It is the genius of the United States, a profoundly conservative country in ways that Europeans find difficult to fathom, to have elaborated a form of conservative thinking that celebrates the new rather than the old.
That is from Susan Sontag’s new At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. This volume is not her best work, but it is still better than what almost anyone else comes up with.
That’s a great line, but doesn’t it undermine its own premise? I’ve noticed for a long time now that my most “liberal” friends are the most change-averse in almost every area outside of gay marriage.
The words “conservative” and “liberal” mean pretty much whatever the person using them want them to mean. Less so with “libertarian”.
I had to work recently with a self-described “liberal” who I deemed to be a “leftard”. He was so change-adverse he complained about the state revising a highway number, and giggled when I told him that was a conservative opinion.
I suspect, gab, that it means that we are more religiously conservative (ie, higher incidence in the US of believing that evolution isn’t real, or that the world is 6,000 years old) and more instinctively hostile to government efforts to change things than Western Europeans. Is that a fair assessment?
Conservatives can be very silly people sometimes. I don’t know what liberals some of your posters have met, but the ones I’ve known have not been terribly resistant to new ideas unless of course we’re talking about bad ideas such as invading Iraq, threatening to invade Iran, privatizing Social Security inadequately, etc.
I think the US is an inherently conservative party. Both major parties are essentially status quo parties, and the differences between them are relatively minor compared to the differences in parties in European systems. Indeed, we do not have any left parties or movements of particular strength or legitimacy.
Please come to requiem gold, we will give you a great surprise.
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