sg,

I’m not saying that technology is the sole force driving change, though it would be sufficient in the absence of the others. As I suggested, Capitalism itself is another such force. While it is true that the change is driven primarily by a “collection of conscious decisions” the aggregate effect of these is not a conscious decision. No one in the 50’s said “let’s create the 60’s”, nor foresaw it, nor probably even regarded such a scenario as “credible”. The course of society is not under conscious control.

On the example of gay rights, I think Stonewall and such would have been unthinkable without the Sexual Revolution, and the latter is fairly widely regarded, I think, as in part the consequence of birth control technology. That birth control would affect the life of gays, who have no need to worry about unwanted pregnancy, was certainly not obvious, but that is frequently how history works. Actually, I think popular culture at this point sometimes exaggerates this, pretending that not even direct consequences of actions are foreseeable, but, still, in part because of the complex interdependencies I mentioned, the overall direction of history is not under conscious control.

My point about gay rights was different anyway. Because liberals were not defending the status quo on this point, they were not stuck with other commitments that bound their hands on the issue. Also, the fact that they went so far so quickly suggests that our culture has become inured to rapid change. I don’t think Burke would have predicted that.

The need to defend the status quo locks one into positions when one should know better. Case in point: Social Security. The Republicans attack this for reasons they pretend are practical, but which are actually ideological. They deploy various dishonest arguments to do so. In response, liberals show that projecting historical trends in economic growth shows Social Security as solvent for several more decades, largely because of the reforms Greenspan pushed in the 80’s so Reagan could use SS to finance his cuts of more progressive taxes. This is all fine, but in protecting this aspect of the status quo, liberals are forgetting about things they know perfectly well in other contexts: global warming and oil depletion, for example. Even assuming we change our current behavior rapidly, the economic impact of those things almost certainly means that economic growth for the next half-century will not match that of the preceding half-century. This is not an argument Republicans can make, but, unlike theirs, it is a legitimate one. Being committed to the status quo, liberals are not taking full account of vectors of change that they do, in fact, know about, much less the ones they do not. Because liberals are protecting the status quo from conservative attack, rather than visualizing comprehensively how they want society to change, they are backed into incoherent positions.

mq,

I think I was being more rueful than triumphant, but still, you did not respond. You responded to my initial glib assertion that Burkeanism was a losing hand, but not to my account of why. No reason you had to, of course, but for that reason I did not regard you as “continuing to cheer”, at least not in my hearing.

On the other points, I agree that liberalism is seeking to moderate rather than prohibit change, but is that not also what Burke seeks? Yes, his specific ideas do not apply to the current situation, but in that sense I don’t think many conservatives of the last 150 years are Burkean either, save perhaps for the occasional William Lind; they are not cheering for the return of the ancien regime.

As for tradition, is liberalism at this point not a tradition? If it evolved in response to events, what can it be but a tradition?

Actually, I would say much of liberalism’s greatest success in the economic sphere is when it is more efficient than laisser-faire. Regulated markets often have lower transaction costs, for example, as the various disclosure laws in real estate, for example, reduce the labor that you must invest to protect your interest as a purchaser. Muting Capitalism does not necessarily slow it down.

Josh – I thınk I agree wıth you then.

Martin, you are being too triumphalist here, since I and others continued to cheer for some form of Burkeanism as the proper governmental response to radical capitalist change. Liberalism tries to build mediating institutions that buffer and moderate the radical changes created by capitalism, hopefully without slowing down the process of capitalist growth too much.

Although I liked your analogy between modern liberalism and Burke, I now think it’s somewhat confusing. There is a certain sense in which American liberalism is incrementalist and traditionalist in its approach to government, but there is little desire among liberals to stop the process of social change created by capitalism. In fact, most liberals welcome those social changes. Burke was writing before the industrial revolution, and his notion of “tradition” simply does not transplant into modern society.

A few people in this thread seem to be blinded by U.S. conservatism, with its libertarian strain, and more or less ignorant of the history of European conservatism. As someone (Martin Bento?) said above, Nazism is a form of radical conservatism, but it’s European conservatism. The thing is that European conservatism is rooted in the history of militarist aristocratic values, while until recently U.S. conservatism has been more influenced by middle-class bourgeois commercial values. As Engels says above, Nazism tried to turn these militarist, hierarchical values into a radical popular mass movement (as opposed to confining them to an aristocracy). The core ideologies are nationalism and militarism along with anti-semitism, and a crude form of communally based social Darwinism (the master race and all that). Those are simply not leftist values. Both radical leftism and radical rightism declined into murderous dictatorships, but the initial ideologies were completely different.

As someone else pointed out above, U.S. conservatism has recently been showing some disturbingly facistic tendencies, with the emphasis on militarism, nationalism, and the importance of a unified popular will.

It seems that you are using right-wing to means “nationalist” or “militarist”, which I find an illogical definition. (Among other problems, it makes the French Revolution a right-wing movement.)

Sam – Fascism ıs a kind of rightwıng populist movement. İt serves the interests of elites by usıng a powerful ıdeology to manipulate the masses into betraying their own interests by fanning and then exploiting widespread hatred of chimerical enemies (eg. Jews, or perhaps Arabs or gays) and promotıng violent emotions (eg. nationalism, feelings of racial superiority) which serve elite interests, notably by creating a polıtıcal climate in whıch aggressive imperıal war is acceptable and even desirable. İn these respects it bears a certaın resemblance to recent mutations of American so-called ‘conservatism’.

I think you’re forgetting one key “right-wing” feature of Nazism: When the Nazis (and in other fascist countries, the local fascists) had taken over power, and been in power for a while, most (allthough not all) of the people who had been rich or wealthy before were still rich or wealthy. As far as I know, that wasn’t so with Stalinism.

Cult of personality is a natural phenomenon for any mass-movement, there’s nothing remarkable about it. Hard to imagine one without a revered charismatic figurehead (sometimes it’s someone from the past, some dead guy). That’s just human nature.

For the Right and Left – depends on the definition of ‘good’. Someone from the Right would certainly argue that a traditional patriarchal/hierarchical society is good for everybody, not just for the traditional elites.

Left—primarily concerned with the good of the society (with “who’s part of the society” a subject of debate).

Right—primarily concerned with the good of traditional elites. (Note: this means that a policy favoring Baptists over Catholics is “right” in Lynchburg, but not in Italy.)

Liberal—primarily concerned with the good of individuals as perceived by those individuals. (Note: the balance between protecting individuals[libertarian] and benefiting individuals(liberal democrat in the European sense) is much contested.)