THE PLANK DECEMBER 21, 2009
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Conservatives have lined up in near-unanimous opposition to any progressive legislation introduced during President Obama’s first year in office. Whether they’ve been railing against health care reform, a climate bill, or financial regulation, their ire has stemmed less from legislative specifics than from a generalized prophecy of doom: Obama’s proposals will move the country toward socialism, bankrupt entire industries and small businesses, and deny Americans their basic freedoms. These arguments, however, aren’t new. Conservatives—not just Republicans, but various politicians and groups who’ve resisted major social changes—recycled them throughout the twentieth century. They used them to oppose numerous progressive measures that Americans now take for granted, from women’s suffrage to child-labor laws to Medicare. Click here to see our collection of choice predictions about disaster that never came. Conservatives today might prefer they be forgotten.
2 comments
If this were a public comment forum, we'd have teabaggers swarming and proclaiming that Democrats opposed civil rights, when in fact it was conservatives (in both parties) who opposed it and liberals who supported it. Still - I sometimes wonder about the types of claims you're making. I can see how conservatives would get frustrated and claim that liberals were just claiming all progress in history as "liberal" and all of those who stand in the way of progress as "conservative". This assumes that conservatives aren't capable of pushing radical change in the social order. Maybe one day decades from now, liberals will be declarings Reagan's policies as liberal and his Democratic opponents as conservative, since Reagan generally tends to be seen as being on the right side of history when it came to the excesses of government.
- Virginia Centrist
December 21, 2009 at 3:59pm
VC makes a good point. But it may be a matter of scale. On the major issues that have defined the success of the American experiment, conservatives have been on the wrong side every time. On smaller issues of less lasting importance, conservatives have played a more constructive role. The example of Reagan is apt: he was on the right side of history on a temporary political issue. If conservatives have to reach for "slightly restrained government excesses in the 1980s" to balance out "opposed independence from Britain," "favored expanding slavery," and "protested aid to Hitler's enemies," that clearly illustrates the degree to which conservatives get the big questions wrong.
- rhubarbs
December 22, 2009 at 3:23pm