Quote:
Originally Posted by scottw
"Liberals are capable of independent thought and can see the big picture and separate the good from the bad and weigh their judgements. Liberals are mostly very educated and are in carreers that use their creative minds.
Conservatives tend to be more rigid in their thought process, are very good at being told what rules work and they follow them. That's why conservatives love religion and the military. . "
still trying to make sense of this....are these the same indpendent free thought liberals that seek to tax, regulate and administer control via a massive centralized bureaucracy over every aspect of American life with their big picture good judgments which I guess is to control those Conservatives who yearn controlling as they complain about trivial things like freedom and liberty and personal responsibility?
must be a left/right brain thing
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It's hard to make sense of a paradox other than to accept it for what it is. Maybe understanding the origination sheds light on why it is whatever it is. The liberal/conservative paradox in which what is purported to be "liberal" is actually authoritarian, and what is considered to be "conservative" (a supposedly rigid, authoritarian complex) is a structure for individual freedom. How did this come to be?
Two nearly simultaneous revolutions both of which were to promote liberty, the American and French revolutions, started from different circumstances and ended with different results. The Americans actually had a great degree of freedom before their revolution, more, for the common man than may have existed in advanced cultures before that time. Their revolution was about keeping that freedom from being usurped by a distant ruling power and ensuring that no ruling power, domestic or foreign, could ever take away that liberty. The French were about getting a freedom that common men did not have.
The Americans created a system derived not only from the centuries of different governing models, but also from their own experience of liberty under loose British rule in the colonies. It was a system created by a people that were relatively free to make their way, and that initiative and self-responsibility engendered a vision which relied on dispersed individual and local power rather than a central authority.
The French experienced and understood, in spite of and contrary to even their own political philosophers such as Montesque, power to be distributed from a ruling class. In the case of their revolution, the ruling class, the monarchy, was to be overthrown and replaced by another ruling class supported by "the people." Their liberty would be an enforced equality.
Each was a "liberal" revolution in that there was a liberation from monarchical rule. The Americans were merely keeping and ensuring freedom, the French would administer and enforce a new freedom of "equality."
Somehow, after about a hundred years, sophisticated American students taught by an emerging class of "progressive" thinkers and scholars that, especially those who went abroad to "better" German and French universities, became more enamored of the burgeoning European idea of "equality" which was growing like a wildfire there, concocted by the likes of Marx and French social theorists, and co-opted and quelled by the ruling class with a system of bureaucratic administration which doled out new systems of welfare and pensions. After all, a founding principle was that all men were created equal, and they saw that Americans were NOT all equal. And they perceived that the wealthy were lording it over the common man. And they admired the system of German and French administration as far more efficient than the cumbersome American system and as far more capable of distributing material good in a more equitable fashion. And they believed that the European system could be "Americanized," that the control of the ruling class could be replaced by freer American governmental ways.
The so-called liberals of today are more inheritors of the French revolution and dissenters against the outcome of the American revolution. As I see it, what is called "liberal" has become an embodiment of that European centralized administration of equal distribution ENFORCED by government. What is called "conservative" is a mixed bag, the ostensible core of which is preservation of the original system of individual and local sovereignty. Hence the paradox. "Conservatism" is actually more "liberal" in the classical sense in that it conserves individual liberation from central government power. "Liberalism" is actually more like what the "liberals" refer to as "conservatism," a rigid attempt to control the distribution and redistribution of material well being in a supposedly equal outcome.