Why are conservatives hated more than liberals?

Post Reply New Topic

I said it started in the south, but the south did not fully define from inception the face of conservatism, including it's sympathizers in the north who didn't own slaves, and certainly after the civil war when the movement expanded beyond its borders.

I was toggling two histories and you are right in "a state that stays out of your bedroom and out of the business of marriage." with regards to the south but the conservative movement stopped being confined to the south after the civil war. It was evil and hypocritical but when we speak about rights and traditions, the right-givers (being the white southerners) assumed sub-human view of their slaves makes these racist policies a non-issue. Any issue regarding them brought up is unnecessary since blacks didn't have a say in anything, including interracial marriage and "miscegenation."


The four I mentioned were grouped together for the very reason of distinguishing the "neo-cons" or "progressives" or whatever word you want to assign to a group of 4 who were pre-hawkish but fully intentioned interventionists from the isolationist members of our founding fathers, like Patrick Henry. We could have gone either way depending on the ideological makeup of our founders and the fact that we started out as a progressive interventionist based on idealism is credited to those four. Their unity in that regard would go on to define the Democratic party's foreign policy. (even though that party had not been founded yet.)

This is ironic and funny as hell. Almost every political forum I've ever been on has always had conservative posters who, when breaking the rules or making racist statements, almost always blame "persecution" from a supposed "liberal moderator" bias.

Regardless, Inuyasha himself actually epitomizes the lack of accountability characteristic of many conservatives. Almost every time he mischaracterizes someone else's views he claims the other person didn't "word things properly" and almost everytime he writes something offensive he blames other people for not "reading it properly".

That makes no sense. After the Civil War, and continuing into the present day, conservatives opposed interracial marriage. That can't be explained away by the fact that blacks were regarded as "sub-human" unless you want to posit that conservatives still regard blacks as sub-human.


I would not call Jefferson or Washington "interventionist" in the least.


I really am curious, where do you get your history? America started out as an interventionist state? Jefferson, Hamilton, and Adams had unity on anything? And the Democratic party has shifted its foreign policy stances many times over its history, as part of broader political realignments. Even further, Washington, Adams, and Hamilton are not regarded as ancestors to or even major guiding influences on the Democratic party.

It really depends on what you regard as "intervention". While there was quite a bit of disunity among the founding fathers on foreign affairs, the US Government engaged in the Barbary War as early as 1801 and invaded British North America as early as 1812. There was also a lot of invasion when it came to conquering indigenous territory.

It is hard to consider this "interventionism" given that Europe had already divided up the land to a great extent without regard to any native peoples, and also given that often what would happen is that citizens would harass Indians forcing the government to "lay down the law", which given that the citizens were US but the Indians were not, meant that Indians tended to lose ground.

While there certainly was a lot of land divided up without the original inhabitants consultation, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 reserved a fair bit of (temporary) territory in the Ohio Valley for the indigenous peoples , which upset the colonists quite a bit. It was so upsetting that it was one of the grievances that pilled up to provoke the War of Independence.

Well, ok? M_P, you're still not proving that the government ideas of the founding fathers had a heavily interventionist character. I mean, Indian territory was generally not respected, and a lot of land was taken simply because of ongoing unofficial disrespect which was then later honored by official disrespect.

There are enduring qualities about our nation that has continued to shape our foreign policy and our approach to the world. The nature of our government and society determines foreign policy more-so then external factors do. We work out our identity at home by our actions abroad. This hasn't been more true of any country then the US.

We've always seen ourselves advancing what we uniquely regard as the universal rights of mankind. It is no accident that we persist in thinking that among our many missions in the world is to defend those rights, which we are often hypocritcal of, but no one can deny that this is what animates and moves this great nation.

Our ambition predates our nationhood. We were ambitious when we were part of the british empire, and this tradition continued long afterwards up to the present day. The Washington Farewell Address viewed as the US a nation that threw off the shackles of European colonialism and then retreated behind the two oceans is a constructed myth to make people feel that "recent" military engagements were not normative or characteristic of American foreign policy or American history. If you were a Native American, if you were a Spaniard, French, Russian, or Brit on the North American continent, you didn't see an America that was putting up walls and retreating from world influence.

You saw a young nation that was relentlessly expanding across the West, and quite the dramatic scene that would have been to see this country topple empire after empire off of this continent. The monroe doctrine built on this by making the entire hemisphere our backyard. Monroe's original intent was based on his view that monarchy is corruption at its very highest.

All four had unity on the view that this would become an interventionist and internationalist state with an important role to play in human history and responsibilities to uphold Liberty and Freedom everywhere. The declaration of Independence makes us inherently internationalists because of its specific all-inclusive language.

Okay, under your definition of "interventionist" would any of the warring Empires of old (The Mongol, The Roman, The Persian, The Athenian, etc.) be "interventionist" because they invaded many territories where the integrity really wasn't that respected or does interventionism presuppose a nation-state framework? That was sorta what I was getting at with my "by your definition" cavet, as I view the actions of the US in the early years as practically interventionist (and the War of 1812 definitely fit under semi-modern "interventionism").

Last edited by Master_Pedant on 30 May 2011, 1:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

—To William Duane. vi, 75. Ford ed., ix, 366. (M., Aug. 1812.)

http://www.napoleon-series.org/research ... jeff1.html

Jefferson was also a force calling for the Barbary war.

M_P, I wasn't giving a strict definition of "interventionist". Even further, nothing I said was about "presupposing a nation-state framework". What happens is settlers piss off Indians, and then because the settlers are US people, US forces go in to protect the settlers. This isn't an official military campaign on the levels of what all of these other peoples you mention did. Even further, "that respected" is valid in that Europeans had already been creating deals for Indian occupied lands. It isn't as if the entire territory bought in the Louisiana purchase was unoccupied, and what this suggests is a particular mentality towards the land. It isn't as if this is a matter of conquests(like the other examples) where pre-existing towns are taken and owned, but rather settlers come in, and consequently indigenous people are shoved off. Land "owned" by European powers is accepted, and indigenous people's wishes aren't considered.

I mean, let's be serious here, there are definite dis-analogies between the prior examples and the Indians. And these dis-analogies, even if they are cultural, are still significant in assessing ideology. Ideology isn't just a matter of objective behavior, but also the perceptions of this behavior. So, even if this exactly the same(a point I am denying), if the cultural perception is different enough, the ideology may very well have been very different.

So, you're saying that Jefferson wanted to march into enemy territory while already in a war, so that way he could remove his opponent from nearby territory?

So, you're saying that Jefferson wanted to attack a marauding force of pirates?

Neither instance really shows a strong case for Jefferson as a strong interventionist. By whatever metric you attempt, we can no longer draw distinctions. However, when people talk about "non-interventionism", what is being referred to is their unwillingness to get involved with the affairs of European powers, which is relevant, meaningful, and an important definition for the term, and one that captures an underlying ideology.

The Barbary wars were our very first foreign policy move after we won independence and actually begin the very day we became a nation. As a colony, our commerce was originally protected by the British navy, but now that we were no longer under their rule, we had to fend for ourselves

It was state-sponsored pirating from states such as algeria libya, tunisia, and morocco, and 20% of all our foreign trade went to the middle east. We ended up paying up to a fifth of our total economic output into ransoms and paying off these pirates to get hostages back.

We were newly-formed with no Navy and a loosely controlled band of states. We had the opportunity to approach them like the Europeans with bribes, but oddly, we chose to fight for our freedom to commerce. It was a religious war as the Muslims had some anti-Christian rhetoric that didn't sit well with Jefferson or Congress. Believe it or not, Jefferson's koran was an english translation made by a lawyer named George Sales so that Jefferson could better know the enemy.

Even though we were provoked into this war, it has been throughout our history the impulse of viewing the despotic ways of our enemies as attributable to their lack of democracy and our value system.(this was also the reason we couldn't just dump the Philippines after spain lost them to us) We immediately moved in to change all of this, sending our first group of missionaries to the middle east, and they built the schooling system there, and eventually creating the American University of Cairo and the American University of Beirut. The university became a breeding ground for secular nationalists and these nationalists would eventually go on to overthrow the ottoman empire.

I think the following list our interventionism/internationalist policies pre-WWII

1.) Attempting to steal Canada from Great Britain
2.) Stealing the SW away from Mexico out of slave-holder interest
3.) John Quincy Adams pushing the spanish to their breaking point over Florida and Calfifornia
4.) Declaring in the Monroe doctrine that the entire western hemisphere is our sphere of influence
5.) Making treaties with native americans only to end up supporting your citizens who wanted to expand westwards
6.) Building up the largest Navy in the Americas after the Civil War to rule the western hemisphere and our commercial interests in Asia
7.) Ruling the Philippines after we were left with it from our battle with spain
8.) Going to war with the South
9.) Stealing Panama from Colombia to build a canal for commercial interests
10.) Annexing Hawaii
11.) Supporting revolutionaries around the world who attempted to overthrow their dictatorial governments
12.) Barbary War - Our first foreign policy exercise, which also happened to be in the middle east

Jefferson's presidency could not really be called interventionist. The Barbary War was a defensive effort; interventionism tends to be defined as proactive and not defensive. I would personal say his opposition to the Jay Treaty qualifies as reflecting an interventionist position, though any quibbling on the subject would mostly be spit on how broadly one defines the term defensive.

What about libertarians? How do they match up against conservatives and liberals?