Political Challenge

[jennythereader]

A challenge for all of my politically minded friends-

Define the other end of the political spectrum is as positive a way as you can. For example, I'm progressive, so I would define conservatism. Here's my attempt:

CONSERVATISM: The belief that societal changes are not always for the better, and that generally the potential negative consequences outweigh the potential good. Therefore changes must be implemented slowly, incrementally and only where absolutely necessary.

Comments

[siderea]

Conservatism: The attitude and belief that we have something precious here in how our society is organized, something it is our sacred duty to protect and to steward, something which is much more valuable than any given individual, and something which is fragile and which will be destroyed if not actively defended and maintained; that society is a complicated machine of many moving parts, and tinkering with them is likely to have widespread unintended negative consequences; that things are the way they are for good reasons, usually because they're time-tested and have proven to be ways of things working for the better of society.

[jennythe-reader.livejournal.com]

Much more nuanced than what I came up with.

[siderea]

Well, I'm not playing fair. I don't consider conservatism the "opposite" of a position I hold. I don't consider any political party or position "opposite". I see the merits in all of them, and can identify with all of them.

I remember exactly the moment I "got" conservatism. I was on the MBTA Red Line headed south and were just climbing up the Longfellow Bridge to Charles St. Station, and I had been thinking to myself about the politics of my local SCA group. And it suddenly dawned on me that wrt my barony, I was deeply conservative. I suddenly and deeply got where cultural conservatives were coming from, because I saw their point.

A certain famous conservative political/economic theorist had pointed out the difference between the SCA, Inc ("The Corporation", aka "Milpitis") and the Society (everybody in it, and all its culture and practices and social organization/structure), and this paradigm was very real in my and many of my fellow citizens' felt sense that our local group was something that had to be defended against the Corporation, which kept promulgating burdensome taxes and rules, to the point I was seriously thinking of writing a terse letter to Corporate with a tea bag stapled to it (this was in 1993 or so, IIRC), and, frankly, we'd prefer if The Corporation disbanded and we make our own damn Corporation.

And if that's not a direct analog of what the less-government-social-conservative crowd is saying they feel, I'll eat my socks.

ETA: I like your challenge, because I strongly feel that if you can't see the attraction in a political school of thought, you're completely defenseless against its charms. E.g. how all those neo-cons used to be progressives. If you can't tell me why Mussolini fascism is awesome, you're a convert waiting to happen.

Re:

[jennythe-reader.livejournal.com]

Well yeah, referring to sides or opposites grossly oversimplifies things. But I think phrasing it that way made it clearer what I was asking people to do.

I have to remind myself frequently that my more conservative friends and family are not taking the positions they do out of a sense of malice, but rather from either contentment with how the system currently works or from fear that changes must be for the worse.