OT - comic relief on lib/con conflict

Yep, it is a dated study, something I didn't notice when I first glanced at it. My initial interest was merely in seeing if there were any numbers provided in the study, and whether or not they supported Bob's assertion. Then I became intrigued with the numbers themselves and started ruminating over them without bothering to actually read the study. So I'll have to plead guilty to a little intellectual laziness this afternoon.

As for libertarianism being a gestating idea at the time, I would have to disagree. Perhaps the ideals were out of fashion at the time, and perhaps the idea of forming a political party around the ideals was new, but the concept of minimal government intrusion into the affairs of people and business goes back much further than the 1970's.

I agree that problems arise in labeling the latter two categories as individual liberties. "Equal role for women" seems to imply not only liberty for women, but also government intervention into the policies of businesses and institutions. And abortion is complicated by the question of whether a fetus is also an entity deserving of individual liberties.

As for legalization of marijuana, I would say that's a fairly straightforward issue of individual liberty. The fact that many conservatives oppose it doesn't mean they don't consider it an individual liberty; it merely means they want to pick and choose which individual liberties are allowed. Of course, conservatives hold no monopoly on the desire to pick and choose; liberals merely have a different set of preferred liberties; and though libertarians might claim to support complete individual liberty, I suspect most would quickly modify their position if ever faced with the realities it entails.

And even that may not be accurate. Supporting two out of the three issues was sufficient to qualify one as supporting the expansion of individual liberties, and the paper did not provide question-by-question statistics, so it's conceivable that even among the more educated, one of these issues had weak support.

Bert

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Bert
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legalization

The study is interesting because it recognized that the "liberal/conservative" split was no longer a good way to define the range of American political opinions. In fact, it never really was.

The neoconservative movement came into the spotlight in 1967, when Norm Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and a couple of other liberal Jewish intellectuals, who had been writing actively in favor of stronger US support for Israel, emerged into public consciousness during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, after which the movement took hold with many disaffected liberals. They've significantly reshaped conservatism in America, and neoconservatism itself has been expanded to cover much more than an aggressive foreign policy.

At about the same time, a previously obscure, mostly intellectual political posture known as liberatarianism grew into a broader but loosely-defined movement, and a group of libertarians first attempted to codify it into a political party and platform in 1972.

Both the neocons and the modern libertarians grew out of '60s liberalism, or rather, reactions against it. In 1976, when that survey was conducted, both were splinter movements. Now, neocons, libertarians, and traditional heartland conservatives (the moralist, sometimes-authoritarian types that young libertarians now call "paleo conservatives") all claim the title "conservative," when the context suits them.

Meanwhile, '60s- and '70s-style liberals have been watered down and dispersed like the lost tribes of Israel. They encompass such a wide range of economic views, particularly, that they're hard to identify by a coherent set of principles. Many have incorporated varying beliefs about the power of markets and the desirability of free ones. They're much less enthusiastic, in general, about the welfare state. The remaining hard-core liberals holed up largely in universities and foundations, where they have been self-destructing ever since.

You can't tell the players without a program today. The political landscape differs so much from that of 1976 that it's hard to recognize. But the idea of that report, that we need multiple axes of political thought to characterize the American electorate today, is more true than ever. It's just a lot different and more complicated now than it was then.

Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Oh, I missed an important group. The moderate Republicans, pols like Ev Dirksen, George Romney, and so on, were still a significant political group in 1976. You could get a strong individual-liberty result when polling them on questions like the three used in that survey, even while they supported economic deregulation (as it stood in 1976, not as it stood in 1995) and, at the time, some government intervention on issues like minority rights. Their key posture was what they saw as "fostering opportunity."

Now, however, I hear that my friends and I are candidates for special protection as an Endangered Species.

Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress

If so, it's probably because they weren't really necessary before them :o). Greg S.

Reply to
Bray Haven

Neo-conservatism was the product of _Commentary_ magazine, edited by Norman Podhoretz. You can look up the history of it. Few conservatives today, particularly the younger ones or those who weren't following the policy debates at the time, know what it's all about or where it came from.

In a sense, it's true that they weren't necessary before then. The 1967 Arab-Israeli war brought the issue to the surface. Of course, it's also probably true that they were never necessary at all. d8-)

Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Yes.

Gary

Reply to
Gary Coffman

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