"All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing." -O’Sullivan’s First Law ...and sometimes not even then. National Review has unconditionally surrendered to same-sex ‘marriage’ Until a few days ago, few people outside the offices of National Review knew that the revered conservative magazine’s publisher is a homosexual, “married” to a man. “The publisher of the most important conservative magazine of the last 60 years, National Review, is gay-married?” wrote The Stream’s Peter Wolfgang, who broke the story. “Garrett Bewkes, the man overseeing the magazine once edited by William F. Buckley, has a husband.” “He’s been the publisher for five years. How did this happen? And what does it mean for the conservative movement and the Republican party?” Wolfgang asked. “I suspect a lot of NR’s long-time readers don’t know this. I wouldn’t have known if a local newspaper hadn’t run an article by Bewkes’ ‘husband’ Bradley.” This of course not to say that gays can't be conservative, or write for or publish conservative magazines, but the leftward drift of THE conservative flagship magazine, National Review, had been attributed, I thought, to it's anti-Trump hysteria. Many Never Trump Republicans, such as many of the ones who wrote for for this special issue such as Mona Charen, Steven Hayward, Bill Kristol, and John Podhoretz have basically abandoned the Republican Party and conservatism in general. But I guess NR's recent social liberalism is due to becoming...a socially liberal magazine. NR hasn't been taken seriously in conservative circles in years, but I'm thinking it was about a lot more than just Trump; it was O'Sullivan's Law in action.
Here's an alternative. Social issues like abortion, same sex marriage, gun rights, separation of church/state issue etc, should never have been identified as 'conservative' or 'liberal' because they have zero to do with conservativism or liberalism philosophy or ideology. One of the fundamental tenents of conservativism is to keep govt from getting into micromanaging who we marry, what we do with our bodies etc. Barry Goldwater was as conservative as anyone can get, but he hated the religious right because they kept getting their noses into everyone's moral business, when that was the exact opposite of conservativism meant to him.
As a liberal, I don't really expect you to understand what conservatism actually is. Conservatism is not Libertarianism, although the venn diagram does have a few common points.
Conservativism, just like liberalism is a concept in flux it changes with time. . I am talking about the following broad principles. Keep taxes low, keep govt small and inobtrusive, keep the budgets balanced ,pro business and anti regulation, , and govt minding its own business. keep a strong defense, and strong law and order commitment. Those are basic principles of American style economic conservativism and none of them preclude marriage equality or abortion access. They also happen to be principles of Libertarianism except Libertarianism is not so interested in a strong military, or law and order. That is why they will differ on the scope of civil liberties, search and seizure, and defense spending .
Low taxes are a policy, not a principle. Here is a handy guide to principle. Ten Conservative Principles
No low taxes is a principle on which policy is drafted. Reducing the sales tax from 5 to 4% or the top tier income tax rate from 9% to 7% is a policy consistent with those principles. I am not looking at your link, Mike.
OK, that's fine. However if we can't agree on what's a policy and what's a principle, we probably could not have had a fruitful discussion in any case.
Conservatism is all about culture. The Left is all about destroying that culture and replacing it with a technocracy dominated by sociopaths, As we've seen from the history of rule by sociopaths like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the secular Left only has two solutions to all economic and social problems: Mass murders and slave labor.
