What is a "real" conservative or "real" liberal?
- Thread starter Jericho9mm
- Start date
invention_45
New member
I don't really need a quiz. I know pretty much where I stand.
Overall: 65% Conservative, 35% Liberal
Social Issues: 10% Conservative, 90% Liberal
Personal Responsibility: 90% Conservative, 10% Liberal
Fiscal Issues: 80% Conservative, 20% Liberal
Ethics: - judgment call - doesn't make sense
Defense: 50/50
Crime: 90% Conservative, 10% Liberal
The last two categories are not the same thing.
Overall: 65% Conservative, 35% Liberal
Social Issues: 10% Conservative, 90% Liberal
Personal Responsibility: 90% Conservative, 10% Liberal
Fiscal Issues: 80% Conservative, 20% Liberal
Ethics: - judgment call - doesn't make sense
Defense: 50/50
Crime: 90% Conservative, 10% Liberal
The last two categories are not the same thing.
Carbiner,
As I already said, Democrats are bad for gun rights.
I was just pointing out that they didn't work in a vacuum and plenty of Republicans ALSO voted for the Crime Bill, etc. And of course, the most damaging Executive order came from Bush.
Reps are a better bet, but far from a sure thing.
As I already said, Democrats are bad for gun rights.
I was just pointing out that they didn't work in a vacuum and plenty of Republicans ALSO voted for the Crime Bill, etc. And of course, the most damaging Executive order came from Bush.
Reps are a better bet, but far from a sure thing.
I'm going to climb out on a limb here. Feel free to pick me off if I'm wrong.
Most folks on this board are neither liberal or conservative, but simply libertarian.
Most of us simply want to be left the f*&^ alone, especially by our government. Most of us are willing to let each other get on with each other's lives in exchange for our own right to do the same.
Most of us don't really like either party and are voting for the lesser of two evils because they won't offer somebody we really like.
If I'm wrong, 10x me and I'll take my lumps.
But if I'm right.....why the heck are we bashing each other over the head?
Most folks on this board are neither liberal or conservative, but simply libertarian.
Most of us simply want to be left the f*&^ alone, especially by our government. Most of us are willing to let each other get on with each other's lives in exchange for our own right to do the same.
Most of us don't really like either party and are voting for the lesser of two evils because they won't offer somebody we really like.
If I'm wrong, 10x me and I'll take my lumps.
But if I'm right.....why the heck are we bashing each other over the head?
MeekAndMild
New member
GoSlash, your definition of libertarian sounds like a pre 1970 conservative. 
If so, it's them that moved away from us, not us that moved away from them. I wasn't around in '70, so I can't really comment.
If you listen to the liberals on this board...I mean really listen, you'd see that they're really just supporting the same ideals you are. It's not that the government moved more 'left' or 'right', it's that the government moved more authoritarian.
Whether it's the Dems telling us the Federal government should dictate how we raise our kids or the Reps telling us the Federal government should dictate who we're allowed to raise our kids with....it's all the same thing really.
Why don't we focus our efforts on what's really wrong? It's not a left vs. right thing, it's a people vs. government thing.
To call National Socialism a movement of the Left is simply a distortion of history. The NSDAP was no more Socialist than the GDR was a democratic republic. Nazism was a rightist, nationalist ideology. There were some Nazis who were Socialists. Ernst Roehm comes to mind. They all got quite dead in the 1934 "Blood Purge." Hitler had them killed to placate the Army and the large business and industrial interests he needed for rearmament.
In reality, not one of the Socialist points in the Nazis' "25 Demands" were ever carried out. All evidence is that Hitler never intended them to be. They were merely to fool the rubes. Hitler himself was bored by economics, and knew almost nothing about it. Workers in the Nazi state were pretty much serfs, and large industries and wealthy agricultural landowners were given pretty much a free hand, so long as they didn't do anything to undermine Hitler's power. Wages in Germany declined during the pre-war period, even as unemployment went to almost zero. If you didn't have a job, and in 1933 many people didn't, you were sent to work on state projects like the Autobahns, or the Western Wall. Most of which were, of course, really preparations for the war that Hitler intended to start from the beginning.
There have been, and will continue to be, dictators from both the Left and the Right. Hitler was a dictator of the Right. If that makes conservatives uncomfortable, that's too bad. The Left has Lenin, Stalin and Mao, the Right gets Hitler, Mussolini and Franco.
--Shannon
MeekAndMild
New member
tube_ee, It might be helpful to look at what Right and Left really mean. From Wikipedia:
Hitler was solidly from the Left, supporting the rising classes against the aristocracy.
Further, given the state of American politics it would seem that Conservativism in government is a myth, a boogyman that demogogues drag out to scare the children. The only thing I see close to rightist thought in modern politics is protection of corporate wealth, but that is a philosophy of both parties. Again from Wikipedia:
Many thanks to Wikipedia! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum
Hitler was solidly from the Left, supporting the rising classes against the aristocracy.
Further, given the state of American politics it would seem that Conservativism in government is a myth, a boogyman that demogogues drag out to scare the children. The only thing I see close to rightist thought in modern politics is protection of corporate wealth, but that is a philosophy of both parties. Again from Wikipedia:
Many thanks to Wikipedia! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum
Seriously, how do you figure? The Nazi power base started in the Army officer corps, which was almost purely aristocratic. There were a heck of a lot of "vons" in OKW and the Wermacht General Staff. In addition, one of the Nazis' first major economic laws bound the farmers to the land they worked on the large Junker estates in Prussia. The Junkers were the German "landed gentry," owners of large agricultural estates. Not only did the Nazis not break them up, as the German socialists and marxists wanted, but they forgave millions of Reichsmarks in debt that the Junkers owned.
Hitler would do just about anything the industrialists wanted, so long as they funded the party and helped Germany rearm. In return, they got all of their labor problems solved by government decree. Labor unions were banned, wages were lowered, hours were lengthened, and profits soared. After the start of the war, they were provided with slave labor from conquered territories in the East. Until their factories were obliterated by Allied bombing, German industry was well compensated for their cooperation with the Nazis.
Hitler was very cagy with the use of words like "socialist" and "worker." In Hitler's dictionary, a "socialist" was "Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of his nation; whoever has understood our great national anthem 'Deutschland Uber Alles,' to mean that nothing in the wide world surpasses in his eyes this Germany, people and land - that man is a Socialist." Similarly, he defined a "worker" as anyone who played any role in the economy. In Nazi parlance, the man on the assembly line and Herr Krupp were both "workers." Nazi ideology also ranked "workers" by the amount they (and those under them) produced. So a factory owner was not only a worker, but a more valued worker than the man on the line. It was his right, as the superior man, to rule over those under him.
None of this conforms to any "Leftist" ideology I ever heard of. In all of this, I'm using the left/right definitions from the 20th century, which have only some resemblance to the orgins of those terms.
--Shannon
MeekAndMild
New member
OK, so how do you explain Hitler's emphasis on equality of outcome for all the master race, redistribution of wealth and income from the Jews and others, interventionist economic policy, disruption of traditional religious and sexual values in his desire to breed Aryans, equality among the Germanic peoples, attempts to mold human nature via behavior control, promotion of secular State religion, collectivist partnership between the State and industry, attempts to forg a new internationalism based on race?
I would posit that just as we accepted Lenin's and Stalin's self definition of their Russian state capitalism as Socialism, so we should accept Hitler's self definition of his regime as Socialism.
One point that seems to be missing here is that Conservativism is neither Left nor Right, but is rather all the mass in the middle.
I would posit that just as we accepted Lenin's and Stalin's self definition of their Russian state capitalism as Socialism, so we should accept Hitler's self definition of his regime as Socialism.
One point that seems to be missing here is that Conservativism is neither Left nor Right, but is rather all the mass in the middle.
That would be an inequal outcome for all except 'the master race'. Just the way it is, ya know? 'Cuz the Aryans are superior.
The wealth redistribution was incidental. May as well pull their teeth out before you bury them.
At home or abroad? At home he was very much non-interventionist. Abroad...well, that's kinda inevitable when you're in a war of conquest.
Hitler was the Catholic poster-boy. Let's not pretend that he wasn't.
Behavior control? What, like 'get in that gas chamber'?
Huh? He was promoting Catholicism. Maybe you're thinking of Stalin?
Okay, now I know you're making this one up. Their wartime economy was no more 'collectivist' than ours.
Last I checked, the 'master race' wasn't a liberal ideal.
You may very much not like to believe it, but Hitler was marginally free-market and very authoritarian. That means he's right where he's supposed to be on the chart.
I'm sure you would. It'd make you very happy to believe that Hitler was liberal. While you're at it, let's pretend that the PDRK is actually a democracy and the PRC is really a republic....
It's missing because it's not true. If liberalism is on the left and conservatism is in the middle....what do we call the right?
Put down the kool-aid and back away.
FirstFreedom
Moderator
No such thing. They're both false constructs. Next question!
MeekAndMild
New member
Sometimes I feel like an anthropoligist who's blundered into the wrong tribe of head hunters.
Its hard to fight mythology.
All my statements concerning Hitler and his master race/equality/Jewish Holocaust et cetera apply exactly the same way to dictators we unequivocably accept as Leftists. Stalin and his purge of the Ukraine comes to mind although the leftists who masterminded the recent bloodbath in Rwanda are more current. We merely ignore that vast similarity of socialist governments because of the weight of Leftist tradition in the US abhorrs the analogy.
So where did THAT come from? Where do you think his army of 1930's agricultural and construction workers came from?
I'm sure Fr. Maximilian Kolbe would disagree with you. You're not thinking of Catholics either, though to an Atheist I suppose all religions look alike. The Christian group which supported Hitler was run by a fellow named Ludwig Mueller, using Luther's antisemitic writings. It was similar in all respects to that bunch in our own Midwest known as the Christian Identity Movement. I'm not denigrating Lutherins here. For a more true look at Lutherin Christianity versus Nazism I'd invite you to read "The Cost of Discipleship" and "Letter and Papers from Prison" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Basically Hitler took the form of existing institutions, stripped out the meaning and internal structure and created a state religion which evolved quickly away from tradition. A reference which might help here is "Twelve Year Reich" by Richard Grunberger.
Read " The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide" by Robert Jay Lifton. I don't recommend this book to everyone as it is distinctly disturbing to the liberals who too often see themselves in it.
I doubt you've been following world religious news but if you were you'd know there is an exactly analagous situation developing in Tibet as the ChiComs are in the process of seating a State Approved version of the Dhali Llama. Look up the word Gleichschaltung and you'll understand this point further.
I don't think that the true American right actually exists except scattered out in a couple of compounds hidden in the Idaho wilderness. Mosly I think its made up in the minds of the radicals who seek to push us further left. You have to remember here that Jack Kennedy's policies would have branded him as a member of the Zell Miller wing of the Democratic Party were he alive today but forty years ago he was looked on as being left-center.
But as First Freedom said these are constructs.
