What is a conservative anyway? Conservatism as a political force in America didn't even start till the thirties or even later. Abraham Lincoln was not a conservative for he wanted and fought for change. Can one imagine an American conservative today fighting for justice and fairness as Lincoln did?
http://www.usmessageboard.com/polit...es-of-midcans-insights-into-contemporary.html
http://www.usmessageboard.com/politics/88682-a-conservative-wakes-up.html
http://www.usmessageboard.com/politics/50727-who-should-rule-test.html
Many Americans today fail to realize we did not arrive at this place in time without a lot of turmoil and change, revolution, civil war, Laissez-faire capitalism, great depression, unions, new deal, civil rights, great society, riots, and on and on. This fictional dichotomy (liberal v conservative) has existed in the minds of many since the New Deal, corporate America has since tattooed it into our minds. Makes everything easy to categorize. For those interested in its story check out the book below.
"The rise of conservative politics in postwar America is one of the great puzzles of American political history. For much of the period that followed the end of World War II, conservative ideas about the primacy of the free market, and the dangers of too-powerful labor unions, government regulation, and an activist, interventionist state seemed to have been thoroughly rejected by most intellectual and political elites. Scholars and politicians alike dismissed those who adhered to such faiths as a "radical right," for whom to quote the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter politics "becomes an arena into which the wildest fancies are projected, the most paranoid suspicions, the most absurd superstitions, the most bizarre apocalyptic fantasies." How, then, did such ideas move from their marginal position in the middle years of the twentieth century to become the reigning politics of the country by the century's end?
Historians and social critics often explain the successes of conservative politics by pointing to the backlash against the victories of the social movements of the 1960s, the cultural reaction against the radicals who fought for civil rights, feminism, and gay and lesbian rights and who protested against the Vietnam War. The 1970s defection of white working class people alienated and frightened by the liberal program shifted the politics of the country far to the right. The argument is that in the days before the onset of the culture wars, a "liberal consensus" dominated American politics, especially around economics." Kim Phillips-Fein ('Invisible Hands')
