I'm a dumb liberal

[lehighguy]

The value of responses will no doubt mirror the value of this post.

[XxGodJrxX]

[ QUOTE ]
So if abortion is legal for a 100 years, then a "liberal" will want abortion to be illegal and a "conservative" would want abortion to be legal.....yeah right.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, that IS right (kinda). If, historically, there had been a strong (not limited) government, then the conservative position would be to keep the strong government, and the liberal position would be something other than that, either a weaker government or an even stronger government. On a left-right spectrum, the farther to the right you go, the more regressive, and the farther left, the more progressive; the farthest points will be radical on the left and regressive on the right.

You are looking at the parties as they are now, but a liberal two-hundred years ago was not in favor of abortion. The meanings change.

If you want to know where Conservatism as a philosophy originated, I suggest you google or Wikipedia Edmund Burke.

[Felix_Nietsche]

Yeah, that IS right (kinda).
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Er.....No
I'll take William F. Buckley's defintion over this stupid defintion.

[XxGodJrxX]

What is that definition. I would love to know what definition of Conservatism is better than the one that is fact.

[vulturesrow]

Waxie,

IF you are up for some dense reading, you cant do any better than Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot.

[lehighguy]

What's a progressive and regressive?

[XxGodJrxX]

Progressive = Progress. Going Forward with a new idea. For example, at the time, Civil Rights was a progressive movement, since there had never been such a thing in the USA. On the same token, Communism was also a progressive movement for the same reasons.

Regressive = Going to a past system. People that, for example, prefer monarchies or other absolutist regimes would be regressive. Fascism was all about yearning to recapture the past glory of Germany, which made it regressive. Abortion is a conservative value because it is based in tradition and was illegal in the (what Conservatives perceive to be a better) past.

These descriptions do not necessarily apply to Democrats or Republicans. In my opinion, most people in the United States, whether they describe themselves as Conservative or Liberal are fairly close to each other when it comes to political ideology and both are pretty close to the center on the leftist-right wing scale. That is a discussion for another day though, since that would be getting off topic.

[lehighguy]

Please copy this into the progressive/regressive thread I started. I'm to busy multi tabling to address it now, though there are more then enough qualified people to make you ask yourself a few questions.

[ QUOTE ]
I'm a dumb liberal.

[/ QUOTE ]

waxie, you may be a lot of things, but dumb ain't one of 'em.

Unenlightend about certain matters, probably.

Idealistic toward many issues, certainly.

But dumb? Nah.

[img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[CORed]

[ QUOTE ]
3. Practicality over naive idealism - see conservative beliefs on economics/social engineering, etc.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, you wouldn't see any practical, hard-headed conservative trying to do hair-brained social engineering like trying to impose democracy on Middle Eastern dictatorship by military force. Oh, wait.