CONServatives Not Ever Getting It Right But Trying To Pull the Wool Over Your Eyes!

[PoliticalTorch]

Ronald Reagan was not on the wrong side of history. He MADE history.

Yeah...."sure" he did. If he had only been so quick to tear down the wall of bigotry as well as his penchant for favoritism for the rich and wealthy of this country as he was to tell Gorbachev about that, it WOULD have made great history. But did he do it? No, of course not. After all, he was a Republican.

 

[M.D. Rawlings]

Depending on which era you are discussing, there is a difference between a "Republican" and a "conservative".

The Southern conservatives of LBJs era, for example, were predominantly Democrats. The Republicans of that era were classical liberals.

The classical liberalism of this nation's founding was muddled during the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. The fact of the matter is that the abolitionist movement, for example, was comprised of both the religiously conservative and the religiously liberal/not so religious in the North. The collaboration of these factions within the Republican Party was an uneasy one that began to unravel after the Civil War.

At the risk of oversimplifying the matter: the rift between President Taft and President Teddy Roosevelt, respectively, the national leaders of these factions at the turn of the Century was the beginning of the Republican Party's decades-long decline. This was classical liberalism proper versus an emerging progressive streak of "egalitarianism" harking back to the Radical Republicans of the Civil War Era.

Despite their early success with the passage of the "hard peace" of the Reconstruction Acts and contrary to the claims of our leftist "friends" on this board, the Radicals' influence in the Republic Party was that of an emerging minority that was set back for decades by the predictable results of their overly punitive agenda against the South . . . until Teddy came along and went all Bull Moose.

Among black leaders, this rift was embodied in the bitter rivalry between Booker T. Washington, on the one hand, who, like Taft, was a stanch patriot of the Anglo-American tradition of classical liberalism, and the Radical Republican Frederick Douglas, on the other. (This is not to say that Washington wasn't friendly toward Teddy or didn't work with him. He was and did. After all, Teddy was the beginning of the rift in the Party and sincerely believed his kind of progressivism was good for the country.)

W.E.B. Du Bois took up Douglas' mantel and pushed the progressive faction of the civil rights movement further to the left under the banner of the NAACP which eventually eclipsed the Tuskegee Institute's approach after Washington's death.

In the meantime, the original base of the Republican Party harking back to the Whigs lost control of the Party. While in the 1960's it supported the agenda of equal political rights for all along with the nominally conservative Northeastern progressives of the Party, it was appalled by the emergence of the welfare state and the judicial assaults on constitutional federalism at the expense of states' rights and, consequently, to the detriment of individual rights.

(This was not the same states' rights movement of the Dixiecrat segregationists. The Republicans of the Midwestern and Western states—the rugged individualists of flyover country and beyond—had similar concerns about the growing power of the central government that had nothing to do with race relations, and they weren't too keen on their Northeastern cousins of the Party.)

They were appalled by the normalization of subcultural values imposed by the central government against the natural inclinations of free-association. The judicial antics of the leftist Warren Court were especially irksome. This was the stuff of the new collectivist egalitarianism, what the cultural Marxists on this board refer to as "the expansion of individual freedoms", in truth, the Orwellian double speak of benevolent despotism/enlightened absolutism, that is to say, the imposition of lefty's morality on the body politic.

(Note my signature. License and perversion are not freedom, let alone liberty, but the chains that systematically bind. Rip the governmentally subsidized initiatives and institutions of social engineering out from under lefty and you will behold the evisceration of his rank stupidity at the hands of an unfettered market of ideas . . . followed by his retreat back into the dark and rancid cave from which he came.)

Most of all, they were appalled by the assault on private property, the increasingly rapacious redistribution of wealth and the disease of the entitlement mentality.

Hence, the Goldwater-Reagan revolution that eventually overthrew the Republican Party's progressive Northeastern Establishment was the revival of the Lockean political theory on which this nation was founded: the preservation of private property as the foundation of liberty. Also, the likes of Smith, Carlyle and Burke were back in fashion, their conservative-libertarian streak of cultural and economic laissez-faire recalibrated for the Twentieth Century by thinkers like F. A. Hayek; William F. Buckley, Jr.; Milton Freidman and others. . . .

The fact of the matter is that most of the southern Democrats of LBJ's era were not raving bigots, but classical liberals of this nation's founding. When a political movement emerged that spoke to their values of rugged individualism, God and country sans all the racial demagoguery of the Dixiecrats and the welfare plantation pimps on the left, they flocked to it, and the Republican Party soon took back Congress for the first time in decades.


Classical Liberalism righting wrongs: Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1960, sponsored and signed into law by Republican President Eisenhower.


Shades of Progressivism, dependency and demagoguery:

I'll have those ******* voting Democrat for the next 200 years. —LBJ, regarding the so-called War on Poverty legislation of his presidency

There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs—partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. . . . There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public. —Booker T. Washington

Oh, yeah, make no mistake about it. The likes of Jesse "Hymie-Town" Jackson, Al "Never-Saw-A-Hysteria-I-Couldn't-Exploit" Sharpton, and their leftist white collaborators go back decades.

 

[PoliticalTorch]

Bull, we want to offer a choice.

When President Roosevelt brought us Social Security it was intended to remain just as is. Millions upon millions of people now can live a little bit better knowing they will be receiving a lot back of what they have put into it throughout their working years. There is no need to alter it. People are not asking for a choice. They are satisfied with what they have.

 

[Stephanie]

oh boy, the op should look in mirror to see someone who is having THE WOOLY BULLY pulled over their eyes

another brainwashed robot for the Democrat/progressive party who is being LED by the nose and played like a fiddle

 

[PoliticalTorch]

oh boy, the op should look in mirror to see someone who is having THE WOOLY BULLY pulled over their eyes

another brainwashed robot for the Democrat/progressive party who is being LED by the nose and played like a fiddle

Well Steph, since you know the routine so well that can only be because you have experienced much the same thing from your RW folks, no doubt, and your postings highly reflect and confirm that.