Conservative - Different meanings (1 Viewer)

[KarmaPolice]

This would be laughable if there wasn't currently a cancel-culture issue going on in this country and the rest of western "civilization".  They're reaching tens, hundreds and thousands of years back to cancel people.

0 clue what that had to do with my post or SCs claims, but ok? 

 

[BladeRunner]

0 clue what that had to do with my post or SCs claims, but ok? 

Yeah, me neither.  Not sure where I was going with this.  I think I thought I was on a roll from the other thread. 

Post hidden.

 

[KarmaPolice]

Yeah, me neither.  Not sure where I was going with this.  I think I thought I was on a roll from the other thread. 

Post hidden.

Happens to the best of us. 

 

[CletiusMaximus]

It's all about time, erosion, and the change of words. Being a "conservative" person meant the first definition, BladeRunner notwithstanding. In time, most people that had a conservative temperament favored things such as free enterprise over socialism, which was a more radical transformation of society than keeping a basic market-based system. Given that, then conservative-minded people started teaming with those who favored free enterprise and we have today's lexical conundrum, which is where a "conservative" actually opts for the dynamism of the free market rather than the old world socialism of the hunter-gatherers and argiculturalists, which predate free-market theory. 

It all depends where you're starting and what your frame of reference is to. If by "conservative" one means that the beginning point is the Enlightenment free-marketers, then yes, a conservative hearkens back to this as his or her reference point. This is what we mean by "conservative" today. 

if it hearkens back something else, then the term "conservative" as applied to politics makes no sense in its modern context. 

It's just like the political designation "liberal" doesn't even mean what "classical liberal" used to mean. Even within a political context, the word changed. 

Certainly the classic definitions of these terms have little meaning anymore and I think it’s happened fairly recently. The meaning today is simply that “liberal” is associated with the Democratic Party and “conservative” means Republican, regardless of context. Even as recently as Reagan and into the Bush years one could say “conservative” was tied to traditional notions of free enterprise, small government, civil liberties and free trade. The current GOP, particularly as represented by Donald Trump, is extremely anti-conservative as to essentially every pillar of the concept. Early on, when Tump repeatedly referred to NAFTA as the worst trade deal in history I thought - this won’t go over very well - but of course it didn’t matter because most people associate NAFTA with Clinton, so it’s assumed to be a liberal / commie project rather than the end product of something started by Reagan and continued under Bush. At the same time, it’s laughable to me to think Joe Biden and the current Democratic Party are uniformly  “liberal” but of course that is the accepted reference in common discourse, so I’ve also come to accept it.