One of the most fundamental differences between liberals and conservatives is how they view government. For conservatives, government is an external force that imposes restrictions on a free people. For liberals, government is the embodiment of the collective will of a free people.
Excerpted from Wikipedia
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_in_the_United_States
Date: 11-Apro-2015
Historian Gregory Schneider identifies several constants in American conservatism: respect for tradition, support of republicanism, “the rule of law and the Christian religion,” and a defense of “Western civilization from the challenges of modernist culture and totalitarian governments.”
Historians in recent decades argue that the conservative tradition has played a major role in American politics and culture since the American Revolution. However they have stressed that an organized conservative movement has played a key role in politics only since the 1950s. The recent movement is based in the Republican Party, but during the era of segregation, before 1965, many Southern Democrats were conservatives, and they played a central role in the Conservative Coalition that largely controlled domestic legislation in Congress from 1937 to 1963. The Southern white conservatives moved from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party (GOP) at the presidential level in the 1960s, and at the state and local level after 1990.
The history of American conservatism has been marked by tensions and competing ideologies. Fiscal conservatives and libertarians favor small government, low taxes, limited regulation, and free enterprise. Social conservatives see traditional social values as threatened by secularism; they tend to support school prayer and the Second Amendment rights of private citizens to own firearms and to oppose abortion and oppose same-sex marriage. Neoconservatives want to expand American ideals throughout the world. Paleoconservatives advocate restrictions on immigration, non-interventionist foreign policy, and stand in opposition to multiculturalism. Nationwide most factions (except the libertarians) support a unilateral foreign policy, and a strong military. The conservative movement of the 1950s attempted to bring together these divergent strands, stressing the need for unity to prevent the spread of “Godless Communism.”
William F. Buckley Jr., in the first issue of his magazine National Review in 1955, explained the standards of his magazine and helped make explicit the beliefs of American conservatives:
Among our convictions:
It is the job of centralized government (in peacetime) to protect its citizens’ lives, liberty and property. All other activities of government tend to diminish freedom and hamper progress. The growth of government (the dominant social feature of this century) must be fought relentlessly. In this great social conflict of the era, we are, without reservations, on the libertarian side. The profound crisis of our era is, in essence, the conflict between the Social Engineers, who seek to adjust mankind to conform with scientific utopias, and the disciples of Truth, who defend the organic moral order. We believe that truth is neither arrived at nor illuminated by monitoring election results, binding though these are for other purposes, but by other means, including a study of human experience. On this point we are, without reservations, on the conservative side.
President Ronald Reagan set the conservative standard in the 1980s; in the 2010s the Republican leaders typically claim fealty to it. For example most of the Republican candidates in 2012, “claimed to be standardbearers of Reagan’s ideological legacy.” Reagan solidified conservative Republican strength with tax cuts, a greatly increased military budget, continued deregulation, a policy of rollback of Communism (rather than just containing it), and appeals to family values and conservative morality. The 1980s and beyond became known as the “Reagan Era.” Typically, conservative politicians and spokesmen in the 21st century proclaim their devotion to Reagan’s ideals and policies on most social, economic and foreign policy issues.
Other modern conservative beliefs include opposition to a world government, skepticism about the validity of environmental risks such as global warming. They support a strong policy of law and order to control crime, including long jail terms for repeat offenders. The “law and order” issue was a major factor weakening liberalism in the 1960s. From 2001 to 2008, Republican President George W. Bush stressed cutting taxes and minimizing regulation of industry and banking, while increasing regulation of education. Conservatives generally advocate the use of American military power to fight terrorists and promote democracy in the Middle East.
According to a 2014 poll, 38% of American voters identify as “conservative” or “very conservative,” 34% as “moderate,” 24% as “liberal” or “very liberal”. These percentages were fairly constant from 1990 to 2009, when conservatism spiked in popularity briefly before reverting to the original trend while liberal views on social issues reached a new high. Although the study does show some distinction between the concentration of moderates and conservatives or liberals between the Republican and Democratic parties. Among the Democrats, 44% are self-identified liberals, 19% as conservatives, and 36% as moderates. For Republicans 70% self-identified as conservative, 24% as moderate, and 5% as liberal.
Conservatism appears to be growing stronger at the state level. The trend is most pronounced among the “least well-off, least educated, most blue collar, most economically hard-hit states.”
The meaning of “conservatism” in America has little in common with the way the word is used elsewhere. As Ribuffo (2011) notes, “what Americans now call conservatism much of the world calls liberalism or neoliberalism.” Similarly, Gross et al. (2011) reject the view that conservatism can be defined in terms of a “fixed or stable essence” or an immutable “category of belief or practice.” Instead, they recommend a historical view of the concept that focuses on how “particular meanings come to be defined as conservative within a given sociohistorical milieu,” both by self-identified conservatives and by their political opponents. In this conception, conservatism is best understood as a “collective identity that evolves in the course of struggles and collaborations over” political meaning.
Conservatives generally believe that government action cannot solve society’s problems, such as poverty and inequality. Many believe that government programs that seek to provide services and opportunities for the poor actually encourage dependence and reduce self-reliance. Most conservatives oppose affirmative action policies, that is, policies in employment, education, and other areas that give special advantages to members of certain groups. Conservatives believe that the government should not give special treatment to individuals on the basis of group identity.
Conservatives typically hold that the government should not play a major role in regulating business and managing the economy. They typically oppose efforts to charge high tax rates and to redistribute income to assist the poor. Such efforts, they argue, do not properly reward people who have earned their money through hard work. However, social conservatives place a strong emphasis on the role of private voluntary charitable organizations (especially faith-based charities) in helping the poor.
Because conservatives value order and security, they traditionally favor a strong government role in law enforcement and national defense.