forestwalker wrote:Not sure I'd lay it at the feet of the relatively recent ascendancy of neo-conservativism (more properly named aggressive neo-liberalism), though.
Aggressive neo-liberalism is a good term for it. The movement leaders dissociated from traditional liberalism and infiltrated the right, especially during the Reagan presidency, in response to what they perceived to be the weakness of liberalism to effect ideological aims. From the right they adopted aggressive tactics to counter their previous experience. Another term might be pseudo-conservatism. I'm glad they experienced another round of failure during their hegemony with the Bush 2 presidency. Into Bush's second term they had lost favor, due again to the incompetency of their catalyst, and Bush policy thankfully became more traditional, albeit with residual messes for his successor to clean up, hopefully.
forestwalker wrote:A truly conservative political tradition doesn't really exist in the US (as political philosophy at least; it's been the starting point for most of the populace [e.g. the Populist revolt] until recent decades).
That's a point worth considering. American political philosophy is, by definition, liberal when measured against everything that came before it. Populist conservatism is more religious and nationalistic than, as you say, politically philosophical. Early federalism under Washington and Adams may have been the closest thing to a manifest conservative political philosophy, since it retained shades of monarchy, but the federalism that re-emerged as Republicanism with Lincoln was by then more democratic and thus liberal. Territorial expansion during the nineteenth century never allowed the convenience of political conservatism, and ever since Wilson America has been too involved in foreign interests to be conservative either militarily or politically.
forestwalker wrote:As the article suggests, the roots of the current conservative degradation are in the Cold War-era alliance between traditionalist conservatives and liberal/libertarian philosophy. The result was libertarian-inclined power brokers paying lip service to traditionalist issues and traditionalist/conservative thought being deeply undermined and confused by libertarian philosophy.
That's an interesting thesis. It points up one of the innumerable gaps in my knowlege base. I have never read anything substantial on the history of libertarianism or its historic interplay with conservatism in America.
forestwalker wrote:It's tough to talk about clearly given liberalism's claim that any rationalism that is not it's own materialistic rationalism is no rationalism at all.
Where does religious liberalism fall into this? It certainly isn't materialistic in the philosophical sense, yet it is pervasive within both traditional and new political liberalism. The way I see it is that rationalism has fundamentally altered all strata of our culture, including religious fundamentalism. (Not even the Orthodox tradition has been untouched by it, though that tradition is arguably the most successful holdout of pre-modernism.) Because rationalism's impact is pervasive and not limited to enclaves of philosophical materialism, and since political liberalism is permeated with religious belief, I don't think that I would agree that materialistic rationalism defines liberalism, at least in its predominant political manifestation.
