IMO, Krugman gets this one (mostly) right. Stopped clock?
Conservatives DO NOT share libertarian ideas on free markets. They only care about privilege and getting handouts from the state for well to do white Christians.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/conservatives-are-mostly-not-libertarians/?_r=1&
...most conservatives are not libertarians, even if they like to use libertarian rhetoric now and then.
Think about it: the modern Republican party may be the party of deregulation and low taxes, but it’s also the party of social illiberalism. Someone like Rick Santorum firmly believes that the government has no right to tell business owners what they can do in the workplace, but has every right to tell ordinary citizens what they can do in the bedroom. William Buckley’s God and Man at Yale was in large part a diatribe against the notion that colleges were teaching students about unemployment and how to fight it; but what Buckley wanted was, in effect, for those colleges to get back to their proper role, which was religious indoctrination. In its heyday National Review was a staunch supporter of free markets; but it was also a staunch supporter of Jim Crow — which wasn’t just about the right of white business owners to discriminate against blacks, it was about a system of laws designed to protect white privilege.
All of this makes no sense if you think of liberalism versus conservatism as a simple argument about the size and role of the state. But it makes perfect sense if you follow Corey Robin, who sees it as being all about the protection of traditional hierarchy:
For that is what conservatism is: a meditation on, and theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.
Conservatives DO NOT share libertarian ideas on free markets. They only care about privilege and getting handouts from the state for well to do white Christians.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/conservatives-are-mostly-not-libertarians/?_r=1&
...most conservatives are not libertarians, even if they like to use libertarian rhetoric now and then.
Think about it: the modern Republican party may be the party of deregulation and low taxes, but it’s also the party of social illiberalism. Someone like Rick Santorum firmly believes that the government has no right to tell business owners what they can do in the workplace, but has every right to tell ordinary citizens what they can do in the bedroom. William Buckley’s God and Man at Yale was in large part a diatribe against the notion that colleges were teaching students about unemployment and how to fight it; but what Buckley wanted was, in effect, for those colleges to get back to their proper role, which was religious indoctrination. In its heyday National Review was a staunch supporter of free markets; but it was also a staunch supporter of Jim Crow — which wasn’t just about the right of white business owners to discriminate against blacks, it was about a system of laws designed to protect white privilege.
All of this makes no sense if you think of liberalism versus conservatism as a simple argument about the size and role of the state. But it makes perfect sense if you follow Corey Robin, who sees it as being all about the protection of traditional hierarchy:
For that is what conservatism is: a meditation on, and theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.
