PoliticalChic
Diamond Member
1. Conservatives believe that custom and tradition result in individuals living in peace. Law is custom and precedent. Liberals are destroyers of custom and convention. To a conservative, change should be gradual, as the new society is often inferior to the old. We build on the ideas and experience of our ancestors. The species is wiser than the individual (Burke).
2. Liberals are impulsive, and imprudent. They believe in quick changes, and risk new abuses worse than the ‘evils’ that they would sweep away, since remedies are usually not simple. Plato said that prudence is the mark of the statesman. For Classical Liberals, known today as conservatives, there should be a balance between permanence and change, while liberals see ‘progress’ as some mythical direction for society.
3. The Founders, Classical Liberals, operated under the view that government is a necessary evil, simply a benign but voluntary social contract for free men to enter into willingly, and incorporated principles based on individualism, free markets, and limited constitutional government.
a. Classical liberalism, the optimistic doctrine that gave us liberty, democracy, progress, was a moral project. It held that human society could always better itself by encouraging the good and diminishing the bad. It rested, therefore, on a very clear understanding that there was a higher cause than self-realization: that there were such things as right and wrong and that the former should be preferred over the latter. But the belief that autonomous individuals had the right to make subjective judgment about what was right for them in pursuit of their unchallengeable entitlement to happiness destroyed that understanding. Progressives interpreted liberty as license, thus destroying the moral rules that make freedom a virtue.
“The World Turned Upside Down,” by Melanie Phillips. p.284
4. There are several incorrigible liars who insist that the Founders were of the same mentality as those we call 'liberals.'
Nothing could be further from the truth.
To see how this pertains to the title of the thread, "Your Choice: Liberalism or the Constitution," notice that those known as Liberals today, actually the group called Socialists until communist John Dewey had them steal the name 'Liberal,' work for the very opposite: collectivism, socialist economic dominance, and unlimited, overreaching government.
a. “Finally, Dewey arguably did more than any other reformer to repackage progressive social theory in a way that obscured just how radically its principles departed from those of the American founding. Like Ely and many of his fellow progressive academics, Dewey initially embraced the term "socialism" to describe his social theory. Only after realizing how damaging the name was to the socialist cause did he, like other progressives, begin to avoid it. In the early 1930s, accordingly, Dewey begged the Socialist party, of which he was a longtime member, to change its name. "The greatest handicap from which special measures favored by the Socialists suffer," Dewey declared, "is that they are advanced by the Socialist party as Socialism.”
http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=OTY0MjA1YzVjNjVkOTViMzM5M2Q5M2Y0ODk0ODc0MmM=
b. Dewey reveled in the thought that the war might force Americans to “give up much of our economic freedom…we shall have to lay by our good natured individualism and march in step.” Taking liberties - LA Times
2. Liberals are impulsive, and imprudent. They believe in quick changes, and risk new abuses worse than the ‘evils’ that they would sweep away, since remedies are usually not simple. Plato said that prudence is the mark of the statesman. For Classical Liberals, known today as conservatives, there should be a balance between permanence and change, while liberals see ‘progress’ as some mythical direction for society.
3. The Founders, Classical Liberals, operated under the view that government is a necessary evil, simply a benign but voluntary social contract for free men to enter into willingly, and incorporated principles based on individualism, free markets, and limited constitutional government.
a. Classical liberalism, the optimistic doctrine that gave us liberty, democracy, progress, was a moral project. It held that human society could always better itself by encouraging the good and diminishing the bad. It rested, therefore, on a very clear understanding that there was a higher cause than self-realization: that there were such things as right and wrong and that the former should be preferred over the latter. But the belief that autonomous individuals had the right to make subjective judgment about what was right for them in pursuit of their unchallengeable entitlement to happiness destroyed that understanding. Progressives interpreted liberty as license, thus destroying the moral rules that make freedom a virtue.
“The World Turned Upside Down,” by Melanie Phillips. p.284
4. There are several incorrigible liars who insist that the Founders were of the same mentality as those we call 'liberals.'
Nothing could be further from the truth.
To see how this pertains to the title of the thread, "Your Choice: Liberalism or the Constitution," notice that those known as Liberals today, actually the group called Socialists until communist John Dewey had them steal the name 'Liberal,' work for the very opposite: collectivism, socialist economic dominance, and unlimited, overreaching government.
a. “Finally, Dewey arguably did more than any other reformer to repackage progressive social theory in a way that obscured just how radically its principles departed from those of the American founding. Like Ely and many of his fellow progressive academics, Dewey initially embraced the term "socialism" to describe his social theory. Only after realizing how damaging the name was to the socialist cause did he, like other progressives, begin to avoid it. In the early 1930s, accordingly, Dewey begged the Socialist party, of which he was a longtime member, to change its name. "The greatest handicap from which special measures favored by the Socialists suffer," Dewey declared, "is that they are advanced by the Socialist party as Socialism.”
http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=OTY0MjA1YzVjNjVkOTViMzM5M2Q5M2Y0ODk0ODc0MmM=
b. Dewey reveled in the thought that the war might force Americans to “give up much of our economic freedom…we shall have to lay by our good natured individualism and march in step.” Taking liberties - LA Times