Interesting thread, I actually asked the same question in an OP, but will spare you the agony and instead give a sorta tongue in cheek survey of my view of American conservatism, it's all I know.
First if conservatism is basically defined as respect for the past and past traditions, which ones do we pick. I like now and I like what modern life has managed to provide. But I'd also like an even better future for all people. (I do well in life.)
Or if we were all conservatives would we still be living in caves howling at the moon? After all is that a great tradition and blaming the moon focuses complaint, single foes make life simple and conservatives are simple. imho
Or are conservatives, as seems so obvious, just whining contented people, too lazy or insecure to allow that maybe things are not perfect for everyone? And just because they are OK, and mommy and daddy are helping them, all is OK with others and if those others weren't lazy and insecure they too would be conservatives or at least OK.
Anyhow these two books sum up the modern American conservative, other conservatives are probably odd too, but unknown at this time, and possibly in a cave somewhere.
"He argues that a triplet of 'rhetorical' criticisms--perversity, futility, and jeopardy--'has been unfailingly leveled' by 'reactionaries' at each major progressive reform of the past 300 years--those T. H. Marshall identified with the advancement of civil, political and social rights of citizenship...Charmingly written, this book can benefit a diverse readership."
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/HIRRHE.html?show=reviews
"'The Culture of Contentment' is a deliberate misnomer. Galbraith is using irony here, irony little short of sarcasm. What he really means is the culture of smugness. His argument is that until the mid 1970s round about the oil crisis the western democracies accepted the idea of a mixed economy and with that went economic social progress. Since then, however,
a prominent class has emerged, materially stable and even very rich, which, far from trying to help the less fortunate, has developed a whole infrastructure - politically and intellectually - to marginalize and even demonize them. Aspects of this include tax reductions to the better off and welfare cuts to the worst off, small 'manageable wars' to maintain the unifying force of a common enemy, the idea of 'unmitigated laissez-faire as embodiment of freedom,' and a desire for cutback in government. The most important collective end result of all this, Galbraith says, is a blindness and a deafness among the 'contented' to the growing problems of society. While they are content to spend, or have spent in their name, trillions of dollars to defeat relatively minor enemy figures... they are extremely unwilling to spend money on the underclass nearer home. In a startling paragraph he quotes figures to show that 'the number of Americans living below the poverty line increased by 28% in just 10 years from 24.5 million in 1978 to 32 million in 1988 by then nearly one in five children was born in poverty in the United States more than twice as high a proportion as in Canada or Germany." Peter Watson
Amazon.com: Culture of Contentment, the (Penguin economics) (9780140173666): John Kenneth Galbraith: Books: Reviews, Prices & more
'Conservative thought will be banned under the new Healthcare reform act as so much negativity. greed, and self centered narcissism only leads to depression and grouchy, lined faces, and furthermore is in opposition to the general welfare clause of the constitution. Due to the widespread prevalence of Dunning–Kruger effect among conservatives and republicans, a healthcare proviso has been amended to the original bill.' mc5
Great post midcan. John Kenneth Galbraith was a close friend and trusted adviser to President Kennedy. He and our 35th president were on the precipice of having a huge effect on American history, but an assassin's bullet ended that and horribly altered the direction of this nation.
Galbraith and Vietnam
By Richard Parker
The Nation
Monday, March 14, 2005
In the fall of 1961, unknown to the American public, John F. Kennedy was weighing a crucial decision about Vietnam not unlike that which George W. Bush faced about Iraq in early 2002--whether to go to war. It was the height of the cold war, when Communism was the "terrorist threat," and Ho Chi Minh the era's Saddam Hussein to many in Washington. But the new President was a liberal Massachusetts Democrat (and a decorated war veteran), not a conservative Sunbelt Republican who claimed God's hand guided his foreign policy. JFK's tough-minded instincts about war were thus very different. Contrary to what many have come to believe about the Vietnam War's origins, new research shows that Kennedy wanted no war in Asia and had clear criteria for conditions under which he'd send Americans abroad to fight and die for their country--criteria quite relevant today.
But thanks also in part to recently declassified records, we now know that Kennedy's top aides--whatever his own views--were offering him counsel not all that different from what Bush was told forty years later. Early that November, his personal military adviser, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, and his deputy National Security Adviser, Walt Rostow, were on their way back from Saigon with a draft of the "Taylor report," their bold plan to "save" Vietnam, beginning with the commitment of at least 8,000 US troops--a down payment, they hoped, on thousands more to follow. But they knew JFK had no interest in their idea because six months earlier in a top-secret meeting, he had forcefully vetoed his aides' proposed dispatch of 60,000 troops to neighboring Laos--and they were worried about how to maneuver his assent.
Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, then Ambassador to India, got wind of their plan--and rushed to block their efforts. He was not an expert on Vietnam, but India chaired the International Control Commission, which had been set up following French withdrawal from Indochina to oversee a shaky peace accord meant to stabilize the region, and so from State Department cables he knew about the Taylor mission--and thus had a clear sense of what was at stake. For Galbraith, a trusted adviser with unique back-channel access to the President, a potential US war in Vietnam represented more than a disastrous misadventure in foreign policy--it risked derailing the New Frontier's domestic plans for Keynesian-led full employment, and for massive new spending on education, the environment and what would become the War on Poverty.
Worse, he feared, it might ultimately tear not only the Democratic Party but the nation apart--and usher in a new conservative era in American politics.
...
By then Galbraith was back in New Delhi, after stopping in Saigon on Kennedy's orders to survey the situation there firsthand. He had filed not one but three lengthy back-channel cables to JFK, which make for sobering reading today (even though Galbraith interspersed them with his trademark wit: For example, he described one briefing by local US officials as "geared to the mentality of an idiot, or more likely, a backwoods congressman"; taken for a brief inspection tour of the countryside surrounding Saigon, he dryly reported that it was hard to tell "friendly jungle" from "Vietcong jungle" and added, "who is the man in your administration who decides what countries are strategic? I would like to...ask him what is so important about this real estate in the Space Age").
Given word of Kennedy's reshuffling at State, Galbraith was cheered by Harriman's promotion but also cautious, knowing full well by now the ambitions of the President's top advisers. To his diary that night he noted his ambivalence about the shift. "It is all excellent and not a moment too soon; but then Kennedy left in place at his right hand McNamara, Bundy, Rusk, and Taylor." His worry, needless to say, proved on the mark: Those top officials kept pushing the President for greater and greater US involvement, as they would push Lyndon Johnson when he inherited them following Kennedy's assassination. But Kennedy--with Galbraith counseling him throughout--kept resisting them in turn, right up to that fateful day in Dallas.
The Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, when for a moment the world hung on the brink of nuclear oblivion, seemed to have a particularly powerful effect on Kennedy. Soon after, he began work on the famous American University speech that he delivered in June 1963, in which he spoke more forcefully than any President had ever dared about the risks of nuclear war and the need to negotiate with the Russians (from that speech came the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty). He also asked Galbraith to take over as US Ambassador to Moscow, an offer Galbraith finally declined, convinced of the impossibility of working with and through Rusk.
We also now know that Kennedy that same spring ordered the Pentagon to plan to have all US troops out of Vietnam by early 1965, shortly after what he assumed would be his re-election--and further ordered that the troop pullout begin by the late fall of 1963. But he did not, of course, live to see their withdrawal.
http://www.johnkennethgalbraith.com/index.php?display=10&page=articles
When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that he was relieved that the President had died quickly, fearing the destruction of his wit and intellect as the greater evil.
