Portal:Conservatism

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Introduction

Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology, which seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization in which it appears. In Western culture, depending on the particular nation, conservatives seek to promote a range of institutions, such as the nuclear family, organized religion, the military, the nation-state, property rights, rule of law, aristocracy, and monarchy. Conservatives tend to favour institutions and practices that enhance social order and historical continuity.

Edmund Burke, an 18th-century Anglo-Irish statesman who opposed the French Revolution but supported the American Revolution, is credited as one of the forefathers of conservative thought in the 1790s along with Savoyard statesman Joseph de Maistre. The first established use of the term in a political context originated in 1818 with François-René de Chateaubriand during the period of Bourbon Restoration that sought to roll back the policies of the French Revolution and establish social order.

Conservatism has varied considerably as it has adapted itself to existing traditions and national cultures. Thus, conservatives from different parts of the world, each upholding their respective traditions, may disagree on a wide range of issues. Historically associated with right-wing politics, the term has been used to describe a wide range of views. Conservatism may be either libertarian or authoritarian, populist or elitist, progressive or reactionary, moderate or extreme. (Full article...)

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Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) was the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989, after having a career as governor of California and in Hollywood.

Early in his presidency, Reagan implemented sweeping new political and economic initiatives. His supply-side economic policies, dubbed "Reaganomics", advocated reducing tax rates to spur economic growth, controlling the money supply to reduce inflation, deregulation of the economy, and reducing government spending. In his first term he survived an assassination attempt, took a hard line stance against labor unions, and ordered the 1983 invasion of Grenada. The next year, he was reelected in a landslide. His second term was primarily marked by foreign matters, including the 1986 bombing of Libya, and the revelation of the Iran–Contra affair, and the end of the Cold War.

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Therefore I trace the peculiar unity of the everyday political philosophy of the nineteenth century to the success with which it harmonised diversified and warring schools and united all good things to a single end. Hume and Paley, Burke and Rousseau, Godwin and Malthus, Cobbett and Huskisson, Bentham and Coleridge, Darwin and the Bishop of Oxford, were all, it was discovered, preaching practically the same thing - individualism and laissez-faire. This was the Church of England and those her apostles, whilst the company of the economists were there to prove that the least deviation into impiety involved financial ruin.

These reasons and this atmosphere are the explanations, we know it or not - and most of us in these degenerate days are largely ignorant in the matter - why we feel such a strong bias in favour of laissez-faire, and why state action to regulate the value of money, or the course of investment, or the population, provokes such passionate suspicions in many upright breasts. We have not read these authors; we should consider their arguments preposterous if they were to fall into our hands. Nevertheless we should not, I fancy, think as we do, if Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Paley, Adam Smith, Bentham, and Miss Martineau had not thought and written as they did. A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind. I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
— John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire (1926)

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On April 14, 2007, an estimated 300,000 people marched in Ankara to protest the possible candidacy of Justice and Development Party leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the Turkish 2007 presidential election, afraid that if elected as President, he would alter the secular nature of the Turkish state. The protests continued over the next several weeks, with over one million reported at an April 29 rally in Istanbul. Early parliamentary elections were called after the failure of the parties in parliament to agree on the next Turkish president. The opposition parties boycotted the parliamentary vote and deadlocked the election process. The AK Party achieved victory in the rescheduled July 22, 2007 elections with 46.6% of the vote, translating into control of 341 of the 550 available parliamentary seats.

Credit: Randam

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Did you know...

... that Romanian scholar Nicolae Iorga (pictured) constructed a conservative vision of world history, contrasting Max Weber's Protestant Ethic?

... that author Jonathan Krohn gave a two-minute speech at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference at age thirteen?

... that for Theodore Dalrymple's book Life at the Bottom, he interviewed over 10,000 people who had attempted suicide?

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Selected anniversaries in April

1960 – Barry Goldwater publishes The Conscience of a Conservative. The book reignited the American conservative movement and made Goldwater a star.

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1948 – the period known as La Violencia begins with the assassination of Colombian Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. For the next ten years Liberals, Communists and Conservatives would fight each other in the conflict.