Roger responds;
I could have sworn I gave 9 specific liberal-inspired
examples which I am pretty sure conservatives defend.
Perhaps your browser is broken? Are you suggesting that
conservatives DONT stand for (to name the most obvious,
least contentious ones) LIMITED GOVERNMENT, DEMOCRACY,
TRIAL BY JURY, FREE ENTERPRISE, or FREE SPEECH (or
other Jeffersonian "rightful liberties")? Or are you
suggesting that these aren't intellectually inspired?
Or that these aren't what was called classical
LIBERALISM in prior centuries?
DMB says:
The other four of the nine you listed are the Emancipation Proclaimation,
Women's rights, Civil Rights, and Collective Bargaining. Claiming that
Conservatives have adopted women's rights, civil rights and union rights is
a stretch at best. The Republicans are still fighting against these causes
in countless ways, subtley and otherwise. I'll give you the proclaimation.
And I want to congratulate you for having the tremendous moral courage it
takes to be opposed to slavery. You're a very big man.
The five listed above are a little more defensable as conservative
positions, but not much. DEMOCRACY seems like a slam dunk, but then there's
Florida and that South American coup that the Bushies supported. And there's
also the whole empire thing. I'll give you TRIAL BY JURY, but also point out
that conservatives tend to view the rights of the accused as a mere
technicality and there are quite a number of secretly detained suspects
sitting in prison even as you read this. The Bush administration's treatment
of criminal suspects seems to pay little respect to their legal rights. FREE
SPEECH was discouraged when the President's spokeman told the press corps to
"watch what you say", when the Attorney General asserted that his critics
were "giving aid and comfort to the enemy", when it re-instituted a gag rule
on women's health clinics all over the world. (Guess what they couldn't talk
about?) LIMITED GOVERNMENT used to be about protecting us from
unaccountable, unelected, and tyrannical power. But to today's conservatives
it means an un-regulated economy, where corporations can exercise
unaccoutable, unelected and tyrannical power. Naturally, this irony is
completely lost on them. And finally, that brings us to FREE ENTERPRISE. I
don't know that this is a genuinely Jeffersonian idea, but its worth
addressing. News flash: liberals aren't opposed to free enterprise. They
object when the imperitives of the market trample on people's rights, but
that doesn't make them commies. When Conservatives talk about free
enterprise, they mean it in that quasi-theological, "invisible hand" sort of
way, which puts the market uber all, as if the economy were the most
important thing in the world, and businessmen are the lords of that world.
Ain't that creepy?
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