slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

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Politics of the United States of America: Which one has worked the most in U.S. history: liberalism vs conservatism?

Charles Tips, Former academic editor

Updated Aug 31, 2015

Hold onto your hat, cuz the answer, at least in the US, is wacky!

The US was founded at the peak of the Enlightenment when liberalism, including its economic component, free enterprise, was the dominant ideology. Consequently, our founding documents are considered to be the pinnacle of liberal thought, with many of our founders, such as Jefferson, Madison and Monroe considered among the foremost liberal thinkers in human history.

When the liberal Whig Party proved insufficiently staunch against s***ery, it was supplanted by the more fully liberal Republican Party. Opposed was the Democratic Party, which was populist and generally pro-s***ery or at least in favor of the power of states to determine that question themselves.

Fast forward two generations, and the Democratic Party has its first flirtation with liberalism (though not racial liberalism) in the form of Grover Cleveland and the Bourbon Democrats. Soon, however, both parties are in the thrall of progressivism, an import politics from Prussia, an avowed anti-liberal ideology. Presidents of both parties bemoan the fact that we are saddled with a relic liberal Constitution and long to switch to the emergent modern statecraft. Liberalism is negligible; thoroughly anti-liberal programs such as court-ordered sterilization of inmates at mental institutions and prisons are opposed by single-digit percentages of the American population.

As usual, progressives can't restrain themselves from telling everyone else how to live their lives, and after World War One and the excesses of the Wilson administration, including imprisoning and even executing numbers of conscientious objectors to the war and the draft, liberalism begins a long, slow revival. Only its native home, the Republican Party, following a two-decade-plus fling with anti-liberal progressivism and moving into new parts of the country where liberalism is not a whole conception, clings only to some liberal economic notions.

The American Civil Liberties Union forms and pushes to restore our enthusiasm for the Bill of Rights. Libertarian groups conceive of themselves as a movement to revive and extend our native liberalism. Nobody is really using the name liberal, and so Herb Croly, founding editor of The New Republic, decides that progressives are the inheritors of our liberal tradition. If this coo-coo notion catches on, it does not do so widely.

But Prohibition had broadly soured the public on progressives, and Franklin Roosevelt, running for president during the movement to repeal Prohibition, decided the better part of valor was to drop the progressive label (he'd been such a left progressive that Benito Mussolini credited his work as Assistant Navy Secretary in WWI as serving as the proof of concept of F*****m) and employ the liberal label instead.

After World War Two, the far left was marginalized by the Red Scare of the Cold War, and the Democrats had a generation of true liberalism, in its northern and western wings anyway. The southern wing remained stubbornly reactionary-populist and most unliberal. It was the Republican politicians who most began to see, courtesy of their military experience, the potential of the authoritarian modern state. Then, bam-bam, left progressive Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency followed by right progressive Richard Nixon, while a generation of student radicals pissed at their excesses in the conduct of the Vietnam War imbued progressive politics with Che, Mao, Red Rudi, Alinsky, Fanon, Marcuse, Derrida and so on and got serious about d**gging the US leftward as far as possible. They refer to themselves as liberals, but in fact the political left is strongly anti-liberal and was openly so through its early history. The liberal label is appealed to now in a Fabian squid-ink sort of way.

Conservatism in the US is all over the map, though it should be noted that we have never had a true conservative party in the political science sense. There are temperamental and religious conservatives, but, by and large, most American conservatives make up the rank and file of the Republican Party and are Burkean, that is, what they wish to conserve is our liberal heritage (though they are not holding up liberally on the social end of things, though that in turn is likely in great part the product of the very illiberal way that progressives push such causes--as privileges offered by government rather than as the product of inherent rights).

And so the answer in the US is that you can't say that one has "worked" more than the other because they reference the same politics. If you substitute the purloined label "liberal" as a reference to our socialists, the answer is clear cut--liberalism/conservatism beats socialism hands down as our present economic and employment malaise so clearly demonstrates.

JFlorio Loc: Seminole Florida

Very nice article. Thanks. To me it is the difference between Individualism and Group Think.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Thanks, JFlorio. I stumbled across this in doing some investigative research, and thought it worth posting. As it turned out, Mr. Tips is quite an interesting individual.

E

I agree with that comment about Individualism and Group Think. All to obvious in todays politics and the so called progressives and liberals especially on college campuses.

lpnmajor Loc: Arkansas

It always amazes me how we redefine labels according to how we wish to see ourselves, ignoring the dictionary definitions at will. C*******m is where the State owns everything and "takes care" of it's people, where all wealth is divided equally - at least on paper - but true c*******m has NEVER been practiced in real life. The "people" who are not allowed to own anything and who's production is confiscated by the State, are invariably the people not in the elite ranks of the government or their Oligarch allies. In socialism, the people own the State, and it's government manages it's assets for the people, and those people may own wh**ever they like, but who direct the government to conduct itself in accordance with the common good. The two are very different from each other, especially in how it's applied, yet we tend to link them together as a single ideology.

Then comes the Democratic Republic, where all power resides with the people as administered through it's State legislatures, and who's National Government serves the people - at least on paper - but true republican democracy has NEVER been practiced in real life. We have our Oligarchs who manage the Government at both the State and National level, the National government serves itself, and ownership is an illusion. Don't pay your Federal tax, and you'll lose everything you "own". Don't pay your real estate/property taxes, and you'll lose your home. Be accused of criminal wrongdoing, and you'll lose everything you own and need God's help to get any of it back if you're found innocent.

In practice, the US is more c*******t than anything else, and practices NO socialist ideology - but we choose to redefine those terms to feel better about ourselves and avoid the pain of reality.

buffalo Loc: Texas

In politics, liberals, progressives, moonbats...wh**ever, and conservatives are just the left and right wings of the same bird. Does anything ever really change except the rhetoric fed to the sheople?

currahee

When labels are applied to economics and protestant Christian Theology they become meaningful. A conservative Christian is a person who believes that God is in control of all life and not government. This is reflected in the v****g for statesmen who write policies and laws against "usury" and the control of "currency printing" by private banking cartels. Today's "liberal" believes in just the opposite and sides with any radical group opposed to a an essential standard of law believing that "law is defined by the present culture because we have progressed technologically to the point where we no longer need a god nor the lessons of history."

GmanTerry

All I can say is the definitions have changed during my lifetime. I'm conservative. I v**ed for JFK. Back then Democrats were the party of the working class. JFK cut taxes. Does that sound like any present day democrat? Today, JFK would not be electable because of his conservative views. This shows how far left the Democrats have gone. Now Democrats are only into identity politics. If you are not caucasian they include you and want to give you anything you wish. However if you are caucasian, you have "white privilege and should be ignored and fought against. That is why Donald J. Trump is President. He represented the taxpaying caucasian population. We make the money and pay the taxes that make this government run. We don't ask anything in return except to be included. We want to be INCLUDED.

Semper Fi