Clarifying the meaning of “conservative”
First of all, today’s “republican” is a neoconservative, not a conservative. The early republican party supported hard money (i.e. a gold standard), were anti-slavery, opposed entering into World War I, and World War II, and opposed membership in the League of Nations (now the United Nations). Although the republican platform began to shift toward a more liberal (I don’t mean that as an insult) stance with the election of Richard Nixon, and even more so with Ronald Reagan, there still persisted a bit of the non-interventionist belief. Republicans opposed intervention in Somalia and the Balkans in the early 1990’s and, in 2000 George W. Bush ran for president on a platform of non-interventionism and “no nation-building”.
No central bank, no government welfare, non-interventionist foreign policy; these are conservative values. But the definition has changed, hence the term “neoconservative”. Today’s republicans subscribe to a unilateral, GTFO-of-our-way foreign policy with a focus on military might (and pre-emptive war) as opposed to diplomacy. They are in love with the idea of central banking and government bailouts, and they want to expand the United States role in United Nations and the “global market”. Today’s republicans are not conservative, nor are they sensible, practical, or objective in their opinions. They are neocons. Ronald Reagan, George H Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain, Rudy Juliani, Mitt Romney, Bill Orielly, Leo Strauss, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfield, to name a few.
ewww, I feel all biased and opinionated now…but you get the idea.
I found this quiz on Lew Rockwell’s site that gauges your political alignment. Read the explanation, then click the link to take the quiz. At the end it lets you guess which alignment you think you might fit under the most. I chose left-libertarian, and that’s what it calculated. A while back I came to the conclusion that I was a “progressive-libertarian”. I’m glad I was pretty much right about that (according to his quiz anyway).
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dmccarthy/dmccarthy14.html
a foreign policy of freedom
The war on Iraq was illegally initiated. Congress passed a war resolution, allowing the executive branch the authority to practically wage the war themselves, instead of constitutionally declaring war. A neocon would rationalize that Saddam Hussein is evil, might have weapons of mass destruction, and might be connected to the Al Qaeda network, and that we need to stop Saddam before he does any more damage. He may see a moral obligation to wage war against Iraq, or he may even see it as a religious obligation. So a neocon would vote YES on the war resolution, and in so doing break the law.
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Tags: conservative, foreign policy, humanitarian, iraq, republican, war
