+- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com)
+-- Forum: Culture (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-49.html)
+--- Forum: History (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-117.html)
+--- Thread: Haiti's historical status + What was conservatism? (/thread-3041.html)
Haiti's historical status + What was conservatism? - C C - Nov 21, 2016
Why Haiti should be at the centre of the Age of Revolution
https://aeon.co/essays/why-haiti-should-be-at-the-centre-of-the-age-of-revolution
EXCERPT: Haiti, not the US or France, was where the assertion of human rights reached its defining climax in the Age of Revolution...
What Was Conservatism?
http://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Was-Conservatism-/238345
EXCERPT: . . . [George H.] Nash presented an influential portrait of conservatism as a river fed by three tributaries of thought: Christian traditionalism, anti-Communism, and libertarianism (or classical liberalism). Although each could be rendered as a popular impulse or unthinking reflex of the mass mind, Nash insisted that all three were fundamentally intellectual traditions, nourished by a cast of characters who deserved both respect and extended study, among them James Burnham, the former socialist turned anti-Communist; Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian classical economist; and Russell Kirk, America’s answer to Edmund Burke. In Nash’s telling, these were the men (and they were almost all men) who created conservatism in the postwar years.
Nash's book illuminates a central reason for conservatism's historic success, and its recent failures.
Where is conservatism today? Once an anguished response to war and chaos, religious traditionalism has become just another sort of identity politics; anti-Communism informed by classical liberalism is now recrudescent nativism; and countercultural libertarianism has hardened into market fundamentalism. The evolution has reached its apogee in Donald Trump, a man singularly devoid of ideas and proud of it. To be sure, classic conservative thinkers persist, but their voices are dim, like light from a dying star.
Nash’s intellectual history illuminates a central reason for conservatism’s historic success, and its more recent failures. Like the conservative movement itself, Nash’s book was animated by a fundamental tension. In his telling, conservatives at once accepted a range of ideas into their universe yet simultaneously erected boundaries to create a consistent (and electorally viable) ideological identity. Nash’s book gives us the first part of the story, describing how conservatism succeeded by purging bad ideas and dangerous impulses. But it could not follow the denouement: when conservatism ossified into orthodoxy, leaving it defenseless before Trump’s onslaught.
There is truth in the conservative intellectuals’ claim that Trump hijacked conservatism. It is also true that despite its principled origins, conservatism birthed Trump.
How did the arc Nash described end with a dive toward a proudly ignorant populism? When I reached Nash at his home in South Hadley, Mass., in August and posed that question, it was clear he’d given the matter a good deal of thought....
RE: Haiti's historical status + What was conservatism? - Syne - Nov 22, 2016
(Nov 21, 2016 11:25 PM)C C Wrote: There is truth in the conservative intellectuals’ claim that Trump hijacked conservatism. It is also true that despite its principled origins, conservatism birthed Trump.
Nonsense. Trump is a direct result and rebuke of leftist politically correct thought policing and social fear-mongering. There was only one major party left that could allow people to rectify their frustrations.