Obama Is the Actual Conservative Candidate in This Race

By -
I am not in love with Obama as our president. But I want him to win, and I want him to win because he is the more conservative candidate. Of course, by "conservative" I mean conservative in the original sense of the term: more prudent, less prone to over-reaction, more deliberative, more respectful of precedent. (Yes, there are problems with him in this regard: think the contraception hub-bub. But it is another conservative trait not to make the perfect the enemy of the good.) By my criteria of being conservative, most of today's modern "conservatives" like Hannity and Limbaugh are revealed as angry, radical populists. And Romney is willing to cater to them in order to win office.

Obama: the conservative choice.

Comments

  1. John Goes10:55 PM

    That's a strange definition of conservatism. Perhaps in the context of a traditional state such a definition would have more meaning, where the leadership serves more the role of a steward.

    For one thing, you seem to be ignoring the conservation of culture and heritage as essential to conservatism. Your conservatism seems rather abstract, universalistic and deracinated in the context of the modern incarnation of liberalism. Your description of conservatism might warm the heart of a risk-averse technocrat!

    If I remember a recent post of yours on immigration, in which you confessed to lacking an imaginative solution to the immigration problem that doesn't violate some kind of a kindness ethic you've adopted; but you do think that current immigration policy needs repair. I'd be curious to know specifically why, if not how? Is immigration just an economic concern, or do you believe that there is a culture/heritage component to it? Do you believe that there are any significant negative social externalities to increased diversity, as discussed in R. Putnam's infamous paper?

    I know you tend not to like to answer direct questions and prefer to be coy, Gene, so take those as rhetorical questions if you like.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more