From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed May 14 2003 - 12:56:35 MDT
On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 12:45:16PM -0400, John K Clark wrote:
> This right-left liberal- conservative thing has always confused me,
> conservatives are supposed to be in favor of Low taxes and preventing
> women from having abortions but what does one have to do with the
> other? It's the same with wanting rigid anti drug laws and school
> vouchers too, I just don't see why it has to be a package deal.
It is about underlying ideology, something which quite a few politicians
and citizens forget these days but which actually has rather profound
controlling effects on ideas. Conservatism is in the abstract about
conserving existing institutions against change, liberalism (American
sense, social democracy in Europe) is based on the idea of using the
government to create equality, and so on. These core ideas can be quite
complex structures (look at Marxism), and often ally with ideas and
groups with similar interests. Then political reality intrudes and
people start making compromises, deals and promises to maximize votes,
and the ideology part gets very diluted and hidden. But it exists deep
down and should not be ignored. One can reach the conclusion "school
vouchers are good" from both a conservative and a libertarian position,
but that doesn't mean they are identical or should always cooperate.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed May 14 2003 - 13:04:19 MDT