Establishment = the new conservative?

[bladefd]

Will establishment shift to be the new conservative? We know that the ideas that make up conservative/liberal change from generation to generation. In basic simplified terms, the idea of conservative is simply to keep things the way they were, and liberal is a call for change. Our current establishment model goes back to the 60s around the period of JFK, impacting both parties (right towards the end of Eisenhower terms). It is built on the ideas of old money having control over the parties by funding and choosing who they want. It was almost like an invisible hand, but it is shifting with the rise of Trump/Bernie.

If it continues, establishment politics is currently on the verge of collapse, but there are rumors that folks like Mitch McConnell would rather vote Hillary in the name of the establishment over Trump. They are fighting hard against Trump/Bernie.

So the question is: is the new conservative going to be establishment?

One way or another, the Trump Train has changed Republican politics forever. But one thing is already certain: The conservative movement has become the establishment.

It is now the part of the GOP with countless institutional levers of power, trying to foist its policies on an unhappy base.

Consider the presidential race: One of its favored candidates, Marco Rubio, is also by everyone's reckoning the establishment candidate. And he's fighting a war with an insurgent candidate, Trump, who is by no means a traditional conservative, having supported single payer health care, said nice things about Planned Parenthood...

And if that scenario isn't clear enough, think about this: The speaker of the House is now a Tea Party darling, because more moderate candidates like Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy lost elections or just couldn't get the votes.

This is it. This is the moment that movement conservatives have been waiting for for decades. They're now the establishment.

http://theweek.com/articles/609204/c...ct-accordingly

[Nick Young]

"liberals" like Hillary are the new establishment conservatives.

[Terahite]

"Consider the presidential race: One of its favored candidates, Marco Rubio, is also by everyone's reckoning the establishment candidate. And he's fighting a war with an insurgent candidate, Trump, who is by no means a traditional conservative, having supported single payer health care, said nice things about Planned Parenthood, and flirted with the KKK."

http://theweek.com/articles/609204/c...ct-accordingly

To say that Trump 'flirted' with the KKK is obviously a lie. Why are you even quoting from this biased rag?

And all of these labels mean nothing; real working people with families don't think about shit like this. They are voting for Trump because they have shit to do not because they are "German fascists".

[Nick Young]

The Democrats started a war in the name of preserving slavery.

The Democrats created the KKK.

The Democrats interned American citizens in concentration camps.

The Democrats forced those interned citizens to perform sweatshop labor.

The Democrats fought against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and the civil rights movement.

The Democrats today are promoting pro-segregationist identity politics.


Are you voting Democrat, bladefc?

[bladefd]

To say that Trump 'flirted' with the KKK is obviously a lie. Why are you even quoting from this biased rag?

And all of these labels mean nothing; real working people with families don't think about shit like this. They are voting for Trump because they have shit to do not because they are "German fascists".

It was the first article I could find on this issue. I didn't go searching for this specific article. If it gets you raging, I will edit that part out. Happy?

[Dresta]

I already made this point on here a while ago, and I think there's some truth to it. Conservatism in the old Burkean/Kirkean meaning is all but dead, and people who call themselves conservatives in that tradition, without being one, have destroyed conservatism--as they've now stigmatised it with warmongering, profligate spending, running high deficits, and a contempt for privacy and the restraining of centralised government power. People like Bill Buckley helped along this shift, as did Milton Friedman (a man as radical as they come called "conservative" smh), because they were the "conservative movement" but they weren't conservative.

Thus conservatism has morphed into kind of valueless tropes about the "free markets" and such, not recognising that an uncontrolled free-market is just about the most radical thing there is--the problem with it isn't its efficiency (and it is that), but the radical social and political change it engenders. The conservative tradition, up to and including Kirk, never stressed economics in such a way, because economics is highly derivative. Moral questions come first, then political ones, and only then does economics become a concern. We have no established basis for morality atm, so that doesn't help much either.

The point is: America has changed so fundamentally over the past one hundred or so years, that a conservative of old would likely despair at there not being anything left worth preserving apart from the unfulfilling husk of material wealth and gratification (something that has always been more of a liberal striving than a conservative one--Bentham, Gladstone, and co.). At that point, someone who still holds those conservative principles, would need to become more radical, and I guess, not all that conservative.

[NumberSix]

Will establishment shift to be the new conservative? We know that the ideas that make up conservative/liberal change from generation to generation. In basic simplified terms, the idea of conservative is simply to keep things the way they were, and liberal is a call for change.

being "liberal" means to advocate for individual liberty. There's no connotation of change or preservation. It's just misused and coopted by people who are not liberal.

"Conservative" is more tricky. You could look at it as wanting to keep things the way they are or returning to the way they once were. In some ways, it is another way of saying traditionalist. Of corse, people have and come from different traditions so different people can be conservative and be on the complete opposite side of things.

For example, from an English/American perspective, the conservative position is to advocate for individual liberty whereas from other perspectives the idea of individual liberty is entirely alien.