I've been thinking about this more and more, and the more I do, the more it seems to be a liberal rather than conservative idea.
?
Rugged individualism was built on the frontier, yet Teddy Roosevelt trustbusted the frontier.
What's your point?
conservatives are more likely to support the idea of rugged individualism these days.
it existed before the frontier....we would still be peasants in Europe otherwise.
Wall Street will have to be dealt with by someone else, and I hope it happens soon.
I clearly stated my point: It's not a political issue. Plus I was remarking on Theodore Roosevelt's character and persona. Quit over-analyzing every little thing. It's annoying as ****.
To be clear, frontier is always the next place people are exploring.
For example, Wall Street used to be New Amsterdam, and the pilgrims were at one time frontiersmen...
...pilgrims who were persecuted all the same by central authorities back home.
It originally was a liberal idea and tendency, but as the American style of liberalism has become dominant, and true liberalism has fallen by the wayside, conservatives are more likely to support the idea of rugged individualism these days.
Sure, until they need to appease their fairy tale gods and want to impose their moral beliefs on the individual.
By definition, Conservatives favor the "make no law" approach to governing.
That the religious right is a part of the Republican Coalition does nothing to make central governmental control of a person's gentalia any less Liberal than does the assertion that Central Governmental control of anything is any less Liberal.
If you seek the limit of personal freedom in favor of the control of peoples' lives by a central authority, you are espousing liberalism.
Land versus capital isn't a political issue?
Please define each of the Styles of Liberalism that you are thinking about.
It's always been a curiosity to me that conservatives ought to place a high value on the 'purity' of Western civilization (which in itself has always been far more eclectic than that of the Orient), but even stranger seems to be the end they desire to seek.
Certain conservatives, of course, recognize the basic nature of human society - that is, that societies change - and simply seek to make sure that change, when it comes, comes slowly and carefully, so as to not radically upset the established paradigm. This form of conservatism can be genuinely respected, even if its Burkean appeals to collective wisdom are asinine and irrational.
Other conservatives (most of them, I'd say), take a radically different view: for them, society must not only remain static, but it must begin going backwards: they by no means wish to conserve the social changes that have happened since the counterculture of the 1960s, and actively seek to roll back the progress made in individual liberty since then. In this they are not conservatives but reactionary-revolutionaries, motivationally similar to the 'revolutionary conservatism' of such 'luminaries' as Edgar Jung - chiefly, they are motivated out of hatred for the man himself and fear of his individual powers. They are, once more, socialists-of-the-spirit. Their ideal collective may be grounded on traditional idealism rather than dialectical materialism, but the essential focus of the philosophy lies in the community, of blud und boden. These are the enemies of free men everywhere. To phrase it differently: there is a cleft here, between these two essentially different praxi, that a skillful political theorist ought to be able to hue, in order to emasculate the reactionary-revolutionary movement, but it would require the co-option of the language of the Right on the part of the Left (for the reactionary-revolutionaries are neither of the Right nor the Left). That is the task set before the Left today - to divorce liberty-minded men from the socialists they have hopped into bed with for the sake of political expediency. Likewise, it is not enough to mindlessly quote the fusionist mantra that "libertarianism is the heart of conservatism" as justification enough to cloud one's eyes to the basic fact that the old Reaganist alliance is finished, and has been for quite some time.
Similarly, a disturbing tendency to automatically dismiss the accomplishments of the Left in American history on the part of libertarians has long confounded me. We need not hearken back to the immediate post-colonial era to prove this point - Jefferson's opposition to the establishment of an oceanic navy, or Jackson's enfranchisement of a multitude of landless whites, though these are proof enough - to demonstrate the close bond between the lovers of freedom and the men of the Left. In almost direct parallel with the popular opposition against the Vietnam quagmire of the 1960s, our intellectual forebears were men who saw themselves in opposition to established interests, not conservators of the same. As Rothbard declaims in the opening paragraphs of his excellent Betrayal of the American Right:
Individualism, and its economic corollary laissez-faire liberalism, have not always taken on a conservative hue, has not always functioned, as it often does today, as an apologist for the status quo. On the contrary, the Revolution of modern times was originally, and continued for a long time to be, laissez-faire individualists. Its purpose was to free the individual person from the restrictions and the shackles, the encrusted caste privileges and exploitative wars, of the feudalist and mercantilist orders, of the Tory ancien régime.
Accordingly, Rothbard says, we see an interesting turn of events that would seem almosy unimaginable in today's political clime: free-marketeers and other individualist radicals actively opposing America's entry into the Great War, going so far to denounce it, in some cases, as a war of imperialism:
By the advent of World War I, however, the death of the older laissez-faire generation threw the leadership of the opposition to America's imperial wars into the hands of the Socialist Party. But other, more individualist-minded men joined in the opposition, many of whom would later form the core of the isolationist Old Right of the late 1930s. Thus, the hardcore anti-war leaders included the individualist Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin and such laissez-faire liberals as Senators William E. Borah (Republican) of Idaho and James A. Reed (Democrat) of Missouri. It also included Charles A. Lindburgh, Sr., father of the Lone Eagle, who was a congressman from Minnesota.
These great individualists, and their intellectual progeny, were not limited in their radicalism to anti-interventionism. Henry Louis Mencken, one of Rothbard's idols and perhaps the most forceful of any American individualists to live, was himself fundamentally a modern, temperamentally related more to men such as Karl Hess than to Ronald Reagan.
Writing in response to the great religious backlash of his day, embodied in the then-novel Fundamentalist movement, wrote in November 1925 that
(u)nder Prohibition, Fundamentalism, and other complex ideals of the Klan there runs a common stream of bilge: it issues from the ghostly glands of the evangelical pastors of the land. The influence of these consecrated men upon the so-called thinking of the American people has been greatly underestimated by fanciers; in fact, most of the principal professors of such forms of metabolism overlook it altogether. Yet it must be obvious that their power is immense, and that they exert it with great gusto... The pastor got into public affairs by the route of Prohibition. The shrewd shysters who developed the Anti-Saloon League made a politician of him, and once he had got a taste of power he was eager for more. It came very quickly. As industry penetrated the rural regions the new-blown Babbits began to sense his capacity for safeguarding the established order, and so he was given the job; he became a local Billy Sunday.
Such honesty concerning our erstwhile 'allies' on the Right is sorely missing from present classical liberal/individualist dialogue, and much to our discredit: for these very men who we have regarded for so long merely as a means to power now desire to usurp that power for themselves. By inviting them into a grand coalition, we have in fact weakened our position, defiled our own purity, and suffer the more for it.
What, then, is to be done? I myself do not dare to profess to have all the answers, but one consideration ought to be to establish some form of rapprochement with those surviving veterans of the New Left, who alone share with us our antipathy towards the Establishment, that is, towards Big Government, Big God, and Big Generals. Only united with them - only by dialectically absorbing their idées fixes and, ultimately, themselves into our fold, can we ever hope to establish anything remotely resembling a genuinely libertarian consensus.
Towards that end, it is necessary for us who believe in freedom and esteem it above all else to put our money where our mouths are, to uphold 'social issues', much scorned, as the exact equal of economic liberty. For free men and free minds are equally important as free money and free markets; without all of these things, the people perish.
Here's an essay I wrote on this very subject some years back:
Einzige, I feel the same way. Really, we need to wait for the old people to die to get a large part of this country moving again. I respect the younger conservatives, who tend to have a more libertarian oriented social view and I think many of their stances could be good for the country, but it's not going to happen until enough of the old people die off that the party is able to shift away from them.
I think, in the long run, this country will be fine, we may just have to wait 20 years for the last gasp of the old style conservatism to die down.
when my son was about 12, he was being hassled by a couple of kids in sunday school, among other places. One of them was the instigator, a new kid in town, while the other had been my son's freind, but now he was a follower of the instigator.
Instigator kid went too far and my son gave him 2 punches to the face, in Sunday School, in front of a classroom full of other kids of the same age.. Instigator never messed with him again, the other kid decided he would rather go back to being my son's friend.
Heard it all from the sunday school teacher, not my son.....
Good for himhes going to grow up a liberal conservative slayer...lolol...
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