Society can exert tremendous force as evidence by the number of laws that have been passed in an effort to weaken that force.
Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner. Democracy is not a viable form of government as it very soon falls victim to the tyranny of the majority. The checks they put on the political power wielded by different branches of the government had nothing to do with class warfare. I would suggest you read the Federalist papers if you are interested in what they had in mind when they put checks on governmental power.
Suffice it to say that they would be heartily disappointed with the way the government they instituted has turned out. Today, there is little regard for the checks they put on government as it relates to government interaction with the people.
The homestead act was the single best way to begin populating the vast frontiers west of the Mississippi.
And it would be pretty hard to deny that antitrust laws have failed miserably to achieve the stated purposes of their authors.
I am perfectly aware of what conservatism is and how it originated, but I don’t look to the roots of conservatism to try and glean the essence of modern conservatism.
Maybe you didn’t read what I wrote. Live and let live may be the “aim” of modern liberalism but it isn’t what modern liberalism practices. The flaw in modern liberalism is that it is doomed to become the very thing that it claims to hate most. As I said, modern liberalism touts a live and let live message, but it supervises everything which is hardly compatible with the live and let live message.
Modern liberalism claims to honor diversity and tolerance above all, but its diversity excludes ordinary people, and its tolerance requires speech codes, quotas, and compulsory training in politically correct opinions and attitudes.
Modern liberal totems and tabus have no clear connection with letting people live as they wish either. Restrictions, large and small constantly multiply. To conservatives, the rules of modern PC liberalism often seem simply arbitrary: prayer is forbidden while instruction in the use of condoms is required; smoking and furs are outrages, abortion and sodomy fundamental rights. This hardly amounts to live and let live.
Tolerance is traditionally understood to mean letting people do what they want. (live and let live) Modern liberals, however, have redefined tolerance in a way that allows them to enforce a requirement for equal respect as a fact of social life. These two different understandings are radically inconsistent. As a political matter, tolerance calls for laissez-faire, while the redefined tolerance requires pervasive administrative control of social life. As a result, modern liberals who claim tolerance as the ultimate goal goal must be intolerant because their redefined tolerance requires the control the attitudes people have toward each other, and any serious attempt to enforce this liberal tolerance will require means that are unforgiving and despotic.
Compare the state of a conservative society to a modern liberal state with regard to tolerance. A conservative state is in one sense the most tolerant possible, but in another does not care about the matter. You can do whatever you want as long as you do not violate certain clearly defined rights. As a result, the conservative state is indifferent between tolerant and intolerant ways of life as long as the intolerance does not take the form of physical attack or violation of property rights.
In contrast, the modern liberal state is intended to promote social tolerance in the sense of equal respect. To do so, it must be intolerant of many ways of life that do not directly injure or interfere with others. For example, laws against discrimination are intolerant of the ways of life called "racist," "sexist," "homophobic," and so on. They force people to associate with others against their will, denying them the right to choose those with whom they will live and work. Since the human experience is saturated with sexual distinctions and religious and ethnic loyalties that permeate and organize our very lives, the modern liberal state is in fact intolerant of all actual ways of life, and committed in the name of tolerance to transform its citizens radically through the use of force. The new tolerance thus means that no one except a few ideologues can live as he wants. As I said, modern liberalis is destined to become the thing it hates the most.
I enjoy the conversation, but if we are to continue, we really need to trim it down to a more manageable size. These exceedingly long responses just take more time than I have to give.
