I suspect most libertarians don’t think much of those ideas, either. What I’m not sure about is whether centrists like Brooks are Republicans because they are pro-business (which I’d think would make them libertarian-leaning) or for some other reason (which is what I increasingly think to be the case).

… All I can say is, I do not think you are correct at all. Unless you would also call Hoover-to-Roosevelt “incrementalist change” rather than a strong response to rather suddenly overwhelming stimuli.

Take more personal area—human relationships. People with conservative temperaments want to slowly plod through working on them (good) but will often get stuck in ones that are never going to be fixed (bad). So when they are in abusive relationships they are at a disadvantage compared to those with more liberal temperaments because they are less likely to leave. (Maybe. It could also be that if the shift from non-abusive to abusive is very quick, it will be so jarring to the conservative temperament as to cause retreat).

A person with a liberal temperament may not be so open to the small changes in relationships, they want things fixed now. For actually bad relationships, this can be good. It will help them leave. For basically good relationships with some problems it might be bad, because it will encourage them to hop from one imperfect person to the next, never satisfied because the changes toward better don’t come fast enough.

Each temperament is suited better for different situations. And a really healthy human being (which I certainly won’t claim to be) learns to adopt a little from outside his own temperament when his temperament isn’t well suited to the situation at hand.

So yes, liberal (oriented toward sweeping changes) ideas might make more sense now.

But you should look at the value of organic change too. Who would have thought that even revolutionary change in the US could lead to a black president 30 years after Reagan? Yet in fact it was incrementalist change that got us there.

In this context, I disagree at least in part with Harry and agree to some extent (groan) with Brooks. Granted, there’s nothing remarkably radical about Obama’s tax package or any of his other proposals. But when you take the budget, the crisis and the responses to the crisis together, the result “is more than just the sum of its parts.” If the budget goes through, the rescue measures work, and the economy recovers, the result could easily be a transformation on a par with the New Deal.

The big problem for conservatives, as I’ve suggested, is the lack of an alternative. Since the system they defend has made radical changes inevitable, there is no conservative response possible.

As regards your last sentence, you are correct that I didn’t understand what you said, and the reason is that I charitably assumed you knew what you were talking about. Find me an American who calls himself a conservative and does not intend his listeners to understand him to be saying, “I vote Republican.” As regards what comes before the last sentence, you’ve written gibberish just to fill out the paragraph, and I would be foolish to attempt to straighten you out.

And that would be an enormous misunderstanding of my comments. You’re doing worse than going back and forth between the definitions, you’re asserting that they are identical. It would be like saying that I ‘love’ my husband exactly like I ‘love’ a book. Not everything is political. In theory it could be true that conservatives (temperament) are conservatives (political). Someone at least thought it was a good concept from a propaganda point of view at some point. But in the US, if you are thinking conservatives (temperament)=Republicans you either aren’t understanding what I’m saying at all, or completely denying its validity in a weird passive-aggressive way.

Conservatives (temperament) offer good caution to liberals (temperament) while liberals (temperament) keep conservatives (temperament) from getting too stuck in their ways.

The radicals and kooks in the Republican party are another matter.