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The definition of Conservative used is laughable. Religious belief has nothing to do with whether you're a conservative or not, and there's no mention of small

by jgranby 17y ago

The definition of Conservative used is laughable. Religious belief has nothing to do with whether you're a conservative or not, and there's no mention of small government, lower taxes, which are what conservatism is about. The definition seems to be a caricature of America's religious right, but the sample is of foreign students in the US. In other words, the definition is based on a subset of American conservatives, which has no equivalent in many of the countries that the students will have come from.

space_cowboy 17y ago
>"there's no mention of small government, lower taxes, which are what conservatism is about." I disagree. I believe Conservatism is context-dependent. In the 1700's, Conservatism would have meant resisting the Democratic revolutions in places like the US and France. That's why Edmund Burke's pieces against the revolution in France are still considered important tomes in Conservative thought. Modern American Conservatism is weird. It was not meant to preserve the old order, but to rebuild an order that no longer existed. Limited government was thoroughly eradicated by the New Deal, which the Conservative movement was born in opposition to. Thus, it is in some ways a "Revolutionary Conservatism", which is slightly oxymoronic.
dkarl 17y ago
You'll never get consensus on what "conservative" means; conservatives themselves will never agree completely, just as liberals will never agree on liberalism, Marxists on Marxism, etc. It's a political question. If we accept the paper's definition for the sake of argument, then maybe we can have an interesting discussion about it. Of course, it's a given that the definition and the means of measurement determined the results, so the definition used in the paper is extremely important to interpreting the results. Whether the definition is correct, however, isn't important.

by jgranby 17y ago

space_cowboy 17y ago

>"there's no mention of small government, lower taxes, which are what conservatism is about." I disagree. I believe Conservatism is context-dependent. In the 1700's, Conservatism would have meant resisting the Democratic revolutions in places like the US and France. That's why Edmund Burke's pieces against the revolution in France are still considered important tomes in Conservative thought. Modern American Conservatism is weird. It was not meant to preserve the old order, but to rebuild an order that no longer existed. Limited government was thoroughly eradicated by the New Deal, which the Conservative movement was born in opposition to. Thus, it is in some ways a "Revolutionary Conservatism", which is slightly oxymoronic.

dkarl 17y ago

You'll never get consensus on what "conservative" means; conservatives themselves will never agree completely, just as liberals will never agree on liberalism, Marxists on Marxism, etc. It's a political question. If we accept the paper's definition for the sake of argument, then maybe we can have an interesting discussion about it. Of course, it's a given that the definition and the means of measurement determined the results, so the definition used in the paper is extremely important to interpreting the results. Whether the definition is correct, however, isn't important.