Long live libertarianism. Conservatism was only ever about small government by accident - they were just for mindlessly preserving the status quo. Which is why they lost.
No, seriously, stop for a moment and define it to yourself. I want you to come up with a serious definition, too, not "those assholes who hate darkies" or something like that. Come up with what they stand for, what they stand against, a serious definition of some kind.
Step Two: Determine if we've actually had a conservative government for any period of time since 1980 that have actually acted on the definition of conservatism.
I've posted this as a meta-message because you can get different answers depending on what perfectly legitimate definition of conservatism you adopt.
If you define it solely in terms of reactionary defense of the status quo, conservatism is politically dead, since the status quo has been, is, and will continue to never apply in our world. It moves too fast for that.
If you define it as isomorphic to the Republican party, then it has been in charge and is discredited... but I don't find this a very good definition, as we already have a perfectly good word for "Republican".
If you define it as involving cutting taxes, it has had some success, although only some.
If you define it in terms of libertarianism, i.e., "smaller government", then it has not been in charge since 1980. We've actually not tried "smaller government" in a long time. It's hard to even identify a year since 1980 where it was winning the war, let alone claim it has been winning since then.
"Conservative" and "liberal" are really such ill-defined constructs that using them seriously without defining them almost always indicates weak thinking. For example (and I'm not saying mattmaroon said this, it's just an example) claiming that "conservatives have been in charge since 1980, conservatives stand for small government, conservatives have been a failure therefore small government is a failure" is very bad logic because the meaning of "conservative" keeps shifting throughout the argument.
Social conservatism has had a much better run than fiscal conservatism or small government, which has had almost no traction since the New Deal or even earlier. A couple of years of exception, but even those years it was mostly lip service followed by expanded government.
A conservative is someone you don't like (if you're a liberal). Other than that, I have no idea what the hell it means (vice versa for the term liberal). Political discussions are tough to have because the terminology has become so meaningless. Far too often, I see people slap a political label on a person or policy and the label is intended to be derogatory rather than informative.
The modern "conservative" is someone who wants to turn back the clock thirty years. Since the schools and universities are solidly leftist, the country as a whole moves left over time. The "conservative" of today is thus liberal by the standards of forty years ago. For instance, can anyone name one issue on which Bush was to the right of John Kennedy?
You can basically define yourself along the right-left continuum by stating the year to which you wish to roll back the American political system. Progressives want to keep on marching forward. The folks at the National Review want to roll back our political system to the Reagan era. Ron Paul wants to roll back the system to 1900. Mencius Moldbug wants roll it back to 1687.
What's interesting is that some phenomena that we now view as "arch-conservative" - such as evangelical Christianity - turn out not to be very conservative at all. In 1900, the evangelicals were firmly in the camp of the left ( think William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, or Richard Ely).
I remember believing this in high school. It was an artifact of the definitions of liberal and conservative they taught us, which were that liberals wanted change, and conservatives wanted to preserve the "status quo." That bit of Latin was critical; it made it seem as if there was a real idea here; it was something that might be on a test.
I remember thinking that it was obvious that the safe choice was to be liberal. If you chose to be liberal, you'd have the values of the future today. It would be like leading a target. You'd just get more and more right over time, and the conservatives would get more and more wrong.
In fact, as I realized soon after, this explanation of the difference between liberal and conservative was bullshit. Conservative, as we use the term in the US, does not simply mean "wants to retain the status quo." If tax rates are high, for example, it tends to be conservatives who want change and liberals who want to retain the status quo.
The real distinction between liberal and conservative is much more complicated, and also changes over time.
Incidentally, there are several ways in which the US is more conservative now than under Kennedy. The most conspicuous is tax rates.
Trying to define a label as broad as conservative always results in gross generalizations. But I basically agree with you and was trying to make a similar point.
The Left-Right divide is about ideology, not status quo versus "change". But since the Left has been winning for 400 years, the debate often gets phrased in terms of "restoring the past" versus "progress".
In broad strokes, the Right believes in common law, property rights, localism, and acknowledging the reality of innate inequality.
The Left believes in administrative law, centralization, universalism, and equality.
The Right believes that the role of government is to provide order, security, and rule of law (negative law).
The Left believes that government is an instrument for creating a perfect world.
Again, these are generalizations. But if you look at the political battles since the English Civil War, I think you'll see the sides generally breaking into two camps that generally align with my definitions. Roundheads versus Cavaliers. Levelers versus Jacbobites. Patriots versus Loyalists. Whigs versus Tories. Jacobins versus the Ancien Régime. Unionists versus Confederates. Gladstone versus the Bourbons. Bolsheviks versus the Czar. Wilson versus the Kaiser. New Dealers versus the Old Right. Obama versus the Neocons.
You'll also notice that the left wins most of the battles. Thus the Neocons of today are far to the left of Woodrow Wilson, and Wilson is far to the left of Gladstone.
And of course, just because the Left wins does not mean they were correct and the Right was wrong. The history of politics seems to be something of a random walk. The political systems from Europe's age of reaction ( 1815-1848) were far superior to what followed. If more people had listened to Metternich's warnings about democracy leading to German nationalism, perhaps they could have avoided a couple world wars.
Incidentally, there are several ways in which the US is more conservative now than under Kennedy. The most conspicuous is tax rates.
And even the above graph leaves out seniorage, which has increased dramatically. It also leaves out quasi-taxes, such as legal mandates that require people to pay for expensive college diplomas in order to enter their chosen profession.
Our deficit is significant but our 13.84 Trillion GDP means deficit spending of 1/2 Trillion a year is less than 5%. His graph placed taxes around 12% of GDP which is just so far from the truth that it's almost meaningless.
"conservative" is about far more than just taxes. If you want to compare government spending and fiscal responsibility then Democrats are by far the more "conservative" party. The modern use of the term has far more to do with preserving the status quo from 100 years ago than it does about any specific ideology.
EX: The ban on abortion, the free market pre great depression, "small government", banning stem cell research, anti environmentalism, which really started around the great depression. I expect the "conservative" movement in 100 years will look back at the good old days of the hippie movement with longing.
'"conservative" is about far more than just taxes.'
I explain why there's a lot of definitions of the term, and your response is to... explain why one of my lines was wrong?
'If you want to compare government spending and fiscal responsibility then Democrats are by far the more "conservative" party.'
Do you live the in the same world I do?
Now, you might think I'm going to take exception to the idea that (D) spends less than (R). In fact, my incredulity is prompted by your "by far the more". From where I sit, neither party seems to have met a spending bill they didn't like, except briefly by the (R)s in the 90s which they quickly seem to have gotten over.
(And whatever credibility the (D)s may have had on this issue just got squandered these last couple of weeks, with this "stimulus" bill that, even if you accept Keynesian economic theory, won't do a damn thing to help.)
That's actually my point, there's significant things called "conservative" that haven't been tried lately, small government merely being at the top of the list.
(Oh, and part of the reason I said "make a real definition" is to head off things like saying conservatives are "anti-environment". Nobody of any importance is "pro-pollution". (I don't know of anybody, but it's best to be careful with absolute statements.) They just disagree about priorities or effects. That sort of thinking leads to letting demagogues make up your mind for you.)
Edit: I used "anti environmentalism" because while I don't think they hate the environment rather they see little value in protecting it. There could be some pro environmental movement (R)'s out there but I have never heard of any of them. The 1930's US dust bowl (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl) is really the first case where we noticed a problem and attempted to reverse the effects of changes to our environment by planting trees. You could also look at the creation of the national park system as part of the same movement.
Note: This rest of this is a long rant but I am not going to delete it.
OK, they all all corrupt bastards. Both the stimulus bill and the bailout package are supported by both sides. They like to talk shit, but watch who votes for it. Anyway, it's not a long term issue so moving on:
The federal government has a 400 billion dollar budget deficit. Now let's forget about the huge unfunded liabilities from the Iraq war, the stimulus package etc but just look at that number. We spent ~800 billion on national defense. Inflation is one thing but "President Clinton's FY 1998 budget requests $250.7 billion in budget authority and $247.5 billion in outlays for the Department of Defense (DoD)." Granted the we are fighting 2 wars for some reason. Now, if we cut defense spending by 1/2 we would have zero budget deficit. No single Republican bill in the last 20 years would reduce the size of the federal government by that much hell all of them put together is smaller than that single change.
When the Republicans wanted to improve the national heath care system with their prescription drug plan they prevented the agency from using it's size to reduce drug prices. This is standard practice for all inshurance companies but for some reason they felt it was unimportant.
Obama's plan is require private heath care companies to cover people with prior medical issues. Regulation with Zero cost to the government which actually fixes a major problem. The other issue is letting inshurance companies drop people who become expensive to treat. You might take issue with this, but having inshurance that becomes unfordable when you develop a problem sounds like not having any inshurance at all. That's like your car inshurance saying we will pay for 5% of the damage but we decided to drop your coverage in the middle of the accident because it would have looked like you where going to cost us money.
When Oil was over 100$ a barrel GB kept increasing the size of the national reserve even when it was running out of capacity. Rather than using it as a strategic asset and bursting the Oil bubble sooner he decided to increase the problem by reducing the worlds oil supply costing us money and gaining an asset that's drooped to 1/3 of it's original value.
PS: The federal budget is also this out of whack while they have reduced funding for state programs. Yea, let's talk about states rights but at the same time let's cut the purse strings.
I think it's changed the way it collects taxes, but as far as I know, government spending is still up, even adjusted for inflation. So it's hard for me to see that conservatives are so successful that they have continued to lose, just not as fast as they used to.
Conservatism, was originally about allowing each state to continue as they were when forming a federal government -- it's about what the states meant the constitution to mean when they designed the government. So it should be a small federal government/states rights perspective; and these states can do anything that they want as long as their state constitution allows it.
I think this Rush Limbaugh quote does a good job summarizing modern day conservatism:
We believe in individual liberty, limited government, capitalism, the rule of law, faith, a color-blind society and national security. We support school choice, enterprise zones, tax cuts, welfare reform, faith-based initiatives, political speech, homeowner rights and the war on terrorism. And at our core we embrace and celebrate the most magnificent governing document ever ratified by any nation--the U.S. Constitution. Along with the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes our God-given natural right to be free, it is the foundation on which our government is built and has enabled us to flourish as a people.^
I think ideally that is what conservatives want to stand for, though in practice it may be quite different.
As a libertarian, I think you've misread conservatives.
Conservatives believe in induction: that things that work the same way over time have a tendency to continue working the same way. That humans are basically good people but flawed. Liberals believe in experimentation: that the human spirit is basically flawed but can be perfected through the right combination of experimentation.
Burke is usually claimed as the first conservative. He was mostly a shill for the ruling class in Great Britain, but, to the dismay of his adversaries, turned out to be right in a large number of his predictions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke)
Both terms have varied so much over the last 30 years as to almost be meaningless, however. JFK? He was for big tax cuts to spur the economy. Nixon? Froze prices. Politicians (and parties) that were "supposed" to be either conservative or liberal basically abandoned their principles whenever they thought they could get votes.
People emotionally attach to the party, and then bandy about "liberal" and "conservative" as labels to shut conversation down. It has little to do with the actual philosophies of conservatism or liberalism (either classic liberalism or modern liberalism)
(Sorry. Political junkie here. Couldn't resist providing the information)
