I'm not. And I'm not even a conservative.
One of the great institutions of Her Majesty's Scepter'd Isle is Prime Minister's Question Time, where the PM has to field (often quite hostile) questions from all comers. Here Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbin tees off on Donald Trump, on the occasion of Prime Minister Theresa May's recent meeting with Trump. May lets him rant, and then beats him like a rented mule, to the cheers of the Commons.
The Winning looks to be global, and shows no sign of letting up.
I've said repeatedly - at least for a year - that while I have no idea whether Trump will make a good President, we're fixin' to find out. But it's hard not to cheer for him when his opponents are such a nauseating combination of self-righteous, stupid, and vicious. We may hope that a bunch more beatings like Corbin just got here may lead to a smarter (or at least a less stupidly self-righteous) Left. We could use an intellectually vigorous Left.
6 comments:
"... an intellectually vigorous Left." If they had intellects, they wouldn't be Leftists.
There. That ought to start a minor firestorm. :)
It would but they don't know what you mean. 'Cause it would require thinking and stuff.
She reminded me of Margaret Thatcher right there.
I second libertyman's comment. That smack down was pure Thatcher in its eloquence. A wonderful backhand.
PM May does indeed talk the good talk. But in her heart, she is nothing more than a British version of the Rove Republicans. She says what she says because she thinks it will get her re-elected when the time comes. But in the meantime, she will do everything she can to undercut Brexit and continue the Long March towards One World Government. Definitely not even remotely Thacherian. Instead, Shrubian. Because, after all, that is what that entire tribe supports as well.
But you are a conservative. You wish to conserve the concepts of individual liberty. I've thought for some time now that the whole liberal / conservative thing was hogwash. Progressives hijacked the term liberal, and they plastered everyone else with the conservative label. At this point, it takes a ten-minute conversation to separate the leftists' progressive ideology from the label of liberal, and I'm not sure it succeeds very often. I figure what the hell; own it. I wish to Conserve the precepts of Individual Liberty. I am a Conservative.
If you want to maintain individual rights, limited government, separation of powers, and the rule of law - you are a conservative/classical liberal. The biggest differences seem to range around just how limited that limited government should be. The more I look, the fewer differences I can find between conservatives, libertarians, and classical liberals - which I believe make up close to 70% of the US. Each group seems to have some bazaar pet ideas, but I think the majority of each group is probably willing to at the least, discuss the relative merits of those ideas. If you can get people to start with - Individual Liberty vs Collectivism and build from there, individual liberty will win with the vast majority of America.
Progressives have no interest in individual liberty, they are not interested in limited government, and they apparently don't give a rats ass about the rule of law. The are collectivists and totalitarian. Many (mostly younger) are simply useful idiots - indoctrinated into the ideology and trained to block out anything that doesn't sound like it.
I would guess that about 30-40% of the US are locked into labels that no longer have any meaning thanks to being hijacked primarily by the progressives. I think the progressives recent and continuing behavior will serve as a reasonable wake-up call. Every day there's another million people who look upon the progressives and think - It's time to step back from the CRAZY.
My personal inclination is toward anarcho-capitalism - which I fully accept is a utopian pipedream. There is no evidence anywhere that indicates human beings could operate under such a system. You would have to ignore all of human history to believe it's a workable system.
The rational part of me leans toward libertarianism but again - it's a pipedream. You can not have open borders and a welfare state, and we're probably never going to get everyone to agree on isolationism. (which I think sounds much better than it would ever turn out to be).
So - unless like Dave Rubin - you want to spend five or ten minutes prefacing every conversation with a definition of classical liberal - Conservative it is. Even he's starting to get the idea.
Conserve the precepts of classical liberalism. We can argue about the fine points once we've relegated the fringe elements to the distant and ignored fringe where they belong.
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