Comments on: Dick Cheney: Conservative of the Year?

By: Katherine

Katherine — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:29:20 +0000

To elaborate: the status quo pre-Reagan was a system that attempted to undo economic inequities via progressive taxation. Reagan sought (and succeeded) to reverse that to make government work to the benefit of the rich. He sought to undo the social safety net.

In the Cold War, the status quo was contained. Reagan sought rollback.

In the culture war, Reagan also looked for rollback, casting the people who had been fighting for their rights in the past decades (black people and women, in particular) as unfairly advantaged over white males.

Bush and Cheney increased what Reagan had begun exponentially, most importantly in the era of foreign policy. The Bush Administration sought – and succeeded – to destroy consensus positions that had stood, at least in America, for over half a century. The most important of these were that the three branches of government were coequal, that torture was immoral and should not be used, and that aggressive war was not an acceptable means to achieve a nation’s ends – that war was only acceptable in self-defense, defense of an ally, or defense of a neutral nation. Preventative war was an old doctrine, not a new one, and one that had become anathema after it resulted in the First World War.

In all three cases, the Bush reaction succeeded as the Reagan one had. The basic positions and principles of 2/3 issues have been accepted by the Obama administration: the US has the right to attack nations that have not attacked it, and the Executive has sweeping security powers not subject to review of either Congress or the Courts. The belief that torture is wrong is no longer consensus; the fact that it is illegal does not mean those who use or implement it are subject to law. Torture is a matter of policy that can and will be reversed the next time there is a Republican administration.

For the last 30 years, history has been moving backwards.

By: Katherine

Katherine — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:15:08 +0000

Conservative is someone who wants things to stay the same. Reactionary is someone seeking to reverse the course of history.

The Republican Party crossed that line with Reagan.

By: Mike Schilling

Mike Schilling — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 23:58:48 +0000

someone who has no political ambitions

I guess wanting to avoid pariahood and prison aren’t strictly speaking political ambitions.

By: Dem

Dem — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 04:42:09 +0000

I’ve always seen it as one who believes you should “turn back the clock,” so close enough in some ways to your view. I just never see the terminology used very often (comparative to the term “radical” that is used).

By: Nob Akimoto

Nob Akimoto — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 04:16:42 +0000

Well, it’s John Bolton. Do we really take him seriously?

By: Jaybird

Jaybird — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 04:12:30 +0000

Is it something you become?

I’ve always seen it as something that you stay while everything else changes around you. I mean, those people who argue that we shouldn’t have gay marriage are eventually going to be reactionary… but they were centrists a mere decade ago and it wasn’t even a topic a decade before that.

By: Dem

Dem — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 01:25:28 +0000

As an honest question: At what point does someone go right enough to become a reactionary? What would be the difference between a conservative (in this case “face of modern conservatism” encapsulated in Palin or Cheney) vs. a reactionary?

By: Justin_Anderson

Justin_Anderson — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 18:41:09 +0000

Dick Cheney is the face of modern conservatism. He and the other neocon hawks hijacked it after 9-11 and used it as a vehicle for their own authoritarian fantasies. The question remains, who gets to define what conservative means. Is it the intellectual right or the mouthbreathers at Fox, talk radio, RedState, etc.