Re: Right and left liberal and conservative

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed May 14 2003 - 12:56:35 MDT

  • Next message: Lee Daniel Crocker: "Re: Right and left liberal and conservative"

    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.

    -- 
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    Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
    asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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