Inside the conservative mind Posted by Suzanne Nossel

I have taken advantage of my stint in Dreznerworld to pose a series of questions about the conservative take on a variety of foreign policy issues.  I'm dying to know the truth about conservative viewpoints on a lot of these subjects, though we'll see what replies I get.  I've said that anything that smacks of by-the-books Scott McClellanism won't be worth the html its written with.

I promised the Dreznerites I would ask a bunch of similar questions of the progressive side to be posted here later this week.

Comments

[rosignol]

Asking lefties those questions would be nearly pointless- we already know the answers, they've been screaming them for around two years now, and have yet to figure out why the righties find the questions and the usual answers uninteresting.

How about letting the 'Dreznerites' come up with the questions?

[jk]

can someone please tell me what a conservative vs. liberal foreign policies looks like these days?

[Nathan]

Or what a "progressive" is for that matter... I've seen everyone from an inch to the left of the center to far left quasi-Marxists use it.

[rosignol]

From where I stand, it looks like calling oneself a 'Progressive' is merely a clever way to imply that your opponents are 'regressive'.

[Keith M Ellis]

rosignol, nice to see that your comments here are as unnecessarily contentious as they were over there.

"From where I stand, it looks like calling oneself a 'Progressive' is merely a clever way to imply that your opponents are 'regressive'."

So "conservative" is a clever way to imply that your opponents are "wasteful"? Does it ever occur to people to not assume bad faith from people with whom they disagree (especially ideologically)? Today's made me tired.

In my opinion, most of the reason leftists today prefer the term "progressive" is simply to differentiate themselves from "liberals"...not from conservatives in some sinister rhetorical fashion as you suppose. For most people who self-identify as "progressives", "liberal" has a faux-left ring to it these days, as if "liberals" are conservatives in disguise. There's a variety of reasons for this, one of which is that in the same way that contemporary American right (which calls itself "conservatism") is in many ways at odds with traditional Burkean conservatism, contemporary American leftism is at odds with traditional liberalism. Progressivism makes that distinction clear; both in how it is explicitly (defined when it is), and merely in common usage among those who don't know anything, really, about progressivism as "Progressivism". That this is the case answers Nathan's question:

"Or what a "progressive" is for that matter... I've seen everyone from an inch to the left of the center to far left quasi-Marxists use it."

What it means today is in flux, very much depending upon whether its usage is erudite or casual. But mostly, either way, it means something distinct from "liberal" on the left. It's not so much, in this current American cultural sense, a term explicitly used to draw a distinction between it and views right-of-center.

"Asking lefties those questions would be nearly pointless- we already know the answers, they've been screaming them for around two years now, and have yet to figure out why the righties find the questions and the usual answers uninteresting."

My position is very much near the center with regards to American foreign policy. (For example—I have supported, ranging from weakly to strongly—every foreign intervention by the US in my adult lifetime. That casts me out of the "progressive" camp for sure. On the other hand, I'm not particularly hostile to the UN so much as I'm frustrated with it. And I'm an internationalist in a way that conservatives typically aren't; which, for example, includes me finding the bromide "oh, they're antiamerican just because they're jealous" to be risible. Thus I certainly don't make it into the conservative camp. I like George Kennan, which should tell you a lot.) And from that vantage point, it's you and other respondents over there that seem very biased in how you approach these issues...not Suzanne. You can tell from her questions what her point of view probably is. But she is most certainly not phrasing her questions in a horns of dilemma style.

Frankly, a lot of those responses were shocking to me. I get my news from a variety of left, middle, right American sources and international sources, and of course Internet sources. And to my eyes, a lot of what I saw in reponses over on Drezner's site reflected the apparent fact that people are in a relatively small, American conservative news echo-chamber (and, I think, more influenced by right-wing blogs than is the typical American conservative). Interestingly, given the nature of Dan's blog, on economic matters the commenters are far more knowledgable. It's really, I think, as if I were reading comments from readers here on economics matters with occasional foreign policy thrown in: leftists are notoriously (in my opinion) underinformed and, well, misled by certain pernicious ideological predispositions on economic matters. What I'd read here (or, say to be neutral and uninsulting to our hosts, some generic left-wing foreign policy site) would be a lot of leftist cliches on economics, things that appear in daily in many university student newspapers without question. But, in contrast, reasonably informed foreign policy discussion. The conversation over on Dan's site seems, to me, to be the opposite. The conservative foreign policy views, things that are held as self-evident truth, are far too often almosst juvenile cliches. The sad thing is that you (like leftists in their own way) are so smug about your intellectual capability and rigor relative to the opposition: every three comments includes some self-congratulatory comment on how you guys can't even expect liberals to understand that water flows downhill, which is just simply obvious, of course. Silly liberals!

I don't know about anyone else, but when I'm involved in the backslapping, when I'm in a felicitous crowd, the self-congratulations both gets old very fast and it makes me damn nervous about just how much I'm decieving myself (or being tempted to deceive myself).

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