Yeah, that made sense. I agree that it's important, and that it does affect political beliefs, but I also agree that you can find people of different types all over the map for different reasons.
Some of it depends on where the current society is at, too. For example, during FDR's New Deal conservatives were definitely trying to "conserve" the old way of doing things and strongly in favor of not changing things. However, later in the Reagan era, most of the liberal institutions that had become put in place, such as welfare and social security, and become long trusted institutions and the goal of conservatives in that era was much more revolutionary... it's not that they were trying to conserve anything, they were trying to tear down the institutions that were already there, to get back to some kind of past that some of them may have remembered but most of them were not even around for.
During the Bush years, the goals also seemed pretty dynamic, although in the Obama years when health care reform became the main issue they were very much on the static side again.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-05-18 01:54 pm (UTC)Some of it depends on where the current society is at, too. For example, during FDR's New Deal conservatives were definitely trying to "conserve" the old way of doing things and strongly in favor of not changing things. However, later in the Reagan era, most of the liberal institutions that had become put in place, such as welfare and social security, and become long trusted institutions and the goal of conservatives in that era was much more revolutionary... it's not that they were trying to conserve anything, they were trying to tear down the institutions that were already there, to get back to some kind of past that some of them may have remembered but most of them were not even around for.
During the Bush years, the goals also seemed pretty dynamic, although in the Obama years when health care reform became the main issue they were very much on the static side again.