The opposite of liberalism is not conservatism, it’s centrism. Discuss.
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by DougJ| 94 Comments
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The opposite of liberalism is not conservatism, it’s centrism. Discuss.
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Belafon
I see the great
statesmanactor Kevin Sorbo has spoken. We have surely been blessed by his guidance and wisdom.Hawes
The opposite of liberalism is being reactionary.
schrodinger's cat
Centrists is what fiscal conservatives like to call themselves.
dmsilev
@Belafon: And the renowned foreign policy guru Mitt Romney has also weighed in.
schrodinger's cat
Dish Update: I went to the Dish to check the color of its header.
-AS is on vacation, again.
-His fees fees are hurt because Krugman called his blue eyed boy a racist
-He is defending Charles Murray, again.
Conclusion: I hadn’t missed much despite not checking his blog for months.
Bob In Portland
The opposite of liberalism is fascism. At least according to Mussolini.
DougJ
@schrodinger’s cat:
I also haven’t checked in months. I admire Sullivan’s (or his staff’s) work ethic, but the whole thing just became too predictable for me, as your update indicates.
Ash Can
lolwut
Amir Khalid
@Belafon:
Well, we’ve heard from Courtney Love, Rupert Murdoch, Oliver North, and now Kevin Sorbo. What are the Kardashians waiting for?
I just realised I’ve confused two different topics, but I don’t care.
DougJ
@schrodinger’s cat:
I feel bad for Patrick Appel and Chris Bodenner, still working there. Even young Conor found a better gig.
Now that he’s on vacay might be a good time to bombard them with emails to see if they’ll nominate someone here for a Moore award.
Villago Delenda Est
@Bob In Portland: WTF did Mussolini know about anything? I mean, he only founded fascism…
Roger Moore
I thought Cleek’s law guaranteed that conservatism is the exact opposite of liberalism.
Villago Delenda Est
@Amir Khalid:
Check to clear.
David Hunt
And the opposite of conservatism is sanity.
Villago Delenda Est
@schrodinger’s cat: Defending Charles Murray, in a just universe, would put you in front of a death panel faster than you can say Captain Jack Sparrow.
BGinCHI
The opposite of 21st-century conservatism is sanity with a side of empathy.
Violet
And of cousre liberalism is BOOGA BOOGA scary Muslim Commie black man in the White House soshulism black men coming to get your white wimmins FEMA re-education camps forced gay marriage abortionplexes and not supporting the troops. And health insurance. Terrifying.
David Fud
In the sense that centrists basically want no change, liberals want a future golden age and conservatives want to return to an imaginary past golden age, yes, centrists are the opposite.
Bob In Portland
@Villago Delenda Est: Around 1990 I was sitting around my union office and looked through two different editions of the American Heritage Dictionary. The definition of fascism changed. Most curious. The newer definition dropped the whole corporatism thing.
Mandalay
@DougJ:
Heh. The greatest thing about Sullivan’s web site for me (more than almost any other web site) is that you really cannot predict what will be there. Just steer clear of his Its-All-About-Me posts and it’s fine. Recent topics:
– The Poisons In Our Pantry
– The Wear And Tear Of Police Work
– The Whiteness Of Poverty
– Busting The For-Profit College Racket
– Sanctions For Sanctions’ Sake
It’s BJ that’s entirely predictable, though that is not meant disparagingly.
Villago Delenda Est
@Bob In Portland: Mussolini himself said a better name for Fascism is Corporatism.
Well, into the memory hole for that!
Villago Delenda Est
@David Fud: Centrists have the gold now and don’t want to part with it, basically.
ranchandsyrup
Liberalism is the opposite of what the love child of Zombie Reagan and Free Market Jesus riding a T-Rex would want. No updates necessary.
Villago Delenda Est
On an unrelated note, these autoplay ads need to die a thousand deaths.
Southern Beale
How to turn a fluff piece about the White House pastry chef embracing FLOTUS’ health initiatives into a lie-filled anti-Obama smear. It takes talent, people, it really does!
Neldob
but liberalism is centrism. So it’s also its opposite? Well muddied waters made muddier. Good work!
Southern Beale
@Villago Delenda Est:
Co-sign that. You’d think someone would invent an app for that.
Mandalay
@Bob In Portland: This is how they currently define it:
Which sounds about right to me – Fascism allows the private sector to do whatever it wants, and will even collude with it, as long as it meets with the State’s approval.
We have a different system here: The private sector allows the government to do whatever it wants as long as it meets with the approval of the one percenters.
pacem appellant
@Villago Delenda Est: A poster here pointed me to Stylish, a Chrome plugin, and then directed me to install “Balloon Juice Light” as a style. Since then, this website runs clean and smooth and noise-free.
pacem appellant
@Villago Delenda Est: A poster here pointed me to Stylish, a Chrome plugin, and then directed me to install “Balloon Juice Light” as a style. Since then, this website runs clean and smooth and noise-free.
bemused
@Southern Beale:
Ugh, Marsha Blackburn is one of the worst Republican women ever.
Felonius Monk
Does this now mean that the opposite of Up is not Down, but rather Sideways?
cleek
centrists are happy to enact liberal policies but only where it can be done conservatively.
it would be fine if we could have better roads and bridges, but gosh darn it, that would be just too expensive given all the things your parents bought and didn’t yet pay for. maybe next year.
? Martin
@pacem appellant: You’re welcome. That’s my work.
taylormattd
I don’t think it is. Although I don’t know. The problem is “centrism” is a completely meaningless term, especially in the left blogosphere.
I realize you are likely using “centrism” as a proxy for all of that horrifying David Broder / Thomas Friedman / Evan Bayh / Third Way bullshit. But frankly, when people on allegedly left blogs call others “centrist” they are usually trying to insult another lefty by using the word as a proxy for “kind of republican.”
Suffern ACE
@Southern Beale: I like the comment you pulled out about how everytime he or she sees the first lady, she’s stuffing her face. I guess that’s another one of those liberal press cover ups. She might be walking around the white house with a bag of egg rolls in one hand and a dozen donuts in the other, but do they ever let us see those photos?
schrodinger's cat
Thread needs kitteh, from Soviet Rushya.
Roger Moore
@Villago Delenda Est:
You should try something like Flashblock. I don’t know if there’s a version for Chrome, but the version for Firefox has saved me from a whole host of evils. It apparently even blocks the to*na*l f*ngus ads that drive everyone else nuts.
cmorenc
@DougJ:
It’s not a binary distinction…a better analogy would be that liberalism, centrism, and conservatism are three respective apexes of an ideological triangle. Except that the centers-of-mass of some ideological dispositions aren’t necessarily inside the triangle, but outside one of the edges, i.e. some politicians are a mix of conservatism and centrism, but nevertheless on the whole are farther from having many (or any) liberal tendencies than they are to either the conservative or centrist apex. Some chamber-of-commerce republicans would be examples of this. Likewise, Rand Paul’s partial social libertarianism e.g. on marijuana (though not obviously abortion), is outside the triangle, between liberal and conservative, but he’s further away from centrism than he is to either conservatism or liberalism. Bill Clinton, OTOH is a great example of a politician who is somewhere *inside* the triangle, much closer to the liberal and centrist apexes than the conservative, but nevertheless in some respects his triangulation approach while in office creeps toward the conservative side, not away from it.
dmsilev
@Roger Moore: For the Mac users, the ClickToFlash Safari extension works very well.
p.a.
@Felonius Monk: I haven’t seen Down. Who’s in it, or is it CGI?
Southern Beale
Just found out the White House pastry chef smear started with Frank Luntz. Can’t even believe that he’d stoop that low. From “death taxes” and “right to work” to twisting a person’s quotes in the NY Times to smear the first lady. I’d call that the bottom of the political barrel.
Amir Khalid
@Roger Moore:
Just once, I’d like to actually see that ad. All I ever get is John Cornyn begging me (in Malaysia!) for campaign money.
SatanicPanic
@Southern Beale: The bottom of the political barrel is probably something like the Wingularity- they’ll never reach it.
Southern Beale
@SatanicPanic:
Just when I think we’ve reached Peak Wingnut we haven’t. The corollary to that is that just when you think they’ve gone as low as it gets, we find a new bottom.
Sorta like the “inflation” echo thingie they found confirming the Big Bang.
Roger Moore
@Southern Beale:
I think they’ve scraped through the bottom of the barrel and into the floor. Or is it barrels all the way down?
Southern Beale
@Roger Moore:
OH MY GOD THERE IS NO BOTTOM!! THERE IS NO BOTTOM!!!!
Aaaaagh!!!
p.a.
@cmorenc: pretty good analysis. Maybe Venn rather than triangle. Snark: the opposite of liberalism is BlueDog-ism. Clintonism (and I think Hilary will show this) is a liberal version of BlueDog-ism. Remember “Bill Clinton was the best Republican president of our lifetime”?
Calouste
@David Fud:
Strictly speaking, it’s conservatives that don’t want change, and reactionaries that want to return to the past. Although of course no one really wants to call themselves a “reactionary”, so they call themselves “conservative” instead.
Southern Beale
@Calouste:
These days the kewl kids are calling themselves “Constitutional conservatives.” I think that means they want to return to 1776, as opposed to the regular conservatives who just want to return to 1956.
boatboy_srq
@Violet: Mustn’t forget the my-Reichwing-501c4-was-audited-by-the-IRS-because-Obamacare-and-Bengazi!!!11!1!
schrodinger's cat
Secret Life of an Internet Troll, Revealed
WereBear
I guess that depression he went through didn’t last long enough.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
So, Obama’s candidate for Surgeon General is almost assured to be blocked. Why? Because OMG he said bad things about guns and hurt the NRA’s fee fees!! In other words, the NRA still rules our world and still wins every single battle it wages because our politicians are shit scared of them.
WereBear
No. No, you REALLY don’t.
Mike in NC
@Southern Beale: Luntz a scumbag? Who could’ve imagined!
Southern Beale
@schrodinger’s cat:
There’s a cat named Alexandria inviting all of us bloggers to blog for them. I got one of those comments too but my Spam filter nabbed it for me. Just thought I’d mention it.
schrodinger's cat
@WereBear: His bank account got depressed too, so he’s back, since an election is approaching.
Southern Beale
@WereBear:
I think he’s still the Loneliest Man In Politics. I find it deeply bizarre that the once high-powered Republican political strategist has resorted to twisting New York Times quotes into a FLOTUS smear on Twitter. Can’t be much pay in that (see schrodinger’s link).
So easy even a cat can do it.
schrodinger's cat
@Southern Beale: That comment was in my moderation queue too, I released it but I have no intention of going to Egypt. Just out of curiosity I checked the blog, the posts on there had a ratio of about 80% wingnut to 20% sane.
Bobby Thomson
@taylormattd:
What’s the difference? Serious question.
Roger Moore
@Southern Beale:
FTFY.
boatboy_srq
@Calouste: And in case anyone thinks this is a recent phenomenon:
FlipYrWhig
“Centrism” isn’t an -ism except by accident. People who call themselves “centrists” mean that they care about helping everyday people but also want businesses to prosper and for taxes to be low but also they don’t act showy with holy books. Most of that used to be called “conservative” until the people calling _themselves_ “conservative” started using that label to mean standing up for the privileges of straight white people and smiting enemies within and abroad. Even Edmund Burke, conservative icon, for fuck’s sake, went on and on and on about compassion and interdependence, and would probably be pilloried as a homo by your Eric Ericksons and Sean Hannities and whatnot.
Ergo liberalism and conservatism are opposites still, but the people who call themselves “conservatives” aren’t conservatives by the customary pre-Goldwater, pre-Reagan definitions, and the people who call themselves “centrists” are.
Or to put it another way, conservatives think the government should implement conservative policies, but “conservatives” think the government should just burn down, except for a few huge divisions of soldiers to intimidate the wussier countries. Until recently I’d’ve said that conservatives would also believe in cops, but they don’t even want them around anymore, apparently being content with “law” “enforcement” by vigilantes and lynch mobs.
schrodinger's cat
@Southern Beale: Kittehs have more integrity in their single pointeh end than Luntz has in his entire body.
schrodinger's cat
@Southern Beale: Actually, don’t some religious conservatives want to go back to the Dark Ages?
Violet
@Southern Beale:
Why not? He’s done nothing to suggest otherwise. However low you can imagine he’d stoop or crawl or slither, he can always go lower.
FlipYrWhig
BTW my mom, once a fairly active hippie type, throughout my youth used the word “conservative” as an insult essentially synonymous with “square.” Short hair, button-down shirt, listens to neither rock nor roll let alone the two at once, etc.
different-church-lady
@taylormattd:
raven
@FlipYrWhig: Brown shoes don’t make it
taylormattd
@Bobby Thomson: I don’t know. Maybe you are right.
FlipYrWhig
@raven: Ha, didn’t know that one, but sounds about right. “Loyal plastic robot” indeed.
raven
@FlipYrWhig: One of those albums I have committed to memory.
Gex
@DougJ: A while ago Cole posted something on Facebook he got from Sully’s blog. And it was something from an Internet aggregator that had gone viral a week earlier. It just cracks me up that people are paying Sullivan to read a blog where he regurgitates week old content he got from a free site that his readers, if they had any size social circle on Facebook would have seen days before it hit his site. Plus content written by interns.
Archon
In practice I would say liberalism (especially American progressivism) is staunchly anti-Fascist. Post WWII liberalism is also staunchly anti-communist too.
I personally base my liberalism more on political and democratic ideals then economic ones. To that end the opposite of liberalism in my opinion is totalitarianism, whether it’s the Nazi kind, Chinese kind or Cuban kind matters little conceptually.
Just One More Canuck
@schrodinger’s cat: sun comes up, sun goes down
MikeJ
@? Martin: Great. Can you restrict it to this site instead of making it global? The @-moz-document rules don’t work on chrome.
Joe Buck
The current definition of “centrist” is “whatever rich people want”. Most rich people don’t care about the delusions of the religious right, and most aren’t bigots. But they care about their investments, don’t like taxes and want the best return on their money. So they are fiscally conservative and socially liberal, but these both fall out of the fact that they are thinking of their own interests.
An alternative definition of “centrist” might be someone who holds roughly the median position on most controversial issues. But by this definition, the idea of cutting Social Security or other entitlements would hardly be centrist.
Trollhattan
Some Kentucky gun-fondler needs his ass kicked.
http://www.sacbee.com/2014/03/18/6247965/uc-davis-to-help-kentucky-collie.html#storylink=cpy
MikeJ
@MikeJ: (And BTW, I’m not the person who said the same thing but was very rude about it on userstyles. )
Trollhattan
@Gex:
“Sully’s intern.” I would so not include that on my resume.
Kay
A billionaire, David Brooks, No Labels and Mark Penn. Is this a laser-like focus on the middle class?
I don’t know. It may be hopeless. It’s like they’re trying to make me sad. And lose. They want to lose. They have a death wish.
Villago Delenda Est
@pacem appellant: Working like a charm, it is!
Villago Delenda Est
@schrodinger’s cat: Michelle Bachmann has said that the Renaissance was “a mistake.”
? Martin
@MikeJ: Let me look into that.
mclaren
No, the opposite of liberalism is cats.
Who is Nebraska? What is the square root of yellow? Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
mclaren
Turkey has decided to troll both America and Russia by announcing that under the Ottoman Empire treaty with Catherine the Great, if the Crimea declares independence from Russia, it returns to Turkey.
LOL!
Cervantes
@Southern Beale:
I saw Howley’s article. What’s the connection to Luntz? (Thanks.)
Ian
@schrodinger’s cat:
I would guess that given his importance to Republican electoral chances, each and every single one of his dirty secrets is kept in a secured safe. If Luntz fails to perform, a folder gets released to the hungry wolves.
the Conster
@Kay:
OMG, Ugh!!! I want Sherrod Brown. Can he be recruited?
Kay
@the Conster:
Well, I disagree. He just got re-elected and he’s a great senator. He should stay where he is.
What about the Democrats, though? I have to admit I didn’t see this brilliant counterintuitive midterm strategy coming, where they’re running as the Party for Plutocrats.
Ladders of Opportunity was bad enough. This is worse.
Kay
@the Conster:
I think Manchin has a kind of exalted opinion of himself, like he’s the commonsense leader who can bridge gaps. I’m not so worried about Republicans if Republicans take the Senate. I’m worried about Democrats joining with Republicans.
That will happen.
David Koch
@Kay:
These PUMAs are something else. Obama salvages Hillary’s career, lifting her out of the toxic snake pit of the Senate, making her Secretary of State, which catapults her to a level of popularity and respect she never reached before.
But nothing is good enough for them. They still act like the whinny, petty, sore losers they are.
Ben Cisco
@schrodinger’s cat:
This could have been predicted.
Also, your results should serve as a guide going forward.