The Importance Of Conservatism

[Zandy12]

The Importance Of Conservatism
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Being a Christian and seeing the state of America today makes a convincing point for me that our two-party political system may be broken. Economic optimism for most Americans is at a record low (United States IBD/TIPP Economic Optimism Index, 2023). Compare this with our Chinese counterparts, who for the past few decades, have enjoyed a rapidly advancing society even under a one-party system. As a result of this poor economic outlook, Americans have been less likely to buy a home, pay more for goods and services due to inflation, suffer from increasing crime in their neighborhoods, and are even being laid off at record rates. The next presidential election will be coming soon, about a little over a year and will most likely resemble a re-run of the 2020 presidential election cycle; with candidates whose policies and views differ from each other quite drastically.

History
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The founding fathers of America are some of the brightest minds to have existed. They came together to form a government in that was built off the wisdom of many governments that came before them. Other than creating another theocracy or monarchy, they founded a democratic republic: the United States of America. It is a government that recognized natural law, individual sovereignty, as well as the concept of ‘human rights’ (Jefferson, 1776). This kind of government has led to the rise of capitalism, an economic system that has boosted our people to a level of prosperity never seen before in history. It was also the result of modernized western political thought; one of which emphasized the reformation of traditional practices and the rise of liberal philosophy. This ultimately led to the philosophical dichotomies that direct our current understanding of politics today: like Left vs. Right, Conservatism vs. Liberalism, and Democrat vs. Republican. Democracy is important, because it has revolutionized and changed the world significantly for the better. It’s what led to the recognition of rights for all peoples; regardless of their race, creed, or gender.

The founding fathers also carefully crafted the constitution to prevent any politicians from abusing their powers. However, they could’ve never been able to envision what problems would arise in the upcoming centuries; especially during a time where mainstream thought in the Americas was dominated by the Age of Enlightenment ("Age of Revolution”, 2023). However, some positive social changes did take a while to arrive, like the abolishment of slavery and women’s suffrage. Today, many women and minorities are enjoying a level of economic prosperity that their ancestors have never experienced, as well as being well off compared to women and minorities anywhere else in the world. However, our leaders and intellectuals view the current state of America as an oppressive regime that was founded by inherently evil white men (Blanton et al., 2020), although their worldview was inspired by these very same men. They’ve used these baseless claims to then radicalize and centralize our government, the very type of government that the founding fathers established checks and balances for, to push their agenda at the expense of many people. How did this kind of dysfunctional thought dominate the western world of our time? The reason stems from a phenomenon known as over-rationalization.

Liberalism And The Roman Empire: This phenomenon has occurred since the Classical Civilization era. During the time of the Roman Empire, several periods occurred where economic progress stagnated. Although rationalization was what ultimately led to Rome’s prominence, it was over-rationalization that bred corruption within the Roman aristocracy. Eventually, this led to the empire’s collapse (Lynch, 2022). However, it was populism and newly formed schools of thought that allowed for economic revival within the Roman Empire. One of these philosophies, republicanism (Plato, 375 BC), allowed Romans to find a new calling as citizens to police against corruption from authoritarians, and has helped revive democratic governance. A concept that is now hard to imagine, took place during its origins, and was important in balancing power between the Roman state and its people. The concept of republicanism now has a bad reputation, because it’s associated with modern-day American conservatives. It is viewed as backwards, although that's an ignorant lens to view conservatism through. To be fair, the public opinion of republicanism has been mostly politically motivated and financed, rather than being negated by most working-class citizens (Ekins, 2020).

Conservatism As A Concept
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Conservatism is as important as liberalism for any society, in order to continue economic development. To conserve means to preserve or protect. Although often mistaken for reactionism, conservatism doesn’t exist to contradict liberalism. Rather, it exists to complement it. Liberal reformation during the Renaissance era was a meaningful progressive movement against the oppression of the Roman Catholic Church and other patriarchal institutions that succumbed to fallacy and corruption (“Why is the Reformation important?", 2017). Although this type of policy advocacy still exists in the west for valid reasons, it’s important to understand that these same patriarchal institutions were important in developing the foundation for which our current society stands upon (Woods, 2012). Eroding these institutions, like traditional family and gender roles, will only lead to our inevitable collapse, similar to that of the Roman Empire. Every nation has its own form of conservative politics. Relative to western standards, middle eastern and orthodoxic nations still need liberal reformation (Alsharekh et al., 2021, Vitkine, 2023). However, within the west, extreme liberalism has led to over-rationalization.

American Conservatism
As American conservatism stands today, it wishes to preserve as much of what the founding fathers envisioned America as. The average conservative is a constitutionalist, classical liberalist, and 2nd-amendment advocate. They reject illegal immigration and sexual promiscuity. They call for the decentralization of government and the return of Christianity within our institutions and culture. Conservatives are not racists, homophobes, transphobes, or even stereotypically depicted middle-age white males. American conservatism, synonymous with republicanism and the Republican Party, currently includes women, Muslims, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and voters from many other backgrounds (Mascaro, 2023). Compared to conservatism in the previous decades, the movement has evolved alongside its countermovement, liberalism, in response to the current challenges that modern-day America faces.

References
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United States IBD/TIPP Economic Optimism Index (April 2023). Trading Economics. United States IBD/TIPP Economic Optimism Index - April 2023 Data

Age of Revolution (May 2023). Wikipedia. Age of Revolution - Wikipedia

D. Blanton, V. Balara (2020, July 19). Fox News Poll: 63 percent see country’s Founders as heroes, 15 percent say villains. Fox News. Fox News Poll: 63 percent see country’s Founders as heroes, 15 percent say villains

R. Lynch (2022, Sept. 26). How the Roman Empire fell[VIDEO]. Youtube. How the Roman Empire Fell

Plato (2007). The Republic. Penguin Classics; New edition.

E. Etkins (2020, July 22). Poll: 62% of Americans Say They Have Political Views They’re Afraid to Share. Cato Institute. https://www.cato.org/survey-reports...they-have-political-views-theyre-afraid-share

Why is the Reformation important (2017, Oct. 11)? Insight For Living Ministries. Why Is the Reformation Important?

T. Woods (2012, Sept. 18). How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. Regnery History; Reprint edition.

A. Alsharekh, A. Pourzand, G. Bhardwaj (2021, May 21). Women and power in the Middle East. Chatham House. https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/05/women-and-power-in-the-middle-east

B. Vitkine (2023, April 18). In Russia, feminism is equated with ‘extremist ideology’. Le Monde. In Russia, feminism is equated with 'extremist ideology'

L. Mascaro (2023, Feb. 7). GOP more diverse, but Congress still doesn’t reflect America’s demographics. PBS News. GOP more diverse, but Congress still doesn't reflect America's demographics

 

[Fantine]

You are right in that income inequality has made it harder for Americans to buy homes or save for retirement.

CEO salaries have exploded. Corporations prefer buying back stocks to compensating their employees fairly. Raising stock prices for investors has resulted in many mergers--resulting in many people losing their jobs, something my family knows from hard personal experience.

Banks were merging so frequently that a friend who worked in banking lost so many jobs due to bank mergers became a corporate recruiter because he decided it was more profitable trying to help the huge numbers of laid off bankers find jobs.

Conservative capitalism needs guardrails to prevent the U.S. from becoming an oligarchy. Conservative policies erode the middle class.

I saw an interesting map showing life expectancy in the U.S. In the red, red states the life expectancy is only in the high sixties. In the blue states life expectancy is much higher.

What's more, they rank at the bottom in education, income, healthcare, and many other quality of life stats. Their dismal ratings should be enough to show that conservatism is a disastrous policy.

 

[Eschatologist]

Just a side note here, but American political parlance often conflates progressive with liberal. Most of the American left is not liberal. It's progressive.

So to expand on the original post, we really have 3 sides at work here. Conservatives are on the right, liberals are in the middle (for the most part), and progressives are on the left. Most of the Democratic party is now progressives, not liberals.

Liberalism at least implies a focus on limiting government to protect liberties. Progressivism wants government involved in everything -- even in supposedly promoting rights.

 

[Eschatologist]

You are right in that income inequality has made it harder for Americans to buy homes or save for retirement.

CEO salaries have exploded. Corporations prefer buying back stocks to compensating their employees fairly. Raising stock prices for investors has resulted in many mergers--resulting in many people losing their jobs, something my family knows from hard personal experience.

Banks were merging so frequently that a friend who worked in banking lost so many jobs due to bank mergers became a corporate recruiter because he decided it was more profitable trying to help the huge numbers of laid off bankers find jobs.

Conservative capitalism needs guardrails to prevent the U.S. from becoming an oligarchy. Conservative policies erode the middle class.

I saw an interesting map showing life expectancy in the U.S. In the red, red states the life expectancy is only in the high sixties. In the blue states life expectancy is much higher.

What's more, they rank at the bottom in education, income, healthcare, and many other quality of life stats. Their dismal ratings should be enough to show that conservatism is a disastrous policy.

Income inequality is insignificant in this. Economic mobility is what matters.

There are plenty of countries with low income inequality where everyone is dirt poor. I can guarantee those people would rather live in a society with high income inequality but also with high economic mobility.

Economic mobility has dropped in America, but that's mostly unrelated to income inequality. We've always had rich and poor, and like most industrialized societies, elites have always held a lot of the wealth.

Economic mobility has fallen for a variety of reasons, but globalization is a big one. The growth of our middle class just after WW2 was mostly because we had a major head start on the rest of the world. While most of the West had suffered at least some level of bombing on their own land, America was almost completely unscathed. So while Europe rebuilt, we prospered and expanded our infrastructure. We also made a lot of money off of the Marshall Plan.

By the 70s, a lot of our industry moved to China and other parts of the Third World. Unfortunately, our education system didn't properly adapt to provide high enough vocational skills to properly shift our labor to less outsourced careers. We haven't done much to improve in this regard ever since.

There is plenty of corporate malfeasance that we can blame on our decline, but it also comes down to failed government intervention. Federally backed college loans have caused tuition prices to explode over the last few decades, for example. The real estate crash of 2008 can be partially blamed on governmental pressure to loan to families with worse credit and low income.

COVID lockdown policies resulted in the greatest transfer of wealth from small business into big business due to how many small businesses had to close for lockdowns while big businesses bought the right politicians to avoid having to lockdown at all. Other big businesses simply survived lockdowns better through having deeper pockets.

So, the more people clamor for "guardrails", the more that can empower government to intervene with the facade of the public's best interest while actually just favoring big business and creating market disasters through poorly designed policies.

Capitalism isn't what has made us trend into oligarchy. Government and globalization have.

As for life expectancy by state, Life Expectancy at Birth by State

The map shows a far less dramatic situation than what you mentioned. However, there is somewhat of a difference between some states. You'll notice a certain pattern that isn't political but racial. Most of the states with a lower life expectancy have a high black population. A lot of the South has lower life expectancies, but they also have high black populations, and the black population in general has a lower life expectancy than whites. This is true even when comparing black lifespans in the North with white lifespans there.

By the same token, states with a higher percentage of black people usually have a higher level of poverty as well. That poses challenges to the local infrastructures that result in lower scores in the various things you listed. It's not conservatism that causes this. It's a combination of factors that aren't political so much as they are historical and cultural.

It's easy for a mostly white state with no history of significant poverty, slavery, or Jim Crow policies to maintain high stats in quality of life, like Vermont. And some of the more diverse blue states have industrial or financial advantages that aren't typically present in the South. Because a lot of the South has historically been agrarian or textile based, there are areas of that region still in the process of attracting industry. North Carolina, for example, was much poorer before the tech and pharmaceutical industries moved into the Raleigh-Durham area. Plenty of other Southern states are still figuring out how to become more industrialized in high income careers. Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia have shown it can be done very effectively through low taxes and low regulation, however.

 

[FireDragon76]

Just a side note here, but American political parlance often conflates progressive with liberal. Most of the American left is not liberal. It's progressive.

So to expand on the original post, we really have 3 sides at work here. Conservatives are on the right, liberals are in the middle (for the most part), and progressives are on the left. Most of the Democratic party is now progressives, not liberals.

Liberalism at least implies a focus on limiting government to protect liberties. Progressivism wants government involved in everything -- even in supposedly promoting rights.

"Liberals" are conservatives. Just not the reactionary sort. The majority of Americans are conservative, as compared to a country like Norway or Switzerland, for instance. In any other country, Joe Biden would be seen as a conservative politician.

 

[Fantine]

BTW, if Republicans are conservative, why are deficits always so much higher in their administrations?

Why are they giving away tax breaks when they know they don't have enough money to pay current expenses?

That's not conservative. That's not prudent.