Yet another attempt at a political taxonomy
A comment by me at VFR, June 2004:
A person who believes we should let everyone in the world including Moslems enter America en masse and destroy us as a nation is a “liberal.”
A person who believes we should continue letting mass Moslem immigration into this country while we try to “assimilate” the Moslems is a “conservative.”
A person who believes we shouldn’t be admitting Moslems into this country at all doesn’t even exist on the political map.
Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 3, 2004 1:50 PM
- end of initial entry -
Robert C. in Nashville writes:
The stunning eye opener one feels when I read your definitions of the liberal, the conservative and then, well… us, and its brevity-made me sit back in my chair and say- YES!
You’ve got a sort of gift, you know….
LA writes:
Thank you. However, now that you mention it, I think that that my definition of a conservative may be somewhat dated, because the conservatives have gotten worse. Sometime in the last ten or 12 years, conservatives, or at least the neoconservatives, stopped talking with much urgency or conviction about “assimilation” as the basis of America and began accepting “diversity.” America, they said, is a diverse country which is held together by a common belief in democracy. “Moderate” Muslims believe in “democracy,” and that is enough to make them A-OK.
As a result of this new way of thinking and speaking among the neoconservatives/conservatives, which represented a surrender to the multiculturalism that they had once fiercely opposed (or that they had gone through the motions of fiercely opposing), the preservation of American nationhood became a matter, not of assimilating Muslims to our culture, identity, habits, loyalties, way of life, etc., but rather of recognizing the existing fact that most Muslims are already “moderates” and believe in democracy, and therefore they don’t need to change at all. They’re fine just the way they are. It would be nice if the moderates helped us in dealing with the radicals, but if they don’t, that’s ok too.
The main difference between the liberals and the conservatives is that the conservatives are still worried about the radical Muslims, and the liberals aren’t.
Here then is a slightly updated version of the taxonomy, in which the second definition has been changed:
A person who believes we should let everyone in the world including Moslems enter America en masse and destroy us as a nation is a “liberal.”
A person who believes we should continue letting mass Moslem immigration into this country, while he worries loudly about the “radical” Muslims who are here but doesn’t do anything to prevent more of them from coming, is a “conservative.”
A person who believes we shouldn’t be admitting Moslems into this country at all doesn’t even exist on the political map.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 19, 2011 06:10 PM | Send