that people are either liberals or conservatives. Why must politics be binary?

I also think that one of the problems with conservatives is that they view the world the way they wish it would be and not the way it is.

Nah, I think that goes for anybody who has ideas. How about "No child should be without health care?"

MJ's comments aways up mirrors mine. What Conason wants to do is to smear the conservatives of 2003 with the errors of status-quoians of 1920 or 1964. You're not going to get 10% support for banning women from voting or for banning interracial marriage today, yet Conason implies that modern conservatives would back such.

How about we all agree not to take credit or assign blame for shit that happened before we were born or that we didn't personally take part in?

Whatever happened to individual responsibility?

If you have shut down your business or laid off workers due to red-tape and increasing regulation - thank liberals

Cough. Ugh, right. I can't find a single instance of this urban legend/meme. Who's running a small business and had to close it down because of "increasing regulation"? What sort of industry is so tightly regulated? Energy? No. Manufacturing? No. IT stuff? No. I challenge others to name some of these oppressed buinesses. Posted by: azrael on August 18, 2003 02:17 PM

Whatever happened to individual responsibility?
Well, Shell, I hate to beat a dead horse, but for the loss of individual responsibility, you can thank the liberals.

The point is that Conason retroactively co-opts all successful advances in governance as 'liberal'. He doesn't use the same meaning of liberal across the time span which he cites. He defines conservatism as being opposed to each of those things. I could as easily say that he is a conservative because he wants to maintain the status quo on abortion, affirmative action, and social security, while he is reactionary because he wants to go back to the old order on welfare. Liberal Martin Luther King Jr. didn't support the kind of affirmative action you see today. Liberal John F. Kennedy didn't attack the basis of the capitalist system the way Chomsky does.

Furthermore he seems to be stating that this list means we should trust liberals now . In order to evaluate that claim you would have to weign in 'liberal' failures. I'm not even sure if he is capable of noticing them.

I’m sorry but I am compelled to to take Jane Galt to task. Joe Conason is actually half right. Liberals do indeed deserve credit for many of the things that he cites. For instance, conservatives mostly disgraced themselves during the early days of the civil rights movement. The Progressive movement did a tremendous amount of good. There is indeed a sound argument to be made that the earlier capitalists, if left alone, might have destroyed the American system. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr’s thesis concerning the Roosevelt administration cannot be ignored.

Unfortunately, today’s Liberals often do not know that they are going too far. They no longer merely distrust the business community, as did Adam Smith, but intensely hate the free market. An adversarial mindset renders them incapable of even offering sound advice.

Interesting discussion....I would like to add some more information to this statement "Someone said that the Civil Rights Act passed with the support of "Republicans (conservative.)" Not true. It passed as a result of a coalition of liberal and moderate Democrats and liberal and moderate Republicans. Conservative Republicans and Dixiecrats opposed the bill."

Hmm....80% of Republicans supported the passage of the Civil Rights Act, while a mere 38% of Democrats supported this bill. That the 80% of Republicans were Liberal/Moderates sounds like a very high number. As it was noted in the CongressLink below, it is more accurate to say:

A bipartisan coalition of Republicans and northern Democrats was the key to the bill's success.

From:http://www.congresslink.org/civil/essay.html or

http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:OSgHQxYeXlsJ:www.congresslink.org/civil/essay.html+congressLink-civil+Rights+act+of+1964&hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8

The House of Representatives debated the bill for nine days and rejected nearly one hundred amendments designed to weaken the bill before passing H.R .7152 on February 10, 1964. Of the 420 members who voted, 290 supported the civil rights bill and 130 opposed it. Republicans favored the bill 138 to 34; Democrats supported it 152-96. It is interesting to note that Democrats from northern states voted overwhelmingly for the bill, 141 to 4, while Democrats from southern states voted overwhelmingly against the bill, 92 to 11. A bipartisan coalition of Republicans and northern Democrats was the key to the bill's success. This same arrangement would prove crucial later to the Senate's approval of the bill.

The idea that the civil rights movement was a conservative one is simply wrong. Remember, we are talking liberal/conservative, not Democratic/Republican.

The southern Democrats who opposed civil rights were conservatives. Many, like Thurmond, later switched parties out of unhappiness with the Democratic support for civil rights, and their political heirs are today's southern Republicans. It's true that some Republicans supported civil rights legislation, but these were moderate to liberal Republicans - nothing like today's radicals.

Finally, don't forget that civil rights laws were strongly opposed by, among many others, William Buckley and Barry Goldwater. Still want to claim it was conservatives who passed them?

"--If you lose all significant use of your land because some environmentalist noticed that the endangered spotted cockroach was living there before you could reach for the Raid (or a blunt object), thank a liberal."

If can't breathe because clean air laws get gutted, thank a conservative.

"--if the guy who mugged you and swiped your wallet gets cut loose because someone made a mistake on the search warrant or something got momentarily misplaced in the evidence room, thank a liberal."

If the guy who swindled you out of your 401K doesn't get prosecuted, thank a conservative.

"--when textbooks devote more space to Sacagawea than to George Washington, and "evil" is replaced with "ethically challenged," thank a liberal."

When schools teach creationism instead of science, thank a conservative.

"--when you can't stomach reading all the comments on this blog because of the petty nun-uh/uh-huh commentary ... thank liberals arguing with conservatives."

Criminy, people.

“Finally, don't forget that civil rights laws were strongly opposed by, among many others, William Buckley and Barry Goldwater. Still want to claim it was conservatives who passed them?”

You are absolutely correct. I have done much reading concerning this era---and I’m utterly convinced that the conservatives did virtually nothing to advance the civil rights of black people. Nonetheless, the Liberals later caused enormous harm by perceiving blacks as always victims of a racist society. This resulted in the grief experienced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Edward Banfield when they attempted to discuss the rapid decline of the black family in our nation’s large cities. White Liberals are inadvertently responsible for high black illegitimacy rates, low educational scores, and a self pitying mindset that hinders the latter's chances for self improvement.

Conanson's article is just silly. Most of his cites are accurate, but they ignore liberal policies that didn't work or aren't now considered beneficial. ("If you have to wait in long lines to see your government-assigned doctor...")

To take an extreme example, weren't the secessionists in 1860 liberals? They couldn't be called conservatives, since the established policy was to compromise with the North and maintain the Union. So Jeff Davis et al must have been liberals (or radicals, even).

Obviously, Conanson thinks we should not only thank yesterday's liberals, but vote for today's liberals. Which makes little or no sense, as others have pointed out, since self-identified liberals have all sorts of new policies they want to implement. Because 1920s liberals supported women's suffrage, does that make nationalized health care a good idea?

If you can vote for your local, state, and national government... you can thank a Greek.

If you can buy food grown in fields, instead of having to go out and hunt & gather your own... thank a Sumerian.

Kate...if you compare your standard of living with that of a lawyer in 1900, I don't see how you can argue that the improvement wasn't primarily due to (a)technology and (b)societal accumulation of capital. The ABA could yell and scream all it wanted, but you'd still be taking your horse & carriage to work.

To the extent that the dollars-to-hours ratio has gotten less favorable in *recent* years, I'm guessing it's due to (a) corporate clients negotiating harder-line deals in an attempt to get their legal costs under control, and (b)excessive numbers of people pursuing legal careers because they think it sounds neat or profitable. Do these explanations seem to make sense?

Jeff,

Thanks for the numbers. What they show is that almost three quarters of the opposition in the House was from southern Democrats, and that 97% of non-southern Democrats supported it.

Is it reasonable to label 80% of 1960's Republicans liberal/moderate? Well, moderate maybe. This was before the Goldwater takeover, and the Republican party of the time was considerably less conservative than today's. It had no significant southern wing, and people like Rockefeller were still prominent. The party's strong conservative cast today stems from Goldwater and the massive, civil-rights motivated, party switch of southerners.

Azreal,
1.Many doctors here in Florida have packed up and moved to other states where malpractice insurance is cheaper.

2.My aunt and uncle who ran a small business that recycled electronics and chemicals, couldn't raise their prices enough to keep up with costs of complying with EPA regulations of running the business.

3.Then there is stuff like this
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1025
that may not mean shutting down a company totally, but can mean job loss, lower profits, and slower economic growth

Bernard Yomtov wrote:

The idea that the civil rights movement was a conservative one is simply wrong. Remember, we are talking liberal/conservative, not Democratic/Republican.

Since no one has defined the terms in any way to relate them to the common usage of the term today, it is both meaningless and misleading to refer to one as “conservative” and the other as “liberal.”

The southern Democrats who opposed civil rights were conservatives.

Not necessarily true. Much of the opposition to the “civil rights” legislation came from part of the New Deal coalition forged by FDR. William Fullbright for example was a signator of the Southern Manifesto and voted against some of the “civil rights” legislation as did Al Gore Sr.

Many, like Thurmond, later switched parties out of unhappiness with the Democratic support for civil rights,

A claim which makes absolutely no sense when you realize that (a) Republicans were more likely to be in favor of civil rights legislation than Democrats (and arguably still are to this day considering the Democratic support for racial preferences and setasides), (b) by the time he switched parties most of the major civil rights legislation was already passed by Congress and (c) Thurmond renounced his previous segregationist views at about the time he switched parties. Considering the timing of his switch, it seems more plausible that Thurmond switched parties when it became apparent that the Democrats were no longer a party that could be taken seriously on foreign policy since there seems nothing to be gained on issues of “civil rights.”

and their political heirs are today's southern Republicans.

Really and the evidence for this is what exactly? The old segregationist Democrats have pretty much died off except for Robert “pretty, pretty” Byrd (KKK-WV). Considering that the demise of segregation in the South correlates with that region’s equally just rejection of Democrats, it would seem more accurate to say that as the South became more enlightened on civil rights, they became more Republican.

It's true that some Republicans supported civil rights legislation, but these were moderate to liberal Republicans - nothing like today's radicals.

And the evidence for this is. . .?

Finally, don't forget that civil rights laws were strongly opposed by, among many others, William Buckley and Barry Goldwater. Still want to claim it was conservatives who passed them?

Actually Goldwater voted for most of the major civil rights legislation as a Senator that dismantled government-created segregation and only voted against one when it proposed restrictions on the behavior of private individuals. A position which is consistent with a supporter of both equal protection under the law (fourteenth amendment) and freedom of association (first amendment). In contrast though liberal Democrats like William Fullbright voted against civil rights legislation that restricted the ability of States to mistreat citizens based on skin color as did Albert Gore. LBJ also while Majority Leader of the Senate helped to delay and kill a number of civil rights bills by using his powers as Majority Leader to keep them in committee.

PJ/Maryland :

"Because 1920s liberals supported women's suffrage, does that make nationalized health care a good idea?"

By 2100, we probably will have nationalized health care, be much better off for it, and some conservative will be making the argument "Because 2003 liberals supported universal health care, does that make X a good idea?"

"Actually Goldwater voted for most of the major civil rights legislation as a Senator that dismantled government-created segregation and only voted against one when it proposed restrictions on the behavior of private individuals."

Bingo. I'm an admirer of Senator Goldwater, but I disagree with his weighing of rights in this case, as I believe firmly that the right of black citizens to be able to find public accomodations as they travel across the United States justified the (real) limitation on property rights that the Act called for. However, the veiled innuendo from the left that his vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made him a racist has always been as asinine as accusations that Hubert Humphrey's support for the Civil Rights Act made him an advocate of racial quotas.

"By 2100, we probably will have nationalized health care, be much better off for it, and some conservative will be making the argument "Because 2003 liberals supported universal health care, does that make X a good idea?""

And it will still be a lame argument. Not to deliver a basic lesson in logic or anything, but it does not necessarily follow that because A supported B and turned out to be correct (or at least successful), A is correct when supporting C. You could construct a similar chain of things that conservatives were correct about, and somehow I don't think you'd be ready to roll over and play dead on future issues in those areas.

"And it will still be a lame argument. Not to deliver a basic lesson in logic or anything, but it does not necessarily follow that because A supported B and turned out to be correct (or at least successful), A is correct when supporting C."

In this case, the argument is lamer still. The "A" (liberals) who supported the prior successes are NOT the same "A" supporting C today. To use a football analogy, in the 1970s, the Miami Dolphins were a great football team -- maybe the best ever. That fact tells us nothing about how well the Dolphins will do this year. Not the same players, not the same coach, not even the same stadium.

That's about as much as liberals of today have in common with those of yesteryear: a label that doesn't even mean the same thing it once did. What predictive value is that?

"To the extent that the dollars-to-hours ratio has gotten less favorable in *recent* years, I'm guessing it's due to (a) corporate clients negotiating harder-line deals in an attempt to get their legal costs under control, and (b)excessive numbers of people pursuing legal careers because they think it sounds neat or profitable. Do these explanations seem to make sense?"

David -- I think your part (a) is some of it. There is downward pressure on hourly rates, particularly in some practice areas. Part (b) I'm not so sure. Don't forget that this phenomenon has happened in offices everywhere, not just law offices and other "neat" professions.

Most of it can be accounted for because technology allows for complex calculations to be performed relatively easily and very quickly, documents to be drafted and redrafted without nearly the trouble of former years, perfection to be demanded, turn-around times to be much faster. All of this adds to a proliferation of documentation. (And, by the way, to increasingly complex regulation. The government's expectations are higher too because of technology. If the tax code has become unreasonably complicated, thank Bill Gates.)

The human brain and human hands are still limited in their hourly output, so it just takes more hours to take on everything that the technology churns out.

"Cough. Ugh, right. I can't find a single instance of this urban legend/meme. Who's running a small business and had to close it down because of "increasing regulation"? What sort of industry is so tightly regulated? "

Well, the personal aircraft industry isn't exactly on fire. Thank the FAA for the dearth of products or job opportunities in that area.

Actually, this question is sort of misleading. Most of the regulations in question have been in place long enough that the industries that it killed have been dead a while and mostly forgotten, and the vast majority of casualties are industries that never got off the ground, and thus also escape public notice. (For examples, just peruse science fiction from the 1950's, 1960's, and even 1970's. They tended to predict that we'd either all blow ourselves up or else continue coming up with new industries and new inventions at the same or greater pace that we did in the previous century. If you want to know why the latter prediction didn't pan out, thank government regulation).

It's interesting that you bring up IT. It is one of our least regulated industries. It's also by far the industry that's been producing the most rapid gains in quality and price of its offerings over the last few decades. I think there's definitely a connection there.

"The Progressive movement did a tremendous amount of good. There is indeed a sound argument to be made that the earlier capitalists, if left alone, might have destroyed the American system. "

There's an even sounder argument that, left alone, they'd have continued generating new inventions, new industries, and ever increasing wealth along the upward trendline established during the previous century. And by now, we'd be arguing about the advisability of beginning to use government action to rein in those evil plutocrats - and posting those arguments from our homes scattered all over the Solar System.

The more I think about it, the more I think that Conason is arguing by tautology. From a retrospective view he defines 'liberal' as an agent for what we now see as positive change. Obviously under this definition liberals will appear to be good at supporting positive change. All negative choices are non-liberal by definitional magic.

Since Conason calls himself 'liberal' it is to his advantage to trade on such a definition even if there is no unifing force to tie together all the 'liberals' which he claims as his own.

Thorley,

The evidence that you keep asking for is just ordinary history, as it happened, not as you imagine it happened.

Fo example, despite your tortured logic, southern Democrats switched precisely because the national party had become actively pro-civil rights. Aside from the southerners themselves, Democrats were more likely to support civil rights than Republicans were, as Jeff's post makes clear.

To take a more specific example, Thurmond became a Republican in 1964 to back Goldwater. He helped Nixon in 1968 by assuring southerners that Nixon would not press too hard on civil rights. he did not renounce his segregationist views until much later, when it became politically expedient to do so.

"just peruse science fiction from the 1950's, 1960's, and even 1970's. They tended to predict that we'd either all blow ourselves up or else continue coming up with new industries and new inventions at the same or greater pace that we did in the previous century. If you want to know why the latter prediction didn't pan out, thank government regulation."

Huh? Is it just possible these guys were as mistaken about new industries as they were about us blowing ourselves up?

Ever think of that?

If we haven't blown ourselves up, thank liberals.

"If we haven't blown ourselves up, thank liberals."

Ronald Reagan and Bush the Elder were liberals? You learn something new every day.

I would like to live to be 300 and have nano-processors in home to supply my every whim.

Get the liberals on it. If they can make 40-hour work weeks and pollution free rivers by sheer act of will, they can definitely pass a few laws and the technologies I want will magically appear. It's just those mean conservatives standing in the way.

Will we ever stop trying to label people? Thankfully through out history there have been people of vision and conviction who strove to make the world a better place.

One other thing..."if our air isn't black with pollution"...it just might have something to do with the transition from coal heating and power to oil+electricity. The people who explored for oil and had the vision to build pipelines are one set of people you might thank, Joe C. Those who made electricity practical on a large scale are others you might want to direct some appreciation toward.

"It's interesting that you bring up IT. It is one of our least regulated industries. It's also by far the industry that's been producing the most rapid gains in quality and price of its offerings over the last few decades. I think there's definitely a connection there."

You can not be serious. Lack of enforcement of anti-trust law has allowed Microsoft to run roughshod over the market, competitors, and consumers. The result is that now you pay almost as much for your operating system as you do for your hardware. And the quality of that operating system is abysmal. If ever there was a poster boy for government intervention to make a level playing field, IT is it.

Ronald Reagan and Bush the Elder were liberals? You learn something new every day.

Well, they favored free trade, opposed institutional racism (aka "affirmative action"), and favored reduced government intrusion in the lives of the citizenry.

So, yeah, I guess they were, at least on some issues.

The problem with Conason's claim is that he's correct, in a historical sense, but incorrect in a modern one. The people responsible for the policies in question were "liberals" in their time, but today would be placed all over the political spectrum. Modern "liberals" are what used to be called "conservatives". So are most "conservatives", of course. :) Today's true "liberals" are the people usually mistakenly referred to as "right-wing extremists" (by leftwingers) or "left-wing extremists" (by rightwingers)... namely, libertarians.

Kate wrote:

"I also think that one of the problems with conservatives is that they view the world the way they wish it would be and not the way it is. Examples of this are: "every family should have a mnother and a father." and "Teenagers should practise absenance." That leads to a pretty closed world in general."

Ironically enough, if you follow those two desires to their logical conclusions, you do tend to reduce many of the ills that present-day leftists use as an excuse to implement further social engineering. Whether or not those desires can be practically implemented (the "legislate morality" can of worms) is a separate argument, but I fail to see how this leads to a closed world.

Bernard Yomtov wrote:

"When schools teach creationism instead of science, thank a conservative."

So, when schools instead pack a shipping container full of atheistic and naturalistic philosophical pandering unsupported by any actual emprics and get to shovel that in the door under a manifest of goods labeled "science," who do I get to thank?

Or were you just attempting to derail this thread?

"You can not be serious. Lack of enforcement of anti-trust law has allowed Microsoft to run roughshod over the market, competitors, and consumers. The result is that now you pay almost as much for your operating system as you do for your hardware."

A few hundred bucks each. Definitely an improvement over what they used to cost.

And let's not forget that computer hardware is also very lightly regulated. The bureaucrats only insist that it not put out too much radio interference, and it not zap anybody who touches its exterior. Aside from that, there's really no standards that a computer has to meet, and vendors can sell any machine of any quality with any new or old features that they want to whoever will buy it, without any bureaucrat having to bless it. And the quality and price of computer hardware has been improving relentlessly, by any metric you'd care to come up with.

"And the quality of that operating system is abysmal."

By whose standard? Computer geeks will hate it, because it's not designed to appeal to computer geeks. It's designed to appeal to the millions of people that would never have willingly gone near a computer before Microsoft Windows.

As far as those people are concerned, Microsoft Windows is well worth a few hundred bucks. Otherwise, they'd install Linux or some other operating system.

"If ever there was a poster boy for government intervention to make a level playing field, IT is it."

Microsoft's competitors needed a level playing field? Netscape didn't update their browser for years. Apple kept their operating system tied to inferior, expensive hardware.

I suppose that their customers were the ones that needed a level playing field? They'd have been better off waiting until Netscape finally deigned to produce their next version (and if not for Microsoft, they might still be waiting!) They'd have been better off trying to learn Linux or shelling out big bucks for Macs? I seriously doubt it.

"Huh? Is it just possible these guys were as mistaken about new industries as they were about us blowing ourselves up?"

Of course they were mistaken. They thought that the late 20th Century would proceed pretty much like the late 19th Century, and failed to predict that massive government intervention would slow everything down to the degree that it has.

After reading the first dozen posts, it seems odd that many equate "conservatism" with "racism"; what dictionary are you reading, what definition in a self-professed conservative movement are you reading. None, you are just calling names, just like most of Conason's articles.

A better question to ask of Joe Conason is: What "advances" are the liberals of today in favor of? How do they propose to improve our lives?

1. The environment: Pass the Kyoto treaty? (Give a hundred billion dollars to Russia for their CO2 rights?)

2. National defense: Declare defeat and pull out of Iraq?

3. Health Care: Fix prices?

What exactly are our liberals for?

By 2100, we probably will have nationalized health care, be much better off for it, and some conservative will be making the argument "Because 2003 liberals supported universal health care, does that make X a good idea?"

Wallster, I don't know about you, but I'll be over 65 by 2100. So I'll be on Medicare, and have government-provided health care.

Unless there are a number of medical breakthroughs, I don't actually expect to be around in 2100. If we have nationalized health care, I doubt we'll see many breakthroughs.

Come to think of it, there's a great conspiracy theory. There already have been life-extending breakthroughs, but the Social Security Administration is keeping them under wraps to avoid going bankrupt in a few years!

Socialized medicine is the surest method of ensuring that future generations will suffer the same failings we do.

What a wonderful goal for liberals to work toward.

Ken -

"It's designed to appeal to the millions of people that would never have willingly gone near a computer before Microsoft Windows."

Those people would never have willingly gone near a computer before email and the Web. Two inventions Microsoft had nothing to do with.

"Microsoft's competitors needed a level playing field? Netscape didn't update their browser for years. Apple kept their operating system tied to inferior, expensive hardware."

Ever heard of WordPerfect? Ever heard of the illegal practice of bundling?

lefty skeptic,
Microsoft was a major contributor to the 90s productivity boom. When nearly all computers had Windows, there was suddenly a standard interface that anyone could use without being re-trained, and software developers could target almost all computer users with one program. They earned their operating system monopoly. All the questionable business practices came later, when they leveraged the success of the OS to force users to use other Microsoft programs.

And Ken is right, if Windows sucks so much, why aren't more people downloading Linux? It's free.

It pissed me off when you lefties act like we consumers are at the whim of large corporations. Actually it is the other way around. If they make us mad and we stop buying their products, most companies couldn't last 6 months. Microsoft will be surpassed, as has every other dominant company that has ever existed. Check out my post about how these same stupid arguments and worries repeat themselves. Heck, in 1980 Sears was so powerful people thought it would rule the world, now they are floundering and probably won't be in business in another 10 years.

Damn link didn't work, try this.

"I would like to live to be 300 and have nano-processors in home to supply my every whim.

Get the liberals on it."

Actually, Pete, Ken's claim was that liberals are the only thing standing in the way. According to him, if we just did away with regulations we would soon have faster-than-light transport, colonies on Mars, cold fusion, etc.

Since he obviously has a hard time telling fact from fiction, I wouldn't take anythign he says too seriously.

"Actually, Pete, Ken's claim was that liberals are the only thing standing in the way. According to him, if we just did away with regulations we would soon have faster-than-light transport, colonies on Mars, cold fusion, etc. "

Well, that would depend on what you mean by "soon".

What I was actually claiming is that if we had never started on the road to massive regulation, and had laissez-faire capitalism for the past several decades instead, we'd have a lot of those things right now. After several decades of development that we missed out on.

Quite a difference. Repealing the regulations now isn't going to undo the past century, or give us back that time. We'll have to do that development that we didn't do in the past.

> The result is that now you pay almost as much
> for your operating system as you do for your
> hardware.

And so? Is there some inherent ratio of cost between hardware/software that's being violated? If so, can you please tell us (a) what the "right" cost ratio is, and--much more to the point--(b) how you determined what the correct ratio is?

Businesspundit -

"It pissed me off when you lefties act like we consumers are at the whim of large corporations."

Never said that. Don't believe it, myself. (Although I admit, some lefties do, and I don't like it either.) Ken made a good point about hardware, where there is fierce, open competition and consumers have the opportunity to choose. We have all benefited immensely.

Operating systems, and office suites are another matter. It is noteworthy that these are the only areas in which Microsoft is profitable, and it is the only areas in which they have a monopoly they can exploit. They have been remarkably unsuccessful whenever they have to actually compete -

- Palm OS vs WinCE
- J2ME vs Win Mobile Edition
- J2EE vs .NET
- XBox vs Playstation

"And Ken is right, if Windows sucks so much, why aren't more people downloading Linux? It's free."

Microsoft's illegal practices have established their proprietary document formats as a de facto standard. However, as they keep pushing the boundaries of acceptable practice, more and more businesses are adopting Linux.

"Microsoft will be surpassed, as has every other dominant company that has ever existed."

Yes, and every murderer that has ever existed will die some day. Better, however, that they be brought to justice than die a natural death. And what about all the damage Microsoft has caused in the mean time?

And, by the way, it pisses me off when you righties worship at the altar of Corporation rather than Competition. Unfair generalization right back atcha, Businesspundit.

Typical Jane bullshit. Can't argue with what he says? Fine, then just say something outrageous and pretend that you've addressed the point.

Do you really think that anyone is fooled by this dodge?

Child labor laws - liberal. check
40 hour work weeks - unions! check
creation of the FDA - liberals. check
Medicare and SS - liberals. check.
creation of the EPA - liberals, check

Not a one of those are the result of conservatives working to make it happen. Not a one.

Oh, and by the Way, Lincoln wasn't a conservative, he was a liberal. Sure, he was a Republican, but that was back BEFORE all of the bigots and kleptocrats bolted the Democratic party and took over the Republican party.

If he were alive today, he would speak out against George Bush and his cabal. And you damn well know it.

Child Labor laws I'll give you

40 hour work week I'll give you

Keeping the unions from strangling productivity - conservatives

FDA was liberal? whatever...

Starting a Ponzi scheme that will either collapse or crush under-30s with taxes ok I'll give you that one.

Fostering an investment environment that gave us the computer and the best medical innovation rate in the world - Conservatives.

Keeping the Russians from taking over the world, liberals and conservatives, until after Vietnam, then thank the conservatives.

The Civil Rights Act was supported by equality-before-the-law Republicans.

Let me put it this way, I can see a number of good things that liberals have done. If you can't say the same about conservatives, you are defining 'liberal' to mean things I like, which is not a useful decision making catagory.

Conason preaches to his choir; just look at the love fest yesterday at dKos. The irony of his screed is that he would not have associated with the people who actually achieved most of what he claims for liberals: OSHA - was that Nixon or Ford; Child labor laws and trust busting - Teddy R; Unions - FDR, one for Conason; safe food - common law protected a small agrarian society, when food crossed borders it grew into federal pork - a wash; clean water act - Nixon; Mediscare and SS, a pyramid scam from FDR; The Civil Rights movement sprang from Religious Fanatics, John Brown and crew, and New England Bluenoses, the Abolitionists were hard-line christian zealots that would scare the crap out of Conason, and Lincoln was the conservative federalist who moderated that zeal, the Battle Hymn of the Republic was for real; That the "liberals" of the 20th century under FDR made a devil's bargain with the Southern Dems is why it took the conservative republicans to overthrow the Jim Crow regime.

So what do we get, on race, the Dems return to form after reconstruction and hold off real progress till 80 percent of Republicans join with northern Democrats who are thoroughly embarrassed of 90 years of obstruction. And Conason gives all glory to the current generation of "liberals" who currently believe in "affirmative" segregation.

On economics, we get Marxists ignoring the defects of unfunded mandates, and ignoring that social and environmental progress is paid for by capitalism's success. I'm just not persuaded or even slightly impressed - its tired, trite garbage.

The attitude of Joe Conason, like so many on the left, is that all good things must come from liberals. After all, the dictionary defines conservatives as being opposed to change, so any change must therefore have come from liberals.

The problem with this way of thinking is that the political spectrum is impossible to define as either "liberal-conservative" or "left-right." JFK was liberal on many social issues, yet he passed massive tax cuts. Johnson supported the war in Viet Nam, yet he proposed the "Great Society." Were Kennedy and Johnson liberals or conservatives? The answer is that, using today’s definitions they were both.

And that is one of the underlying problems with trying to define things from the past as either liberal or conservative. The definitions have changed over time. Yesterdays Democrats held political positions that today’s Democrats are strongly opposed to. And today’s Republicans hold positions that are significantly different from the Republicans of 100 years ago.

"Typical Jane bullshit. Can't argue with what he says? Fine, then just say something outrageous and pretend that you've addressed the point."

Typical Bones bullshit. Leap into a discussion mid-stream with insults and generalizations, then gradually retreat as the other posters pick your arguments to pieces with inconvenient facts (which has already begun, I see--nicely done, Sebastian). Kind of like your argument a while back that Bush had some sort of legal obligation to ask for a full manual recount in Florida, which became some kind of squishy moral obligation (which Gore apparently was not subject to until his back was to the wall), which became you apparently remembering you had something in the oven and vanishing like a puff of smoke. Very entertaining to observe--are you planning on topping it this time?

"Oh, and by the Way, Lincoln wasn't a conservative, he was a liberal. Sure, he was a Republican, but that was back BEFORE all of the bigots and kleptocrats bolted the Democratic party and took over the Republican party."

Ah yes, the mystical liberal process by which Lincoln becomes a Democrat and George Wallace becomes a Republican. Very eye-catching.

"If he were alive today, he would speak out against George Bush and his cabal. And you damn well know it."

You know, you'd be able to put in more hours for Miss Cleo if you did your third-rate psychic act on company time rather than here.

I'll give you the Child Labour Laws, but I'm not sure how much credit we should give them. In developing countries even now, children are, as soon as it's economical, taken out of the work force and educated. Their parents are the ones behind it, since they want a better life for their children.

One might have predicted, a la Game Theory, that the parents would continue to exploit the labour of their offspring, and reap the rewards thereof. However, the opposite is true, and we see remarkable selflessness.

The point was made above that certain laws simply codefied what was becoming common practice. I'm no fan of children throwing bobbins or what-have-you, but it has to be possible for the family to survive without their labour before such a law would be obeyed or rational. And sometimes, particularly before a society builds up its economy, it isn't.

For most of history, children were expected to be useful: to keep the fires burning, to hunt, fish, sew, tat: to work, briefly. With increasingly efficient technology, we dispensed with that, not because the laws were passed, but because we loved our children. The laws were secondary, an expression of this love.

I'll give you the Child Labour Laws, but I'm not sure how much credit we should give them. In developing countries even now, children are, as soon as it's economical, taken out of the work force and educated. Their parents are the ones behind it, since they want a better life for their children.

One might have predicted, a la Game Theory, that the parents would continue to exploit the labour of their offspring, and reap the rewards thereof. However, the opposite is true, and we see remarkable selflessness.

The point was made above that certain laws simply codefied what was becoming common practice. I'm no fan of children throwing bobbins or what-have-you, but it has to be possible for the family to survive without their labour before such a law would be obeyed or rational. And sometimes, particularly before a society builds up its economy, it isn't.

For most of history, children were expected to be useful: to keep the fires burning, to hunt, fish, sew, tat: to work, briefly. With increasingly efficient technology, we dispensed with that, not because the laws were passed, but because we loved our children. The laws were secondary, an expression of this love.

Lefty_skeptic,
True enough on the "unfair generalization." But I think you missed my point about Microsoft and operating systems. While they may use agressive business practices now, they didn't have that kind of power back when they were first growing Windows. So they didn't initially obtain the monopoly through any illegal means. It's just that once they had the monopoly, they used it wrongly. And the monopoly was actually good for us because it standardized the computer user interface. That is my main point.

Actually MS had the Carter Administration Department of Justice to thank for their current monopoly status. When the DoJ put the screws on IBM in the late 70's IBM trashed plans at buying both MS and Intel. Thanks ot Government interference we have three companies where there would have only been one.

"Child labor laws and trust busting - Teddy R;"

You forgot to write "score another one for Conason" after that. HTH. (Read what he wrote if you don't understand.)

You and Jane may be the only people in America who believe that Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln were conservatives.

Well using Conason's definition they were conservative.

TR wanted to "Conserve" his hunting and ranching areas.
Lincoln wanted to "Conserve" the union.

Both got us into wars with Lincoln overseeing the largest number of deaths of Americans in a single day, and suspended Habeus Corpus.

Anyway, if Lincoln did become a Democrat today he would have been hounded out early for telling racist jokes.

Conason's examples are unfair, especially "if your food is not poisoned and your water is drinkable" which is just plain BS. Being a liberal I got terribly upset when reading that and it was not until I reread the entire text and though "OK, I see what you want to say" that I decided to let it pass.
FWIW, I think in this paragraph Conason is concerned with resurrecting the word "liberal" as a positive attitude. AFAIK, it has lost the positive connotation and Conason's book is primarily about restoring "liberal" to something you can claim to be just as proudly as you can claim to be conservative.

"Well using Conason's definition they were conservative."

I know you're just being facetious, but Conason explicitly identified TR as a progressive. I do not think this is a controversial assertion.

Several times on this thread people have misrepresented Conason's point as being about Democrats v. Republicans instead of liberals v. conservatives. You would think that by explicitly naming liberal Republicans Conason had averted this problem.

Scott/David Walser -

The argument is not the slightest bit lame. The occurrences where liberals are correct are not independent. If liberals have been more correct than conservatives (who would have had us retain slavery, and force seniors to work until they died or rely on charity/family when they run out of resources, etc.), we can conclude that they will probably continue to be more correct.

Think of the 1978 Pittsburg Steelers, to use a 1970s football analogy as well. They finished at 14-2 on their way to the Super Bowl. When they were 10-1, and were playing a below average team, the two of you would apparently conclude that past performance is not predictive of future performance, and be willing to bet on the other team, without odds or a spread. Of course you wouldn't, but that is what you are doing by maintaining that 'because liberals were correct before does not make them likely to be correct now.'

It is more than likely that in 100 years, we will have national health care (I won't be around, PJ), gay marriage will be completely accepted, the death penalty will probably have been long abolished, and the people of that era will look back in amazement at the dark ages of 2003 the same way we look back at an era when women weren't allowed to vote and blacks had to sit in the back of the bus.

I don't understand why people keep confusing partisanship with ideology. By asserting that liberals are responsible for that laundry list of benefits, Conason wasn't saying that Democrats all through history were responsible. He's saying liberalism was responsible. The Republican party wasn't the homogenously conservative party until fairly recently. In fact moderates and liberals (on domestic policy) either strongly influenced the party, or ran it, for much of this century. Lincoln, Roosevelt, and even Taft, not to mention Nixon (in some sense) were some of the most effective liberals. So people should stop saying that liberals aren't responsible for civil rights because of the Dixiecrats. It's a logical inconsistency.

That this topic is even debatable is silly to me. As someone who largely opposes abortion "rights", I believe that the procedure will ultimately be banned in this and all other civilized countries. But how would you conservatives feel of fifty years down the road I asserted that conservatives were not responsible for the anti-abortion movement? Wouldn't it be silly? Isn't opposition to abortion one of the issues that defines modern conservatism? So for liberalism and labor and civil rights legislation.

Conservativism has also been defined -- by conservatives no less -- as opposition to labor rights and racial and gender rights for one hundred years and in support of business privileges. Those Dixiecrats that were originally only racial conservatives, but were otherwise more liberal populists, eventually abandoned their populism as they abandoned the New Deal coalition. These have been the defining characteristics of conservatism in this country. To deny that is to deny history.

And I don't believe for a moment that modern conservatives have abandoned the principles that their paleo-conservative (as TNR might call them) predecessors followed, with the exception of overt race-hatred, because modern conservatives still assert those same principles: opposition to environmental regulation (not even the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts are settled issues yet), safety regulation, social programs (not even Social Security is sacrosanct anymore, so the elderly who have worked long hours for low pay their whole lives will just have to suck it up after they finally can't work anymore), anti-trust regulation, minimum wage and other wage regulations, health provision, etc.

If you are so proud of your principles (and you should be, of course, in that conservatism has played a positive role in our history, though less of one than liberalism) stick to them. Don't co-opt the issues that battle over which your ideology has lost.

Yes I was being facetious, but that is the problem of using dictionary definitions to discuss today's policies. All of us want to conserve some things we find good in society and change things we find intolerable. To point to only data that makes your case is to fool yourself. One has to address the hidden and not so hidden costs of change; acknowledge those changes that turned out to be not so good ideas;
(prohibition and free love) and recognize the outside influences that prepare society, from the religious revival of the abolitionists to frozen dinners allowing women to work outside the home.
Change isn't always good, and it isn't always liberals who are responsible for it.

Wallster - Past performance only has predictive value if the same people (or people holding the same values) will be performing in the future. The 1978 Stealers were a great team (which is still hard to admit, since I am a Raiders fan), but that fact gives you no clue on how well the 2003 Stealers will do. Since today's liberals hold vastly different values than did the liberals of prior eras, the past success of liberal ideas is irrelevant in predicting the worth of the current crop of ideas.

This thread is a wankfest. A bunch of bloody statists, the lot of you...

Lenin and Stalin could both be charitably described as 'liberal'. How did the countries they were in control of turn out again? Oh yeah, Russia and parts of Eastern Europe are some of the most polluted areas in the entire world. Castro sure was itching to change the system, so I guess he's a liberal too. Exactly how great is Cuba nowadays. Healthcare is free, and you get what you pay for. So long as you aren't black, cause then you don't even get to see the doctor because everyone knows ALL black Cubans are stooges of the Americans. You can have a library, just don't get any of those pesky books. They live on a tropical island and have problems related to scurvy. I wouldn't have thought it was possible if someone had actually tried.

Me thinks this thesis needs a little more, ok a lot more logic and critical thinking. As has been stated before countless times, when a society grows more affluent it has the time and inclination for quality of life initiatives. It isn't a very great shock to me that after almost every economic growth period we saw agitation and acceptance for inclusion of another oppressed group or improvments in the lives of the citizenry. Industrial Revolution-Civil War, late 1890's/early 1900's growth-Progressive era, post WWII boom-Civil Rights Movement and environmental movement, post 80/90's boom-advances in GLBT agenda. I guess if you want to just thank one person, rather than a group direct it towards Adam Smith.

Businesspundit -

I think Microsoft gained their monopoly through a variety of methods, some ethical and some not. But I'll concede the general point.

However, I disagree that we have benefited overall from their monopoly. The interoperability of applications is due at least as much to the following -

- Open standards for hardware (e.g. PCI, IDE)
- Open standards for protocols (e.g. TCP/IP, HTTP, email)

Had document formats been as open and interoperable as these standards, we would have benefited from competition in the office suite category as well.

I concede that there are productivity gains from having a standard windowing interface, but don't think they are important enough to balance out the other factors.

The farther back into the past you look, the more different are the political concerns of the age and the less relevant the labels we use today. To claim FDR for the cause of present-day left-liberalism is merely
whiggish; to claim Abraham "I did not at any time say I was in favor of Negro suffrage" Lincoln for the cause of present-day left-liberalism is preposterous.

One thing that I find interesting but has not yet been mentioned is that Conason seems to be merely repackaging similar arguments that have been floating around the web for years and presumably elsewhere much longer. This sort of simplification to the point of inaccuracy argumentation is fine for Howard Dean Meetups and the like but it's unseemly that Conason actually is paid for it.

I think that the real problem behind much of the disagreements in this thread can best be described as steming from the logical fallacy of equivocation. In essence, terminolgy that is bandied about keeps shifting its meaning, especially in regard to the terms "liberal" and "conservative." Sorry folks--if you are guilty of this sin you are indulging in sloppy thinking.

I don't really think that such labels are of any worth; they tend to obscure issues rather than define or focus them. This is especially true when someone wishes to pigeonhole a contemporary or historical figure. People are complex and rarely fit into a given stereotype.

Big Lies by Joe Conason

Truth in advertising...

"creation of the EPA - liberals, check"

Richard Milhouse Nixon - tanned, "rested", ready and *gasp* liberal.

Alot of this is silly stuff. Conason just took longer to understand what Coulter has known for years. Throw red meat to the base and they will lap it up. Joe just took a look at the parallel universe of liberal hatred and felt a buck could be made. That alone should put down any notions of his being "un-american" just because he is liberal.

Is there anything more American than fleecing the stupid surrounding you?

(waving one hand in the back of the crowd) Excuse me, I forget. Which was it that gave us Prohibition, liberals or conservatives?

At the time, the Prohibitionists were part of the Progressive movement, seeing alcohol as the root of social evil, especially pathologies within the immigrant community.

Diversity = the new Segregation. Funny how the democrats are promoting that dinosaur again. They won't be satisfied until we are Balkanized into our own little subsections in each city.

If the guy who swindled you out of your 401K doesn't get prosecuted, thank a conservative.

When you're dumb enough to invest all your 401(k) in company stock, blame yourself.

What mj said. I consider myself a Hayekan aka classic liberal, and I ended up in Republican/libertarian camp.

"At the time, the Prohibitionists were part of the Progressive movement, seeing alcohol as the root of social evil, especially pathologies within the immigrant community."

I believe those pathologies were a foundation for the eugenics movement as well.

Amitava Mazumdar writes:

At the time, the Prohibitionists were part of the Progressive movement, seeing alcohol as the root of social evil, especially pathologies within the immigrant community.

Which brings us to what I think is a crucial point. I also agree that the whole "conservative"/"liberal" labelling is meaningless now, but even the dichotomy is strange: in the literal sense, conservative is not the opposite of liberal. Conservative is the opposite of progressive; authoritarian is the opposite of liberal.

Frankly, all the common political terms today are used (one may say abused) in such a way that the original meaning of the words no longer applies. We have "progressives" who are fighting to keep the status quo, and "conservatives" who want to make big changes: it's the "progressive" that wants to keep the "conservatives" from making changes to affirmative action programs, and the "conservative" who wants big changes made to them (a removal is a big change), because he believes that doing so would redress a fundamental injustice or cure a social ill. The two groups seem to have switched labels, but in terms of trying to change society, it seems like today's "conservatives" would seem to have quite a bit more in common with the progressives of yore, than would the status-quo "progressives" of today. The "progressives" of today act not at all unlike the conservatives of earlier years, warning of fire and brimstone and societal collapse that will result if changes proposed by today's "conservatives" are put into practice. The dimwits who snarled traffic in our cities and staged various sit-ins, teach-ins, and vomit-ins to prevent the invasion of Iraq called themselves "progressives," but they were really conservatives -- reactionaries, in fact -- trying to preserve at any cost the internationalist legal order that they believed Bush was violating by his "unilateral" invasion. (Of course, a good number were simply idiots, who couldn't articulate a real position if their life depended on it. They were simply "against" something -- war, Bush, whatever -- but this precludes them from being true progressives, by definition.)

It's enough to give you a headache, but I'm not done yet. The word progressive is itself a loaded term, with a presumed positive connotation that it hasn't earned. It was the progressives of the 20th century that created Marxism, communism, fascism, Nazism, eugenics and the "master race" and the Holocaust, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere... It was the progressives of Cambodia who emptied the cities and filled the killing fields, the progressives of Iran who created the Islamic Republic, and Koran-driven progressives from Araby who casually killed over 3,000 New Yorkers in the name of their progress. Yet none of these take away from other accomplishments also given to us by progressives: from the end of slavery and the instillment of principles of racial equality, to the very idea that government legitimacy derives from the governed. Progressive is a morally neutral term; it simply implies a change in society.

Conason's cheap parlor trick is to use that conflation and lack of distinction to score his points, and many people have already pointed this out. He does, in fact, claim for the "liberals" only those changes that, with hindsight, were deemed positive. (Of course, like many, he substitutes liberals for left-wing progressives; one could hardly claim that laws banning child labor or enshrining protection of the environment create a more liberal -- that is, a more free -- society.) Still, there is no shortage of other things that left-wing progressives are responsible for: where is Conason's demand that we thank his side for Stalin's collectivizations, the Great Leap Forward, or the "accomplishments" of Pol Pot? Where does he pause to thank those icky conservatives of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s for keeping the Nazi and fascist progressives from dominating the planet, and for keeping the various other far-left progressives from making their own societies too weak to resist them? Where does he thank the pro-market conservatives for keeping Western economies from ruin at the hands of the communist and far-left-socialist progressives -- that is, where does he thank them for keeping him out of bread lines and empty food stores?

The whole thing is B.S. Yes, I thank the progressives who created a government that respects my right to speak and worship as I please; yes, I am grateful to those who made education universal; yes, I am glad someone is out there to stomp on the snake-oil salesmen. But no, I won't take these achievements to mean that all progressive ideas are positive or benign; thanks, but history teaches otherwise. Nor am I about to accept that Left-wing ideas are always positive or benign: history teaches otherwise on that, too. Progressivism, conservatism, liberalism, and authoritarianism are not good or bad in and of themselves; it's the results that matter, and all sides have much to be proud of, and much to be ashamed of. Lame-ass wankery like "if your food is edible, thank a liberal" are as meaningless as they are moronic; the equal-and-opposite moronic response is, "if your food didn't require you to stand in line for three hours, thank a conservative." The ending of racial segregation no more lends no moral weight to the institution of government-paid health care, just as standing up to Communism doesn't give moral weight to reducing environmental protections. Both have to be argued on their own merits, without lame-assed references to accomplishments that are often not yours to claim.

OK, I'm done now -- I think we can all be thankful for that.

Doh.

The ending of racial segregation no more lends no moral weight to the institution of government-paid health care, just as standing up to Communism doesn't give moral weight to reducing environmental protections.

Sorry about that.

So, what would these historical figures - Teddy Roosevelt, Abe Lincoln, Martin Luther King - who have been christened "liberals" by Joe & co. say if they were alive today?

Would Teddy be in favor of raising taxes to pay for everyone's medical bills?
Would Lincoln declare, "sure, the US should be subservient to the UN, especially the ICC."
Would King say, "I don't see anything wrong with gay marriages."*
Would any of them be deeply offended by, say, a statue of the Ten Commandements in front of city hall?

HELL NO. They'd be considered conservatives, and regularly whined about by lefty commentators.

Joe takes credit for every positive change that he claims liberals brought about, but selectively forgets that CHANGE IS NOT ALWAYS GOOD. Stalin, after all, was a liberal.

*You may want to look up some of King's comments on homosexuals before answering that.

If you're feeling tyrannized, thank politicians.

Aw, now, Joey the latte liberal is just trying to schlep books, not make sense. He saw how Ann Coulter, et al, mad a bundle creaming the left, and he saw dollar signs and a little payback.

Good on'em if anyone buys the silly thing.

"Lenin and Stalin could both be charitably described as 'liberal'."

Ummm, no.

The liberal party in Russia (the Kadet party) were part of the short-lived coalition government post-February revolution (which included the Kadets, the agrarian [Right] Social Revolutionaries, and the Menscheviks), led by Kerensky (an ex-Menschevik) that Lenin & Trotsky *overthrew* in the 1917 October revolution.

The Kadets fought against the Bolsheviks in the Civil war, and established a short-lived democracy in the Crimean peninsular after the Germans withdrew, which was overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1919. Lenin, in an order to the Cheka, declared the Kadets "enemies of the people".

Even now, Marxist-Leninists consider "liberal" a term of insult. Do a google on "bourgeouis liberals" and you'll see what I mean.

"It was the progressives of the 20th century that gave us..."

Progressives in FDR/Truman administration (Ascheson & Marshall) & the Atlee government in the UK (Ernie Bevin) gave you NATO, folks. Didn't stop Nixon & McCarthy trying to smear Acheson.

I've not read all of the comments, so perhaps this has been mentioned. But you seem to be under the mistaken impression that liberal = Democrat and it has been so throughout history. Um, no.

Stalin, after all, was a liberal.

Oh for crying out loud.

From dictionary.com:
lib·er·al·ism    ( P )  Pronunciation Key  (lbr--lzm, lbr-)
n.
A political theory founded on the natural goodness of humans and the autonomy of the individual and favoring civil and political liberties, government by law with the consent of the governed, and protection from arbitrary authority.

The term liberal has been manipulated in the U S in part to demonize the mainstream.

May a suggest some definitions:

The Left:
Power should ultimately rest with a State with a rational Plan, and its Experts

The Right:
Power should ultimately rest with a Nation with clear Values, and its Leaders

The Liberal:
Power should ultimately rest with the citizen.

Another good definition of liberalism:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Once upon a time "liberal" meant to support individual liberty, our right to action without interferance by others. By that definition, contemporary liberals aren't. If by "liberal" one means "generous," perhaps contemporary liberals are, but they force other people to cough up the treasure with which they display their humble generosity of spirit.
To force one person to support another against his will is known as "involuntary servitude," a fifty-dollar term for "slavery." It matters not how good one's intentions are, to do this is wrong.

Once upon a time "liberal" meant to support individual liberty, our right to action without interferance by others
Except where such action would interefer with others.

Brett, you seem to have brought into the myth that things like welfare, public education etc. are displays of consciences. They are not. It is a recognition of they fact that large numbers of poor, ignorant, desperate people deprive the economy of labor, raise crime rates and most importantly are a danger to democracy. The hope is that the wealth saved will offset the wealth taxed.

You might disagree with the execution, but dont misunderstand the motive.

If by "liberal" one means "generous," perhaps contemporary liberals are, but they force other people to cough up the treasure with which they display their humble generosity of spirit.
To force one person to support another against his will is known as "involuntary servitude," a fifty-dollar term for "slavery." It matters not how good one's intentions are, to do this is wrong.

So I guess that means you are against the invasion, occupation and reconstruction of Iraq then?

"My goodness -- how did we ever survive as a nation with Abe Lincoln sneaking out of the White House at night to poison our food?"

Do let's cut the crap, dear. Lincoln -- to put it mildly -- was the liberal of his day (he may even have had flat-out socialist tendencies, given the speeches he delivered on the exploitation of "labor" by "capital"). The Party of Lincoln ceased being the Party of Lincoln back in 1876, when it sold out Southern blacks to put Rutherford B. Hayes into the White House; and ever since then it's been moving further and further to the Right of the Democrats. Since 1964, it's officially been the Party of Jefferson Davis.

As for your commentators: my, oh, my. I had no idea there were so many self-proclaimed Ayn Randians and Social Darwinists left in the world, or that so many of them have managed to find your site.

That, of course, is not to mention the fact that it's cretinous to say that Conason was accusing Republicans of "sneaking out of the White House to poison our food" -- he was just pointing that, throughout the past century, it's been the Right that has repeatedly fought tooth and nail against even the most elementary measures to improve the living conditions of the non-wealthy if it required the wealthy making any sacrifices whatsoever. (Not that that would disturb some of your commentators; let's Let The The Poor Die And Reduce the Surplus Population, or maybe Increase The Average IQ.)

"As for your commentators: my, oh, my. I had no idea there were so many self-proclaimed Ayn Randians and Social Darwinists left in the world, or that so many of them have managed to find your site."

Hey, Bruce! Have you gotten around to suing your high school English teachers for malpractice yet?

*reads Bruce's posts*

Be sure to ask for punitive damages--the situation certainly merits it.

"it's been the Right that has repeatedly fought tooth and nail against even the most elementary measures to improve the living conditions of the non-wealthy if it required the wealthy making any sacrifices whatsoever. (Not that that would disturb some of your commentators; let's Let The The Poor Die And Reduce the Surplus Population, or maybe Increase The Average IQ.)"

And, of course, it's been the Left that has shrugged at the reports of millions being starved and shot in Communist countries and muttered something about needing to break eggs to make omlets before moving on to the next victim. . .er, I mean "liberated nation."

If you are willing to burn someone's house to the ground in the name of the environment, thank Liberals. If your schools suck thank Liberals. If your power goes out because the activists stopped all new nuclear, nat. gas, oil, or coal power plants, thank Liberals. If it is impossible to get tenure because your political beliefs are not correct, thank Liberals. If your son is made to feel like a criminal just for being male, thank Liberals......

Joe doesn't understand that today's Liberals are against liberty. Kudos for many of the things that were done in the day by both Democrat and Republican liberals. Today, most Liberals are either left-wing fascist or too stupid to realize they are facilatating them.

BTW, as soon as the Dems. become consistently pro-liberty their fortunes will reverse and the world will become a better place.

If you are willing to burn someone's house to the ground in the name of the environment, thank Liberals. If your schools suck thank Liberals. If your power goes out because the activists stopped all new nuclear, nat. gas, oil, or coal power plants, thank Liberals. If it is impossible to get tenure because your political beliefs are not correct, thank Liberals. If your son is made to feel like a criminal just for being male, thank Liberals......

Joe doesn't understand that today's Liberals are against liberty. Kudos for many of the things that were done in the day by both Democrat and Republican liberals. Today, most Liberals are either left-wing fascist or too stupid to realize they are facilatating them.

BTW, as soon as the Dems. become consistently pro-liberty their fortunes will reverse and the world will become a better place.

DUNCAN YOUNG DECIDED TO SPEW:

"The Liberal:
Power should ultimately rest with the citizen."

But isn't that EXACTLY the opposite of what Joe Conaesco is saying? All these "liberal" reforms he keeps praising ultimately take power AWAY from the individual - i.e. the Governemnt decides what healthy food is, not the farmer or the grocer.

Ah, but your definitions are sadly typical of the left - "Liberal means whatever I want it to mean, so long as it makes ME look good."

"That, of course, is not to mention the fact that it's cretinous to say that Conason was accusing Republicans of "sneaking out of the White House to poison our food" -- he was just pointing that, throughout the past century, it's been the Right that has repeatedly fought tooth and nail against even the most elementary measures to improve the living conditions of the non-wealthy if it required the wealthy making any sacrifices whatsoever."

That's because all these "sacrifices" demanded of the wealthy produced practically nothing of benefit to the non-wealthy in comparison to the relentless rise in living standards produced by the technological and material progress that free people in a capitalist system had been consistently delivering without those sacrifices. And they keep on delivering, not because of, but in spite of, all the "sacrifices" that are demanded of them.

In comparison to that, all of the benefits that Mr. Conason takes credit for are lost in the noise. (The costs, unfortunately, are not.)

"(Not that that would disturb some of your commentators; let's Let The The Poor Die And Reduce the Surplus Population, or maybe Increase The Average IQ.)"

No, it's Let The Poor Live Like Yesterday's Kings, And Let Tomorrow's Poor Live Like Today's Evil Plutocrats. That's what free people in a capitalist system can do, and they'll do it a lot faster if everyone would get the hell out of their way.

And if we stopped screwing around with the health care system, forcing pharmaceuticals to waste years playing Mother May I before they're allowed to sell what they spend billions of dollars developing to willing customers, threatening to shut down research because cloning is bad (why? just because), then maybe, just maybe, we'll live to see 2100 and beyond. But I can guarandamntee you that you won't see National Health Care in 2100... if it passes, you're screwed, cause that anti-aging treatment ain't gonna happen.

"Brett, you seem to have brought into the myth that things like welfare, public education etc. are displays of consciences. They are not. It is a recognition of they fact that large numbers of poor, ignorant, desperate people deprive the economy of labor, raise crime rates and most importantly are a danger to democracy. The hope is that the wealth saved will offset the wealth taxed."

All sorts of captial investments benefit the whole society. Investments in new factories increase the supply of whatever products those factories turn out, and make them easier and cheaper to obtain. Investments in new and improved supply chains make retail products easier and cheaper to obtain for everybody. But the government doesn't require these improvements, and it doesn't even subside them, but people make those improvements voluntarily.

Why? Because they get a return on their investment. They end up wealthier than they were before they made the investment. This is enough to induce people to make those investments.

Education is the same way. People who educate themselves are making a capital investment. That investment increases the rate at which they can produce value... every hour they work is worth $30, or $40, or $50, or even $100, rather than $8 or $10. And, as you say, when people educate themselves, the rest of us benefit from this increased value. So do the individuals in question, which is plenty of inducement to get them to make the investment. No need for government to provide or require it.

"Well using Conason's definition they were conservative...Lincoln wanted to "Conserve" the union.
Actually, Monkeyboy, Lincoln wanted to "preserve" the Union-- but that doesn't mean he kept fruits from spoiling.

"Lenin and Stalin could both be charitably described as 'liberal'."
Right, Joe-- on Bizarro World!

"It was the progressives of the 20th century that created...the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere...the progressives of Iran who created the Islamic Republic, and Koran-driven progressives from Araby who casually killed over 3,000 New Yorkers..."
So Emperor-worshipping militarists and Fundamentalist Islam fanatics are progressives, too. Certainly a creative definition, E. Nough-- but wait, he's not done!
"Where does he (Conason) pause to thank those icky conservatives of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s for keeping the Nazi and fascist progressives from dominating the planet...?"
Which ones are those? Charles Lindberg, Father Coughlin, Henry Ford, Joseph Kennedy, Francisco Franco, and the Duke of Windsor were icky and conservative for true, but they were also sympathetic to Nazism and fascism.
And this guy has the nerve to accuse Conason of a "cheap parlor trick." E. Nough's enough!

"Stalin, after all, was a liberal."
Hey, Fatmouse, say hello to Joe for me when you return to your home planet!

Seriously: I understand that the definition of a political philosophy can be fuzzy around the edges, especially when you're talking about different decades and countries. But there's no excuse for intentionally muddying the waters by using words in confusing ways just for shock value. If I could have just one wish, it would be for conservatives to stop using the word liberal to describe anything to their left that they don't like.

Fatmouse,
Let me introduce you to a little fellow called "representative democracy".

Fatmouse, representive democracy.

Representive democracy, fatmouse.

whoops, same person....

Two things give the citizen power - open markets and a government that is accountable to its people.

And in all those cases describe by Conason, they passed because of popular support - the people, by and large, asked for them once individuals, whom one might describe as liberals, raised the issue.

And by and large, they remain popular.

Ken,

Why? Because they get a return on their investment. They end up wealthier than they were before they made the investment. This is enough to induce people to make those investments.

What facinates me about libertarians is how they so often ignore the very thing that makes markets so innovative.

Risk.

That wealth you speak off is not guaranteed.

Education is the same way. People who educate themselves are making a capital investment. That investment increases the rate at which they can produce value... every hour they work is worth $30, or $40, or $50, or even $100, rather than $8 or $10. And, as you say, when people educate themselves, the rest of us benefit from this increased value. So do the individuals in question, which is plenty of inducement to get them to make the investment. No need for government to provide or require it.

You might want to try explaining this to a six-year old.

Education is helpful for an economy; it is a prerequisite for democracy.

Argg..
That wealth you speak *of* is not guaranteed.

'Tis late...

The excitableboy acts true to his name:

So Emperor-worshipping militarists and Fundamentalist Islam fanatics are progressives, too.

Yes, in both cases -- in the sense that they wanted to change society around them for the better -- with them defining better, naturally enough. Sorry, progressive is not a term you get to apply retroactively to mean, "defender of stuff popular today."

Which ones are those? Charles Lindberg, Father Coughlin, Henry Ford, Joseph Kennedy, Francisco Franco, and the Duke of Windsor were icky and conservative for true, but they were also sympathetic to Nazism and fascism.

I can't speak to them all (trying to keep this short), but certainly Ford, Lindbergh, and other fans of fascism, Nazism, and eugenics were not the conservatives of their day. Right-wingers, perhaps (though much of fascism and Nazism was quite left-wing), but definitely not conservative. They were, if anything, radical ideas, new to their times, and often seen as "progress" (in the case of eugenics, the "progress" was even "scientific" in nature).

The conservatives who opposed it were people like Churchill, who was, in fact, mostly for preserving the status quo, be it in the British Empire, or in the maintenance of liberal democracies. It was they who saved the world from rampaging and mass-murdering progressive idiocies of their day. They were opposed not just by progressives who supported fascism, but also those progressives who loathed fascism, yet were "for peace" and considered capitalist bourgeois liberal democracies to be the greater enemy. The same bunch that would later use "fascist" as an adjective for anything they disliked, would first work to weaken (morally and physically) the very conservative forces who would be the final obstacle to fascism's expansion. Capitalism and imperialism were the greater evil, see...

So yeah, Conason's strategy of randomly attaching "liberal" to a few popular causes was a cheap parlor trick. And you fell for it. Way to illustrate my point by missing it, excitableboy. Also, I found it quite interesting to learn that I am "conservative" (by any definition of that word) and the stuff I described as "liberal" was what I didn't like. Perhaps you should try to become readingcomprehensionboy first. Not as fun as merely excitable, I admit.

Hmm... need to nitpick my own post a bit:

The conservatives who opposed it were people like Churchill, who was, in fact, mostly for preserving the status quo, be it in the British Empire, or in the maintenance of liberal democracies. It was they who saved the world from rampaging and mass-murdering progressive idiocies of their day.

Actually, it was Stalin's communist progressives that took the brunt of the Nazi progressives' onslaught. (Yes, both were progressive ideologies. Again, you don't get to limit your definition of progressive to "supporting a cause popular today.") The British, Americans, and others helped immensely, but it would be wrong to claim credit for defeating the Nazis without giving the Russians their due.

With the destruction of Nazism, communism became the new progressive ideology to defeat -- again by conservatives, Democrat, Republican, Labor, Tory, whatever, who thought (correctly) that the old system of liberal democracy was worth defending from the new system of communist dictatorship.

E. Nough
Your thoughts on this debate are the most sophisticated I've seen here - but I think there is an extra layer of subtlety.
My interpretation:

"Progressive" means should change, regardless of circumstances;

"Liberal" means can change; if required by the public;

"Conservative" means better not change, especially the social/economic hierarchy; (ie a rising tide may lift all boats; but you better remember who had the yatch)

The liberal democracies have changed significantly over time (for the better), in a manner that was not conservative.
Your point is taken, that conservative and liberal are not strict opposites. However I dont think they are complementary either - they work at cross purposes.

Cheers

Duncan, I don't consider popularity a justification for anything. I have been bemused since the first grade by those who equate individual liberty and majoritarian democracy. They are obviously contradictory.

Your argument concerning buying off the poor is the justification of the mafioso demanding protection money or else; it also dismisses the rights of the individual by ignoring whose wealth is being spent. If wealth is spent by you or anyone else who did not produce it, one can hardly consider it saved, speaking from the point of view of the person who did earn it. That the wealth within the nation is "America's" wealth is a common misconception promoted by our educators. No one admires true education more than I, but I believe it to be overrated as a society building mechansim; we were arguably a greater nation when half of us did not complete high school and fewer than ten per cent completed college. People used to evaluate their abilities and deserts more accurately. Plus, fewer educators wore out the revenue teat. We now pretend to be educated by obtaining watered-down degrees; we do it for the money, not the knowledge. Who's greedy in such a situation?

I will not address your unrelated comments about the Iraq war. I learned twenty-five years ago when arguing with Soviet Communists to ignore such non-sequiters; such an argument is on a level with "you're ugly." Much political discourse such in these days when we see debate not as a path to understanding but as a stepping stone to power over others. This last desire is the true sin of many liberals and conservatives alike.

Thanks for the compliment, Duncan. :-)

I was actually trying pretty hard to stay out of the liberal/conservative semantic quagmire (hah!), but unfortunately, couldn't avoid it.

But the point I wanted to make is that it really is disingenuous to deliver lines in the format of "If you like [feature X], thank [liberals/conservatives]." Depending on their outlook, the "liberals" of yesterday could very well be the "conservatives" of today. It all depends on what motivates a person, really: do they hold specific positions, or are they driven by the need to change society's perceived shortcomings (progressive), or preserve its perceived merits (conservative). This need not be mutually exclusive, but political arguments can often be over whether something is a merit or a shortcoming, because a lot of societal features are both.

This can be a bit annoying to ponder in the abstract, but let's just try one example:

Not long ago in the U.S., the notion of racial equality and an officially color-blind society was a radical, progressive idea. The progressive view was that officially, race should not be considered by the government as a factor for dealing with citizens. The conservative view was that segregation kept society stable, etc. Conservatives viewed the separation as a "merit" for keeping down inter-racial conflict. The progressive view was also liberal: they wanted less interference in everyday life; if a black man wanted to drink at a certain fountain, there would be no policeman to deny this to him.

Today, the notion of racial equality and a color-blind government is much more of a right-wing idea. The left-wing viewpoint is that in order to make up for the disadvantages racial minorities endure in a predominantly white society, they are entitled to some concessions in terms of cultural references, job placement, etc. Furthermore, in order to preserve their cultural uniqueness, racial minorities are even entitled to some degree of voluntary segregation -- e.g., all-black dorms, same-race adoption placement, etc. Such thinking would have been abhorrent to many of the civil-rights advocates of the 1960s, especially the more idealistic ones. "Preserving cultural uniqueness" was exactly the justification that anti-integration conservatives used unsuccessfully to defend their positions. The new left-wing position is also far less liberal: there are all sorts of rules and regulations, and thousands of federal, state, and local government agents to enforce it all.

That's how things stand today, and the desire of those on the Left is to preserve (and possibly) expand this. This makes them conservative, actually. The desire of the right wing is to scrap the whole thing, and start over with the principles advocated by the left-wing progressives of the Civil Rights era: a color-blind society where the government refuses to acknowledge a citizen's race in any way. They view the current system as unjust, and want to change it; that makes them progressives. (Note that being progressive in itself is neither good nor bad.) And the society they want is more liberal.

So what we've got in this case is right-wing progressives trying to achieve a more liberal society, espousing the color-blind ideals of 1960s-era left-wing progressives, vs. left-wing conservatives trying to keep society less liberal, because they consider color-blindness unworkable. Which of these guys would Joe Conason have me thank? Which ones are the "liberals"?

The problem is that you can't always discern political motivations behind certain positions. Some take up a cause because they believe that certain societal features are just or unjust; if they reach their goal, they stop and try to preserve their achievements. Thus you could say a conservative is a former progressive who has reached his goal. Others can want to keep going, because a certain goal was just a step towards something else: the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam certainly wanted an end to second-class black citizenship in the U.S., but that wasn't their end goal, and they were hardly liberals in any sense of the word. Should I "thank" them for what they did help accomplish? Should their views (e.g. on gays) have any kind of moral authority?

That's what annoyed me about Conason's appropriation of all the things I consider good in our society today to his camp (which he refers to as "liberals"). Those policies are the result of constant struggle between many sides of our society, and it is completely disingenuous for him to claim that the left wing has always stood for precisely the positions we now occupy. It's not very satisfying, and it's useless for cheap political points, though.

When a real old Joe Conason writes an update to this in 2040 he might be able to add:

* If you can get married to whomever you love and want to spend your life with, no matter what your genders, thank a liberal.

* If your dad kept his health insurance even after he lost his job for awhile, thank a liberal.

* If you appreciate the cleaner air that you breathe and the cheaper fuel because we don't use nearly as much oil to power our cars, thank a liberal.

* If you enjoy walking around instead of suffering from your MS that was cured with a simple series of injections, thank a liberal.

And if those things come to fruition, conservatives will say, "Why does old Joe Conosan say such silly things? We conservatives were always for gay marriage, universal health care, fuel-cell technology, and stem-cell research. We supported those things in 2003 and we support them now."

Liars.

When a real old Joe Conason writes an update to this in 2040 he might be able to add:

* If you can get married to whomever you love and want to spend your life with, no matter what your genders, thank a liberal.

* If your dad kept his health insurance even after he lost his job for awhile, thank a liberal.

* If you appreciate the cleaner air that you breathe and the cheaper fuel because we don't use nearly as much oil to power our cars, thank a liberal.

* If you enjoy walking around instead of suffering from your MS that was cured with a simple series of injections, thank a liberal.

And if those things come to fruition, conservatives will say, "Why does old Joe Conosan say such silly things? We conservatives were always for gay marriage, universal health care, fuel-cell technology, and stem-cell research. We supported those things in 2003 and we support them now."

Liars.

I guess, being from Bizarro World I have more time to actually read posts and such. Way back up thread, Kate said "Conservatives generally want to keep the status quo...and that's fine, while 'liberals' seek to 'challange' it in the hopes of improving society. Each one of Conason's statements is literally correct." Stalin and Lenin certainly were looking to change the world in hopes of improving it, or at least their little corner of it. I know it is a difficult concept, but the bar for being declared an enemy of the state wasn't very high. Lenin and Stalin weren't exactly above declaring political allies or potential allies as enemies in a bid to consolidate power. They weren't so subtle as to play the enemy of my enemy game, it was either you're with us, or you're going to Siberia.

The argument also falls just a little flat when it is proclaimed that the Communists weren't liberals because there was another liberal party. Does that mean that the Democrats aren't liberals because the Green party is liberal, or the Republicans aren't conservative because Libertarians exist? Since the world 'liberal' when Lenin was alive meant essentially what we would describe as a conservative today, you may want to chat with Bruce and see if you can get a class-action going.

I was attempting to show that the liberal policies weren't exactly nothing but sweetnes and light, but rather responsible for far more horror and suffering than anything the worst neocon cabal has ever dreamed up. It just slipped by the 'everything my side has ever done is great, and if someone did something wrong they aren't part of my side' crowd. Wonderful levels of intelluctual maturity, guys.

"If your dad kept his health insurance even after he lost his job for awhile, thank a liberal."

And while you're at it, you can thank a liberal for the fact that your health insurance plan is so intimately tied to your place of employment in the first place. Instead of fixing the problem, the next liberals seem to want to apply more kludges to it.

"If you appreciate the cleaner air that you breathe and the cheaper fuel because we don't use nearly as much oil to power our cars, thank a liberal."

So liberals are going to make alternative fuels cheaper? That's a neat trick!

"If you enjoy walking around instead of suffering from your MS that was cured with a simple series of injections, thank a liberal."

And the pharmaceutical companies.

And if you don't, thank the FDA.

Obviously, it's fruitless trying to define the words "liberal" and "progressive" in terms of policy positions. That doesn't work, because positions can change over time. Obviously, assuming for a moment that Lincoln was a liberal, it's hard to predict what his policy positions would be today.

But we can look at movements. The liberal/progressive movement beginning in the industrial era was one that sought to protect individuals from corporate and racial hegemony. The liberal movement that exists today descended from that early one, and still shares the same motiviations, if not particular policy positions. We admire Lincoln, TR, FDR, and MLK, because of -- in shorthand -- their support for the underdog who was seeking, at various times, the right to vote, a jood job, healthcare, retirement security, workplace safety, etc. Those accomplishments, therefore, are the accomplishments of modern "liberalism," or whatever word you want to use. They are the accomplishments of string of public servant linking Lincoln to the Roosevelts to Clinton.

No, Amitava, thank the economic progress that allowed people the time and excess energy to think them worthwhile. It's that whole hierarchy of needs things writ large. The "liberal/progressive" policies are second and third tier needs that won't be fulfilled until the first tier needs are satisfied.

"Does that mean that the Democrats aren't liberals because the Green party is liberal,"

I don't recall the Democrats and US Green Party fighting in a civil war against each other (as did the Kadets, most prominent Mensheviks, and the [Right] Social Revolutionaries did against the Bolsheviks? Have the Greens declared the Democrats "social fascists" like the KDP did in Germany pre-1933, and declared there was no objective difference between them and Hitler's NSDAP?

Have the Democrats & the UK Labor Party proposed an international military alliance against the Greens, as did Acheson & Bevin?

Look. Learn some history about the strands of political thought that you're trying to lump in together. Otherwise we won't have ludicrous arguments like yours, or (as someone did in a similar Tacitus thread) somebody trying to claim Truman [who had a national health service in his platform] as a conservative.

Social democrats & revolutionary communists parted ways in, ohh, 1903 for Russia, at the second congress of the RSDLP. Liberals & social democrats, depending on the particular country, either stayed together in uneasy coalitions or parted, depending on when universal suffrage to males was granted.

Lenin, if anything, saw social democrats as being the prime enemy to his objectives. That's why he organised the Third International, and instructed the revolutionary left to not cooperate with social democrats.

That's why being a member of a democratic centralist group meant explusion from the UK labour party, and why the CIO kicked out the communists in the 1930s.

One can excuse US conservatives for confusing liberals & social democrats, as the Democratic party is a coalition of both, but it takes an exceptional case of cranium ferric accumulation to confuse liberals & social democrats with Marxist-Leninists.

"Stalin and Lenin certainly were looking to change the world in hopes of improving it"

So did Thatcher; and, in the case of Poland (but not necessarily the UK) she succeeded. By your argument above, Thatcher would be a liberal. (She'd be called in the UK a neoliberal economically, but a believer in an authoritarian state; c.f. Anthony Gidden's "The Free Economy and the Strong State" about Thatcherism)

Liberal and radical are not equivalent terms.
Liberal and revolutionary are mutally exclusive terms.

Sidenote: John Dewey, who is the platonic ideal of American Liberalism, held a commission of inquiry into the Moscow show trials in the 1930s, which played a major role in exposing the human rights abuses in the USSR.

Bernard Yomtov wrote:

The evidence that you keep asking for is just ordinary history, as it happened, not as you imagine it happened.

Funny how you have yet to produce any evidence backing up your earlier claim that the South went Republican by having former segregationist Democrats switch parties. Simply saying that it is “just ordinary history, as it happened” without providing details of the supposed “history” isn’t an argument so much as a bluff.

Fo example, despite your tortured logic, southern Democrats switched precisely because the national party had become actively pro-civil rights.

And the evidence of this is what exactly? The South didn’t go Republican until fairly recently when “civil rights” were already a settled matter which it makes it rather silly to claim that they switched because the Democratic Party had gone from a party in favor of discrimination against Blacks to a party in favor of discrimination against Whites and Asians.

To take a more specific example, Thurmond became a Republican in 1964 to back Goldwater. He helped Nixon in 1968 by assuring southerners that Nixon would not press too hard on civil rights.

This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. First of all, by the time Nixon was elected POTUS in 1968 the major “civil rights” legislation was already the law of the land. There isn’t much that he could do in the way of “not press[ing] too hard on civil rights” and I have yet to see any evidence that he did anything to undermine voting rights, equal protection, etc.

On the other hand, as I stated earlier, the Democratic Party was quickly showing that it was no longer a party that could be taken seriously on issues of foreign policy. The debacle at their 1968 convention and selecting George McGovern as the party’s standard bearer in 1972 all helped Nixon’s election and reelection particularly amongst voters who are more likely to be pro-military and pro-America (arguably this is even truer in the South which has a disproportionate representation in the armed forces).

"On the other hand, as I stated earlier, the Democratic Party was quickly showing that it was no longer a party that could be taken seriously on issues of foreign policy. The debacle at their 1968 convention and selecting George McGovern as the party’s standard bearer in 1972 all helped Nixon’s election and reelection particularly amongst voters who are more likely to be pro-military and pro-America (arguably this is even truer in the South which has a disproportionate representation in the armed forces)."

Bingo. It's no accident that it was the election of 1992 when a Democrat broke through and won a Presidential election after a long drought. The Cold War was over, and Clinton's obvious inadequacies as far as his dishonest tactics in evading the draft were seen as irrelevant in that climate. If Clinton had run in 1988 he would have suffered the same fate as Dukakis: if he were running for the first time in 2004, he'd be just another Dwarf with unserious views on national defense and a lot of baggage.

M. Scott Eiland wrote:

Bingo. I'm an admirer of Senator Goldwater, but I disagree with his weighing of rights in this case, as I believe firmly that the right of black citizens to be able to find public accommodations as they travel across the United States justified the (real) limitation on property rights that the Act called for.

I’m afraid I have to disagree with this though. In a free society people have and ought to have the right to do pretty much whatever they want so long as they do not initiate physical force against another. If someone puts a sign that says “no ______ allowed” then they haven’t really done anything to someone else other than refusing to associate with them which isn’t a violation of their rights.

Also as far as “public accommodations” theory goes, it seems to me to be one of those slippery slopes in which private ownership of private property is gradually eroded under some specious notion that if you hold it open to the public (which is questionable since it is doubtful that no owners of an establishment are likely to want everyone and anyone to enter it), then somehow anyone and everyone else has some sort of claim to use it. IMNHO determining what is and is not a “public accommodation” ought to be based on who owns it. If the “public” (read government/citizens/taxpayers) owns something as opposed to private individuals, then and only then should government be able to determine who may and may not use it and require that access not be denied based on ______.

However, the veiled innuendo from the left that his vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made him a racist has always been as asinine as accusations that Hubert Humphrey's support for the Civil Rights Act made him an advocate of racial quotas.

I agree and while I agree with Goldwater’s stance on this issue (the fact that he voted for pretty much every other major piece of civil rights legislation while LBJ used to kill them in committee seems to be lost on revisionists like Bernard Yomtov), it is a difficult thing to articulate. Most people seem to have no problem with the concept that you can defend a person’s right to say offensive things without defending what has been said because speech is usually not the initiation of force or fraud. By that same token, you ought to be able to make a principled case that private organizations (determined by who owns them) and individuals ought to have the right in a free society to discriminate for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all.

Revisionist?

I lived in the south when all this was going on. I read the papers, kept up with the news, etc. The fact is, many of the party switchers were segregationist - Trent Lott comes to mind immediately.

If you really think civil rights was a settled issue in 1964, when Thurmond switched, you know even less than I thought about the period. Most public schools, and most universities, in the south were still segregated, twelve years after Brown vs. Board. The Voting Rights Act was still a year away. There were major issues concerning the enforcement of existing laws and court decisions.

As for Goldwater, no, he was not a racist, but his 1964 vote was a terrible misjudgment at best, and did in fact set back the cause of civil rights putting the nominee of a major party on record as opposing the act. That he was influenced by Rehnquist, who was a racist, (so much for "those guys are all gone") reflects further discredit.

And by the way, Thorley, my post was not just about Goldwater. It also pointed out that lots of leading conservatives vigorously opposed the civil rights movement, so trying to claim it as a conservative cause is laughable.

Once again, Tom. It is not my fucking definition. It was the definition used by Kate above. Before tossing around charges of cranial impaction, learn to read, or comprehend what you read. And again, the Soviets were not above throwing the baby out with the bath water in the 1920s and 30s. People and groups were purged all the time that were allies or ideological soulmates with the Soviets, but were seen as threats to their power. Ergo their hostility to the Nazis.

Oh, and saying Thatcher was trying to turn back the clock to a previous era makes her liberal has a tinge of irony coming from a person tossing around charges of historical illiteracy.

Bernard, what party was Fritz Hollings in again? George Wallace and Sheets Byrd didn't put an (R) behind their name that I can remember. If these men were capable of changing their views on race relations, why are Helms, Lott and the rest incapable.

Joe wrote:
"Once again, Tom. It is not my fucking definition. It was the definition used by Kate above."

Didn't see Kate saying: "Lenin and Stalin could both be charitably described as 'liberal'", Joe.

"Oh, and saying Thatcher was trying to turn back the clock to a previous era makes her liberal has a tinge of irony coming from a person tossing around charges of historical illiteracy."

Thatcher wasn't trying to turn back the clock. She (and Keith Joseph) made a radical break with the one-nation conservatism of the past; they were heavily influenced by Hayek & Friedman. Culturally, she wasn't part of the British establishment. If you want a UK conservative who was trying to turn back the clock, try Enoch Powell.

And, yes, Thatcher can be (and has been) described as a neoliberal. Google on "Thatcher" and "neoliberalism".

"Social democrats & revolutionary communists parted ways in, ohh, 1903 for Russia, at the second congress of the RSDLP. "

Funny how such distinctions are accepted of philosphies of the left, but on the right all we have are heirs of segregation and Jim Crow. No partings are acknowledged despite repeated disavowals of the very policies we are alleged to represent.

Amitava,

You say:

"We admire Lincoln, TR, FDR, and MLK, because of -- in shorthand -- their support for the underdog who was seeking, at various times, the right to vote, a jood job, healthcare, retirement security, workplace safety, etc. Those accomplishments, therefore, are the accomplishments of modern "liberalism," or whatever word you want to use. They are the accomplishments of string of public servant linking Lincoln to the Roosevelts to Clinton. "

Let's say there is someone who believes that everyone should be treated equally before the law. Let's further consider this person to be 100 years old. What are the ramifications?

Convention defines this person as a liberal in his youth and a conservative in his dotage without having changed his views at all. OK so far, the changing nature of political labels seems to be generally accepted (if confusing).

Where we run into a problem is comparing the groups of different eras. The changing nature of views precludes us from inferring anything about the groups. Your comment that today's liberals are "linked" to Lincoln & FDR appears to preclude conservatives from the same link (otherwise neither you nor Conason is even making a point). Returning to my example, the 100 year-old conservative is now excluded from consideration as an intellectual heir of equality despite his support of those very policies. If your method of analysis brings you to such an obvious impossibility, why do you insist it is still valid?

The truth is that you must relinquish group analysis between eras. Such analysis is completely devoid of merit.

Perhaps this stance makes those who engage in it feel better about themselves, after all they're not one of those "conservative troglodytes". Or, perhaps this methodology is simply political posturing: instead of "wrapping yourself in the flag" let's call it "wrapping yourself in the Civil Rights Movement". It's a good way to avoid discussing the merits of any particular piece of legislation, but that doesn't make it correct.

Let me try another analogy.

In Group A we have all SUVs, and in Group B all sports cars. Let's now change the basis on which we group them. Group A will now be foreign cars and Group B domestic.

How is it that you conclude Group B is faster?

The divide between liberal and conservative used to be one thing, now it's another. The original divide is now meaningless as it pertains to the current groups.

"what party was Fritz Hollings in again? George Wallace and Sheets Byrd didn't put an (R) behind their name that I can remember. If these men were capable of changing their views on race relations, why are Helms, Lott and the rest incapable."

I didn't say they were incapable. I said that, in the 60's and early 70's many party switches were motivated by the fact that the national Democratic party had become strongly pro-civil rights. That not all segregationists switched doesn't disprove that. Neither does the fact that many, switchers and not, subsequently changed their views.

Amitava Mazumdar writes:

Obviously, it's fruitless trying to define the words "liberal" and "progressive" in terms of policy positions. That doesn't work, because positions can change over time...

But we can look at movements.

Exactly. But then you have to ask: what defines liberalism or progressivism -- the positions they take, or the movements they launch? If it's the positions, then the progressives of today can't use them for moral authority, because they no longer occupy those positions. If it's the movements, then I fail to see why I should give thanks to a movement for achieving a position that was only an intermediate step anyways. Again, must I give thanks to the Nation of Islam for the end of racial segregation? Must I give them moral authority on other forms of segregation -- e.g. by sexual orientation?

The liberal/progressive movement beginning in the industrial era was one that sought to protect individuals from corporate and racial hegemony.The liberal movement that exists today descended from that early one, and still shares the same motiviations, if not particular policy positions.

Even assuming this is true, it is incomplete. Lots of other movements also descended from those of the industrial era that had the motivations you describe. Nazism and communism certainly fit the bill -- both worked to help "the people" against "the powerful." Neither carries much moral authority. Many -- I daresay most -- of the horrors of the past century were committed by movements that were rather solidly left-wing, in principles economic, political, or both. Collectivism -- something abhorrent to today's American Right, but not at all out of vogue on the Left -- was virtually their only common element.

Furthermore, not subscribing to modern "liberalism" does not mean that you reject the notions of racial equality, for example; that legacy is not the unique birthright of the modern Left. If anything, today's Right is much more committed to the principle; the Left is more liable to demand concessions and government policies motivated by race. No one would mistake Ward Connerly for a left-winger today; in the 1950s, his positions would have made him radically liberal. And "racial hegemony" is one of those concepts that's in the eye of the beholder.

We admire Lincoln, TR, FDR, and MLK, because of -- in shorthand -- their support for the underdog who was seeking, at various times, the right to vote, a jood job, healthcare, retirement security, workplace safety, etc.

Perhaps. Or perhaps we admire them for standing up for individuals against tyrannical societies: Lincoln against slavery (well, not really, but never mind), FDR and Churchill against Nazism, MLK against Jim Crow, and oh by the way, Reagan and Thatcher against communism. (Ask the Russians, the Poles, and the Czechs who they credit with their liberation. I guarantee you Jimmy Carter won't show up on the list.) Frankly, when I think of FDR's achievements, the Rural Electrification Commission is not topmost on my list. If we went solely by the criteria of creating entitlements, LBJ would have to be the greatest President who ever lived.

Which is the point I was trying to make. If you define your movement as the guys who fought for "a jood job, healthcare, retirement security, workplace safety, etc.", you'd better be including Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, and a large set of other "luminaries" into your list of compatriots. If you define your group, instead, as having held certain positions, then you can't claim all the credit for the left wing. Not the left wing of today, anyhow.

Those accomplishments, therefore, are the accomplishments of modern "liberalism," or whatever word you want to use. They are the accomplishments of string of public servant linking Lincoln to the Roosevelts to Clinton.

I can't decide whether I find the last sentence of this quote fatuous, or simply gratuitous. I'm sure we can all draw whatever threads we wanted between public figures, but I could just as easily create one going from Lincoln to FDR to Reagan (defeat of murderous tyranny), or from Wilson to Johnson to Bush (assertion of American power overseas), or, most gratuitously, from Stalin to Mao to Buchanan to Gore (demagoguery and "people vs. powerful" class warfare).

Sorry, but I don't play that game. To claim that progressive (especially left-wing progressive) movements alone are responsible for the good things in our society today is simply self-serving; one would at least have to acknowledge that the conservative and right-wing movements did much to prevent damage from progressive excesses (evident in places where conservatism failed -- Germany, Russia, China, Cambodia, etc. being the most obvious examples). It's as lame as Conason's original list, to which counter-examples are quite easily given. One might at least ask why, in places where the left wing was allowed to run unchecked, the populations are significantly poorer, health care is vastly inferior, food is scarce and of poorer quality, environments are destroyed, and labor camps exist. And just whom Joe would have us "thank" for that.

Oh boy, another silly list. Let's see what the future "conservative" might say:

* If you can get married to whomever you love and want to spend your life with, no matter what your genders, thank a liberal.

If you can get married to whomever you love without having to prove how your coupling would benefit society at large, promote diversity, and not result in further damage to Mother Earth, thank a conservative.

* If your dad kept his health insurance even after he lost his job for awhile, thank a liberal.

If you are able to take advantage of the latest medical innovations, provided by competent doctors, without you having to wait two months for an appointment at a clinic understaffed because the "need" wasn't there, thank a conservative.

If your daily regimen is not rigidly controlled by health nuts, thank a conservative. After all, The People can hardly be expected to fund treatment for your heart attack if you smoke and eat steak.

* If you appreciate the cleaner air that you breathe and the cheaper fuel because we don't use nearly as much oil to power our cars, thank a liberal.

If you are able to have a private car and travel wherever you wish without having to "demonstrate need" and ride on a packed bus to protect Mother Earth from human pollution, thank a conservative.

If you still have access to technological innovation and are not just struggling to keep running some 40-year-old tub because of lack of resources due to the failure of yet another Five Year Plan, thank a conservative.

If your travel is not obstructed every 25 miles by checkpoints manned by an Army that invaded 10 years ago, thank a conservative.

If you are able to appreciate the cleaner air because the energy industry has not regressed back 50 years due to neglect at the hands of People's Committees, thank a conservative.

* If you enjoy walking around instead of suffering from your MS that was cured with a simple series of injections, thank a liberal.

If research into new diseases is still funded, and drugs are still made in large quantities that most people have access to without rationing or the black market, thank a conservative.

It's a dumb game, but it sure is fun.

And if those things come to fruition, conservatives will say, "Why does old Joe Conosan say such silly things? We conservatives were always for gay marriage, universal health care, fuel-cell technology, and stem-cell research. We supported those things in 2003 and we support them now."

Liars.

Wow. Someone get me a broom; I have straw to sweep...

And for the record, I'm not trying to discredit all left-supported policies in the previous post. But these Conason-style lists are idiocy on stilts (from both sides), and I coulnd't resist slumming it a little.

E. Nough (and others):

Frankly, I just don't know where to go from here. If we can't discuss an intellectual and political tradition, liberal or conservative, without trying to squeeze in Mao and Hitler somewhere, then obviously some of us aren't even making an attempt to understand the point of view of others.

I agree that history and life are complicated enough that maybe liberals today can't claim to be the sole heirs to Thomas Jefferson (or whomever you wish to pick). But it seems to me to be patently absurd to not permit people who support things like social security, minimum wage, workplace safety, and environmental protection to feel a part of the tradition begun by those who enacted those laws. And those people were people who fought powerful business interests and racial interests in order to reach their goals. For Pete's sake, the conservative movement today continues to oppose minimum wage, AFDC (as a result, it doesn't exist anymore), environmental regulations, etc. Not even Social Security, the crown jewel of liberalism, is sancrosanct. If Ronald Reagan can feel close enough to the conservative intellectual tradition to restore a long abandoned portrait of Calvin Coolidge, why can't a liberal today feel proud of the accomplishments of his liberal predecessors. The degree to which you all are trying co-opt victories away from modern liberals -- victories that you don't even really cherish (minimum wage? labor rights? that ponzy scheme, social security?) -- is just pure ideological gamesmanship.

Why is it illegitimate to keep tally of what your world view has accomplished? I never asserted that the only good things ever done were done by liberals. The foundation of our capitalist system was set down by the conservative, quasi-monarchist Alexander Hamilton. That's at the early end. More recently, in my view, Dan Quayle was absolutely correct to return our attention to the importance of fatherhood. If you want to keep a tally of the success of your world view, then do so. Why can't I?

My political heroes enacted social security, medicare, the right to strike, the minimum wage, clean air and clean water, and the politicians I currently support work to protect those legislative programs. Is this playing a "game"? Hardly.

Finally, to those who think it unproven that the civil rights movement was the beginning of the end of the New Deal Democrat coalition need to pick up a history book. And read about the souther strategy. It's pretty much settled history.

THIS thread is still going? At 150 posts? Ack, the voices! Out of my head! OUT!

But it seems to me to be patently absurd to not permit people who support things like social security, minimum wage, workplace safety, and environmental protection to feel a part of the tradition begun by those who enacted those laws.

And since Conason's argument trades heavily on the fact that the Good Things in his list are now uncontroversial with everyone save a relative handful of paleos and libertarians (not surprisingly, as they were chosen for that very reason), it follows that it would also be absurd not to let ordinary conservatives feel a part of that very same tradition. Once we admit that, Conason's point dries up and blows away. With whom, then, is he contrasting liberals?

Amitava,

"why can't a liberal today feel proud of the accomplishments of his liberal predecessors"

He can. As can "conservatives" who also believe what past "liberals" believed.

What today's liberals can't do is claim nearly universally supported accomplishments as their own, and thereby imply that all others oppose these accomplishments despite obvious evidence to the contrary.

Amitava,

Well said.

Tom, Kate gave a definition of liberalism that applied equally well to Lenin as too the 'good guys'. I was trying to point out the silliness of the argument. If you have any other questions, refer to E.Noughs post.

"maybe liberals today can't claim to be the sole heirs to Thomas Jefferson"

You my friend, have mastered the art of the understatement.

Amitava, at the risk of annoying anony-mouse even more: I did not take the left-wingers to task for claiming credit for social security; I doubt conservatives want the credit -- or "credit," as they would say if they felt charitable. I give no credit to conservatives for the minimum wage, because many, if not most, wouldn't take it either.

But Conason wasn't claiming credit for Medicare, or Social Security, or minimum wage, or the Helium Reserves. He claimed credit for our air being clean, our food not being poisoned, and us making a "living wage." Well, sorry, but no dice -- humanity survived for quite a while without the FDA, ya know. He didn't claim credit for programs, he claimed credit for the good things that those programs were meant to achieve, regardless of how successful they were -- and painted his opposition as being for dirty air, poisoned food, and children dying of black lung disease. It was an ugly tactic (see my blog for a demonstration from the other angle), with an ugly and hateful and self-aggrandizing purpose. Liberals can claim full credit for wealth redistribution and activist government, yes, -- but not for prosperity or progress. There's a difference, and the inability to see it is a pretty sure sign of being one of the choir that Conason so earnestly preached to.

Finally, to those who think it unproven that the civil rights movement was the beginning of the end of the New Deal Democrat coalition need to pick up a history book. And read about the souther strategy. It's pretty much settled history.

Now THAT's an idea!! History books aren't politically biased at all!

Bernard Yomtov wrote:

The fact is, many of the party switchers were segregationist -

And the evidence for this is what exactly? Give us some numbers on how many segregationist Democrats switched their party affiliation to Republicans, when they switched parties, and what the evidence is as to why they switched. One or two anecdotes aren’t data.

Trent Lott comes to mind immediately.

Really, when was Trent Lott ever a Democrat? The only thing I’ve heard is that he, much like William Jefferson Clinton, worked for a segregationist Democratic Senator – neither of whom ever switched parties which contradicts your thesis.

If you really think civil rights was a settled issue in 1964, when Thurmond switched, you know even less than I thought about the period.

Burn strawman, burn. I said that the major “civil rights” legislation was pretty much passed by then and more importantly (to the point I made in my last post which Bernard Yomtov has skipped over) by the time the South went GOP, the issue was pretty much settled. I’m still waiting for evidence to back up his earlier claim that Nixon wasn’t going to “push too hard on civil rights.”

As for Goldwater, no, he was not a racist,

Wait a minute now. If Bernard Yomtov is now finally admitting that Goldwater wasn’t a racist, it undermines the claim that Southern Democrats became Republicans to support segregation. Unless he has something else to prove this.

but his 1964 vote was a terrible misjudgment at best, and did in fact set back the cause of civil rights putting the nominee of a major party on record as opposing the act.

And by the way, Thorley, my post was not just about Goldwater. It also pointed out that lots of leading conservatives vigorously opposed the civil rights movement, so trying to claim it as a conservative cause is laughable.

Actually it did no such thing. You made some allusions to William F Buckley Jr. (no specifics) without providing any evidence. On the other hand, I’ve named three Democrats of the decidedly liberal persuasion who each acted legislatively to stop major “civil rights” legislation while you have noticeably failed to provide any evidence to prove your earlier charge that there was some massive exodus of Southern Democrats to the GOP and they changed affiliations over segregation and “civil rights” issues. I stand by my earlier statement that most segregationist Democrats including the liberal ones such as William Fullbright remained Democrats and the switch of that region’s political affiliation is more closely correlated with the Democratic party’s implosion on foreign policy matters.

Oh for those who are interested in some harder facts (since Bernarnd Yomtov does not appear to have any), Steven Taylor of PoliBlog did an excellent piece on examining the South’s switch to Republicanism and how it doesn’t correlate to the so-called “Southern Strategy.” Here are some of the highlights:

Presidential Races

• Tennessee voted for Harding, a Republican, in 1920. • Texas went Republican in 1928 for Hoover (as did VA, TN, NC and FL) • Texas, Virginia, Tennessee and Florida went for Ike in 1948, as they did in 1952 (adding LA). • TN, VA and FL went for Nixon in 1960 • In 1964 LA, MS, AL, GA, and SC went for Goldwater • In 1968 most of the “Deep” South went for Wallace—clearly for racial reasons. • In 1972 everywhere but MA and DC went for Nixon. • In 1976 only VA went Republican, the rest went for Carter. • In 1980, only GA went for Carter, and in 1984 only MN and DC went for Mondale. • In 1988 Bush won all of the South, with 92 and 96 being a split, and G. W. Bush swept the South in 2000.

Based on this it looks like there were some Southern States which voted GOP for President pre-“civil rights” movement and in some cases more than went for Nixon in 1968. In 1972, pretty much the whole nation (sans Massachusetts and DC) went GOP which doesn’t really support the CW of a “Southern Strategy.” The data on when Southern States began electing GOP Senators though is the particularly enlightening:

• Alabama elects it first post-Reconstruction Republican US Senator in 1980. The state doesn’t have two Republicans until 1997. One of the current Senators (Shelby) was a Democrat until 1994. • Arkansas has had one post-Reconstruction Rep Senate: from 1997-2003. • Georgia has elected all of three post-Reconstruction Republican Senators. and has never had two Rep Senators at the same time. They were elected in 1980, 1986 and 2002. • Louisiana hasn’t had a Republican Senator since 1883. • Mississippi elected its first Republican Senator in 1978, and had two Reps starting in 1989. • NC has had 5 total Rep Senators since Reconstruction. Jesse Helms came to office in 1973 (the rest coming in the 1980s or later). • SC has had only two—the party-switching Strom Thurmond, and his successor, Lindsey Graham. • TN has had 5 post-Reconstruction Era Reps. • Texas has had four Republicans in Senate seats (first one was in 1961, the second (who replaced the first) was in 1985), and only had two at the same time starting in 1993. Ironically, two of the first three Republicans were elected in special elections (John Tower took over when LBJ became VEEP and Kay Bailey Hutchison won Lloyd Bentsen’s seat when he became Clinton’s first SecTreas). • VA has had four Senators in the 20th Century—the first was in 1972.

Note that most of the States which had Republican Senators did so in the 1980s after the “civil rights” legislation was a settled matter. I ask again, where is the evidence of this massive exodus of southern Democrats to the Republican party over “civil rights”?

Uh, that MJ person lacks a grasp of history.
Liberals today have exactly the same amount of guilt of Soviet mass murders as conservatives do for denying women's suffrage. Which is to say, none
Posted by: mj on August 18, 2003 11:59 AM

In the historical record, the Joseph Stalin has far more in common with conservatives like Hitler, Joseph McCarthy, or John Ashcroft than with "liberals today" like Ralph Nader. Unlike the astounding sameness of the past conservatives who denied women's voting rights and civil rights compared to today's gay-rights-denying conservatives.

And what's up with these laissez-faire capitalist yearning morons. Do you really want a country composed of what is effectively a wage-slave class majority and a tiny ultra-rich majority? That's the equilibrium state after a couple generations of unregulated capitalism.

Chris,

Is there some point in making a post consisting entirely of insults five days after the debate has ended? Does it make you feel special or something?

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