Time Mag: What is a Conservative? Talks about Ron Paul

This is interesting article written by TIME Mag, who are certainly not conservative.

One of the more interesting things was how they viewed us as representing 1/5 of the whole Conservative pie.

I expanded on it below:

The 5 faces of Conservatism.

[1-Libertarian Conservatives]: The second smallest group in size, these leave us-alone goldbug isolationists with growing youth appeal are growing in number but no clear place in the GOP. They are in direct conflict with the Value Voter who seeks to impose their morals and restrict civil rights, they are in direct conflict with the Neocons who seek to expand American Hegemony, and they are slowly learning that real power is in holding positions inside the GOP of which the Chamber Conservatives dominate. Ron Paul represents this group, but this group has no idea of who its successor will be or what in its future. Two names rise to the front with this group, Rand Paul and Judge Andrew Napolitano.

[2-Neoconservatives]: These are the smallest group, arguably a band of intellectuals, yet they successfully converted the general fear of communism into a generally accepted fear of "terrorism". The rise of antiwar doves in the democratic party in the 1970s drove a band of hawks to become neoconservatives in the Reagan 1980s who never blinked an eye over big government expenditures, but got their big moment in both Bush presidencies to start Gulf War I & II and implement their goals of Middle East Hegemony.

[3-Value Voter Conservatives]: Are perhaps the second largest block. These are Evangelical Christians who crusade against gay marriage, abortion and general American moral decay. If Rick Santorum has his way, the concerns of the lower class working man who has been left out of the privileged wages & benefits enjoyed by the Union working man.

[4-The Chamber of Commerce Conservatives]: These are the largest block of conservatives, from small business owner to the "I am just not a democrat" republican. These are low regulation, low tax, and status quo republicans are often refereed to as the Country Club Republicans, yet it is these long hours over worked small businessmen showing up at the local chamber of commerce that organize, take up positions of power inside the GOP and get things done. If it its raising taxes on the rich or attempts to stop issuing visas for the educated & talented, these conservatives speak up. Mitt Romney represents this group.

[5-The Tea Party Conservatives]: These conservatives spread themselves over the above groups and have failed to hold together. The one overriding concern they have is spending, as in government spends 'too darn much'. They are new blood into the party and they have given new life to the libertarian faction which started the movement back in 2007/8. But the tri-cornered Patriots could not hold their baby together. By 2012, this faction broke over both values and foreign policy. No GOP candidate represents this group today.

With Romney representing the Chamber Republicans he has also tried to represent the neocon views and tea party views. His trouble has been with the value voters who do not buy his flip flopping on their issues.

With Santorum representing the Value Voter, he has tried to represent the neocon views and tea party views while having an outsider status to the real GOP power holders who are Chamber Conservatives.

With Newt Gingrich representing the chamber voter, neo con voter, and tea party voter, his stumbling block has been the value voter. Both Newt and Mitt have stumbled on this value voters block and Rick Santorum has made claims to it this block. Rick has also reached out to blue collar independent-democrat concerns of falling wages and lost manufacturing jobs.

Ron Paul battle is not with Obama or the democrats, but with his own party. Indeed, they are a party to themselves. His Patriots failed to convince value voters that Paul's libertarianism would give them a more moral society in which to live. The Patriot faithful failed to hold key power positions within the Tea Party and deliver them in 2012. His Patriot faithful are just learning the importance of holding key positions of power within the GOP apparatus (they are a loud bunch, not too stealthy & wise in the ways of small "p" politics: face-to-face "likeability-gets-things-done", don't-show-your-cards politics. Indeed, one doubts that they could handle the politics of an emotional little league board). This is why Ron Paul says over and over again, his message is an intellectual revolution. Its a revolution between the ears that his Patriots gets, but little else of the big picture.

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The Conservative Identity Crises, by David Von Drehle.

"So it should be no surprise that the Republican field has been a mosh pit of fracturing and forming and re-fracturing alliances, hoisting one candidate after another to the top of the polls. Republicans are yearning for to catalyze the old coalition. Romney appeals to a shared desire for victory, Gingrich to a shared set of grievances, Paul to one brand of ideological purity and Santorum to another."

"Yet the image of a party's "base" suggests a solid foundation, and the Republican race revealed some deep cracks in the conservative movement - dividing anti-abortion social conservatives and live and let live libertarians, separating the isolationist heirs of Robert Taft from the nation-building heirs of George W. Bush's "freedom agenda", culling the pragmatists at the Chamber of Commerce from the ideologues of talk radio and distinguishing country-club insiders from the Tea Party outsiders".

"Some of these cracks are almost as old as the movement itself. Modern conservatism was born in the early 1950s after the extraordinary 20 year reign of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his chosen successor, Harry Truman. Conservative economics had been blamed for causing the Great Depression, and conservative isolationism for inviting World War II. Amid the rubble of a discredited ideology, a young writer named Russell Kirk unearthed a rich philosophical tradition going back to British writer and politician Edmund Burke: Kirk's 1953 book THE CONSERVATIVE MIND was a sensation, influencing a generation that included William F Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan."

"Kirk's was never the only brand of conservatism, but his ideas were like a magnet pulling others toward them, and steadily, a coalition of the right was formed. Kirk emphasized the religious roots of society, which spoke to the rising Christian conservatism of the 1970s. He counseled slow and orderly change rather than radical or utopian schemes; this made his movement a welcoming home for Americans unnerved by the social revolutions of the 1960s and '70s. He held that individual property is the root of freedom, which rang a bell with the free-market economists of postwar London and Chicago, disciples of Austrian Ludwig von Mises. And he cherished traditional values and local institutions rather than shiny new ideas from central headquarters, which made his philosophy a comfortable place for the inevitable backlash against Washington and the New Deal."

"If that sounds tidy, it's because it's all compressed into one paragraph. In the long run, some of these alliances became quite messy. For example, the individualism nurtured by the Austrian school of free-market economics was a prickly match for Kirk's ideal of ordered, traditional authority. Even the conservative hero Thomas Jefferson, with his capacious mind, had trouble reconciling "Don't tread on me" with "Thy will be done." By 1963, the free-market individualist Willmoore Kendall had made a "declaration of war" on Kirk's movement with his own book, 'The Conservative Affirmation'."

"This division endures in the determined fragments of the GOP devoted to the devout Santorum on the one hand and renegade individualist Ron Paul of Texas on the other. Yet for some 40 years, a common enemy welded the strands of conservatism together: Soviet communism. The imperial ambitions of Lenin's descendants posed a mortal threat to Kirk's philosophy and Kendall's too. Communism was radical rather than gradual, central rather than local, utopian rather than humble, atheistic rather than religious, classless rather than ordered, totalitarian rather than free. The longer the Soviet Empire went on, the stronger the conservative movement grew, until ultimately Ronald Reagan became the only President since Roosevelt to not only be re-elected but also pass the office to his chosen successor--a rare feat of political strength in American history."

Read the Complete article here:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2105974,00....