From: Miles Goosens <outdoorminer@mindspring.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Wolfe's politics
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 1998 17:35:04 

At 04:58 PM 6/30/98 -0500, Jim Jordan wrote:
>	1. Wolfe's conservationism (environmentalism) is wholly in keeping with
>traditional conservatism, which is not committed to a total laissez-faire
>approach to all matters. 

<snip>

>	6. But the conclusion of the whole matter is this: Wolfe has said in
>interviews that he is a practicing Roman Catholic, "but you may not
>understand what that means." The same is true of being a conservative. A
>great many people who have not read Christian and conservative (not the
>same thing, of course) literature have very odd notions about what such
>people actually believe and espouse.

Not to go entirely off-topic, but what Jim is talking about serves to
highlight the radical disjuncture between what most people think
"conservative" means vs. what academics usually mean by the same term.  As
Jim points out in #1, philosophical conservatism often questions the
morality of a "laissez-faire" market-driven economy, whereas those
popularly identified with "conservatism" usually fetishize "free markets"
and, in at least this sense, embrace liberalism just as heartily as
"liberals"!  

But if you tell people that their "conservatives" are really liberals,
you'll get nothing but puzzled stares.

I consider myself to be very left-leaning, and not religious at all, but I
often find myself in sympathy with those on the academic right.  If you
think of the range of political opinions as a circle rather than a
continuum, the far left and the far right are not that distant... :-)

later,

Miles


===============================================================
"Gettin' piss-drunk, givin' the players a hard time, throwin'
a chicken bone at the cop - that's what baseball is all about."
	-- a lout from Cleveland two rows in front of me at 
a Tigers game, waxing rhapsodic about how Indians games used
to be

Miles Goosens
outdoorminer@mindspring.com

http://www.mindspring.com/~outdoorminer/miles
===============================================================

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