[vodpod id=Groupvideo.2723407&w=425&h=350&fv=clip_id%3D5135229%26server%3Dvimeo.com%26autoplay%3D0%26fullscreen%3D1%26md5%3D0%26show_portrait%3D0%26show_title%3D0%26show_byline%3D0%26context%3Duser%3A1862055%26context_id%3D%26force_embed%3D0%26multimoog%3D%26color%3D00ADEF%26force_info%3Dundefined]
more about "PFS09 Robert Groezinger Interviews Se…", posted with vodpod
Discover more from The Libertarian Alliance
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Sean, I agree with and admire a great deal of what you say, but I must say I have a great deal of trouble with your associating liberty with conservatism- at the end of the discussion, for instance enumerating various organisations which you consider to be part of a wider “conservative” movement.
Whatever conservatism is in the UK is rather blurred (unlike in the USA, where a very different ideological standpoint is rather clearly definable as conservatism- “God, guns, small government except for moralism”), there is no particular association her between conservatism and liberalism/libertarianism beyond a common enemy in marxism- that socialism which is effectively defunct now anyway. The closest the Tories have ever come to liberalism was Thatcher’s tepid economic liberalism, which was more a form of corporatism, linked with authoritarianism in the sphere of individual rights and liberties which you have yourself strongly condemned. It was the conservatives who inaugurated the regime of policing under which we now suffer, for instance.
I feel very uneasy that the director of an organisation calling itself a “Libertarian” Alliance would so often portray libertarianism as a kind of subset of conservatism. It is not. It is a distinct, and indeed radical, philosophy which stands apart from the two authoritarian political wings which dominate our polity.
Sorry – but libertarianism and traditionalist conservatism shade into each other in England.
Sorry- but I do not agree. They only shade into each other in the sense that all political views shade into one another. For instance in the anglosphere we can see that socialism and conservatism shade into one another- consider Brown’s “hard working families” rhetoric.
As I said above it is hard to define anglo-conservatism, but perhaps one way is that it is a belief in a previous, lost golden age of morality and social order which the conservative hopes to recreate. Broadly speaking, it appears that the stereotypical conservative seeks a return to the first progressive (i.e. socialist) era of late Victorian times, in which the prodnoses of church, charity and state reached a particular peak of influence (prior to their shading into the then new fad of marxism) but did not yet reach so avaraciously for the citizens’ property to fund their interferences.
Conservatives do not believe in spontaneous social order, though they may pay a lip service to it in economic terms. But ask whether the market alone should decide whether a lap dancing bar should open on the High Street, and you will hear a demand for the state to make that decision- preferably via a planning committee staffed with fellow conservatives who know the importance of upholding the moral character of Bufton-On-The-Wold.