A very interesting and stimulating presentation, part 2 is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moyZ65kB5XA

If you like what you hear, and can bear a bit... erm lot of Hillary Bashing, check out his blog at http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/

An interesting blogger who lets his ideas and perceptions develop like a real human being, instead of being a mouth piece of particular political side. I disagree with him sometimes but he is always an interesting read.

Conservatism is a form of mental illness.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/aug/13/usa.redbox

"A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity".

As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.

All of them "preached a return to an idealised past and condoned inequality".

Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the report, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, received $1.2m in public funds for their research from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.

"This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes," the authors argue in the Psychological Bulletin.

One of the psychologists behind the study, Jack Glaser, said the aversion to shades of grey and the need for "closure" could explain the fact that the Bush administration ignored intelligence that contradicted its beliefs about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

I suggest you read the studies you cite before you propose that conservatism is a form of 'mental illness', the study itself was carried out to link a hypotheses to the idea that conservatism shares common treads as a whole or independently with regards to rigidity, inequality and unwillingness to be open to new ideas.

"Our first assumption, too, is that conservative ideologies – like virtually all other belief systems – are adopted in part because they satisfy some psychological needs. This does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational, or unprincipled."

Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative. I gather that you're a USian?

Guess whose wrong.

There is a interesting post by Kevin Drum:

END OF AN ERA?....David Frum is pretty pessimistic about the current state of movement conservatism, but George Packer says that David Brooks is even more dejected:

When I met David Brooks in Washington, he was even more scathing than Frum. Brooks had moved through every important conservative publication — National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard — "and now I feel estranged," he said. "I just don't feel it's exciting, I don't feel it's true, fundamentally true." In the eighties, when he was a young movement journalist, the attacks on regulation and the Soviet Union seemed "true." Now most conservatives seem incapable of even acknowledging the central issues of our moment: wage stagnation, inequality, health care, global warming. They are stuck in the past, in the dogma of limited government. Perhaps for that reason, Brooks left movement journalism and, in 2003, became a moderately conservative columnist for the Times. "American conservatives had one defeat, in 2006, but it wasn't a big one," he said. "The big defeat is probably coming, and then the thinking will happen. I have not yet seen the major think tanks reorient themselves, and I don't know if they can." He added, "You go to Capitol Hill — Republican senators know they're fucked. They have that sense. But they don't know what to do. There's a hunger for new policy ideas."

The great liberal wave that lasted from the 30s through the 70s was fundamentally based on three things: middle class wage growth, the construction of a social safety net, and the individual rights revolution. Its other pathologies aside, liberalism's big problem by the end of the 70s was that it had essentially won most of these battles. Not all of them. No movement ever wins all its battles. But once you win two-thirds of them, it's hard to sustain the kind of momentum it takes to win the rest.

Conservatives are in the same boat today, except worse. Modern movement conservatism was also fundamentally based on three things: low taxes, anti-communism, and social traditionalism. ("Small government" was never more than a fig leaf.) Today communism is gone (and Islamofascism has failed to rally the troops in the same way), taxes literally can't be lowered any more, and sex-and-gender fundamentalism has become an albatross that's rapidly producing a generation of young voters more repelled by conservatism than any generation since World War II. Even in the late 70s, there were still plenty of traditionally liberal goals still to be fought for. Not enough to build a winning coalition around, but still something. Modern conservatives don't even have that. The culture war is pretty much all they have left, and its clock has run out.

They won't be willing to say this during a presidential campaign, but there are at least half a dozen smart Republican senators who understand this and don't really want to go down with the ship. So even if Democrats don't win a filibuster-proof majority in November — as they almost certainly won't — it's likely that there will still be enough survival-inspired GOP senators around to give Barack Obama the votes he needs to make a difference. If that's the case, and if Obama has the courage of his convictions, his first two years could be historic.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/

I should be forgiven for assuming you're a USian; you use all-USian references. Which is not helpful.

I could stand another 40-year liberal wave. It's been hard to live through a 40-year conservative one.

I don't think there's an innate problem with people who believe in conservatism. I think there's an innate problem with the people in the party who try to claim the mantle. They're a pro-corporate, pro-rich party, and will use any divisive trick they can to win elections.

I'd love to go back to being able to think of the difference between the political parties in terms of philosophical differences over how to solve problems.

Right now the gulf is between those who want to address the problems actually in front of the country, and those who want to use fear to cow the populace into obedience.

I'd rail against a Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama presidency if they tried to use fear, even if they used those fearmongering tactics to pass Universal Health Care and a carbon tax.

We're not supposed to be a monarchy, not even a benevolent one.

But by and large those are the definitions that are used within the political sphere right now, one can't just hope for it to change anytime soon. People are people and as a whole the population loves encapsulation of set of ideas and ideals within narrow definitions, it's hard to present oneself to the public as fiscal conservative with social liberal leanings. It's impossible. At the same time no one is willing to listen to nuance and understand ones position, because of the way people make judgments.

I agree however that conservativism as it was defined or rather referenced by those in power in the last couple of years is a fallacious lies, focusing on fear mongering, social and religious postulations that play no role in wider social and foreign policies sphere, basically saying and doing anything they please while calling themselves conservatives.

Small government as a core of the conservative movement was a bullshit lie, we all seen how the Bush administration has created the largest no bid privatizations of the government, believing that all of society could be 'fixed' if only left to the private market. Their ill performance in Iraq and Katrina further exemplify their inability to actually lead.

As David Brooks points out "You go to Capitol Hill — Republican senators know they're fucked. They have that sense. But they don't know what to do. There's a hunger for new policy ideas."

I believe however that it is useful to understand why the conservative movement did gain such a momentum post Clinton and going into Bush eras. At the same time to see where the movement will go after this, I believe Sullivan has a idea of recovering the so called 'Conservative Soul' his own definition of it is very interesting, at which point I recommend you watch the video.

"But by and large those are the definitions that are used within the political sphere right now..."

In the United States. There is a world outside of the USofA.

"it's hard to present oneself to the public as fiscal conservative with social liberal leanings. It's impossible."

What are you talking about? What's wrong with "I'm a fiscal conservative with social liberal leanings."?

By the way, liberal and progressive are by no means interchangeable terms.

Andrew Sullivan is an imbecile. He thinks ABC News is left-wing, and until recently he was one of the biggest apologists for Bush. I don't think conservatism has anything whatsoever to offer society.

Moving this video to Farhad2000's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

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Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued - promote requested by original submitter Farhad2000.

Sullivan does a great blog...though he posts about 1000 times a day!

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