In a recent thread about "sophister", to which no one has replied (sob! sob!), I referred to Edmund Burke's view of conservativism.

Just today in the Chicago Tribune, there was a long article about two recent Supreme Court decisions; one supported gay/lesbian relationships and the other supported affirmative action for university admissions. In the U.S., at least, these decisions are considered "liberal"; yet, many here have always considered the court most "conservative", so people are perplexed.

Yet, if you think about Burke's views on "conservativism", are the decisions really conservative? As I posted in the "sophister" thread, to Burke, "conservativism" means decisions should be made from day-to-day experiences, rather than from fine-sounding ideals. He considers people who push the latter to be arrogant.

What are your views on the difference between "conservative" versus "liberal"? I wonder if the Brits think differently from the Americans on this.

[This message was edited by Kalleh on Sun Jun 29th, 2003 at 19:43.]

Well in Britain the situation is made more confusing because in addition to the words "conservative" and "liberal" we also have political parties of those names "Conservative" and "Liberal" so regardless of the actual meanings of the words in many minds they are associated with the policies of the parties.

If we look at the words instead of the parties "conservative" usually means "in favour of established customs and values" and "resistant to change" whereas "liberal" means the opposite "favouring social change" (Note -those are definitions from my dictionary rather than mine.)
I'd have said also that "liberal" carries the implication of "broad minded" and favouring personal liberty to an extent that conservative usually doesn't.

With all that said not all the Conservative policies are conservative and not all of the Liberal policies are liberal.

It all depends on where you stand politically whether you think conservative is an insult and liberal a compliment or vice versa.

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Things DO get confusing! I agree that the mostly Republican-appointed Supreme Court's recent decisions seem unusually liberal, given the ire they surely must have created in such rigid people as John Ashcroft.

My take on the liberal/conservative difference is that conservatives want to conserve their wealth by taking ever more from the poor; liberals want to take away the wealth of the rich and give it to the poor. Both extremes are a bit screwy.

I would argue, however, that the US Constitution is at its core a liberal document, as it gives exceptional power to the people, and not just to a ruling class, as did the Magna Carta, which was itself a document of exceptional liberalism for its time.

It IS odd, methinks, that we bandy about these terms as though we all knew what we were talking about - when we DON'T!

Yet, Asa, here in the U.S. doesn't "conservative" usually mean that power should be with the individuals and state, rather than with the federal government? Or, by "ruling class" do you mean the rich people and businesses?

As Bob says, "conservative" is heavily influenced here by "Conservative" (of the political party), and is thus broadly synonomous with "right-wing".

I'm amused to see that in the reporting of Russian politics, fervent communists should logically be more left-wing than reformers, but are in fact described as "right-wingers" because they are broadly what we would call conservatives.

A bit like assuming that in the southern hemisphere "more Northern" is still synonomous with "colder". (I remember being very confused the first time I went to Australia. It was December, and I'd asked someone how long they'd been doing somthing. "Since the spring", they replied, "about three months". Caused a mental double-take on my part.)

I recently read an interesting quote that links this thread to the thread on irony. "There's something ironic about all this uproar from conservative guardians of morality. I mean, one does not have to dig very deep to realize that this decision is actually a validation of one of the core tenets of conservatism. Namely, that government should be smaller and less intrusive." ~ Leonard Pitts