An article I just came across involved one of Jeb's recurring weak strategies to combat Trump's popularity, which is to that Trump isn't a 'real conservative.' Here's a Time article on the latest from Jeb's campaign trail:
http://time.com/4172287/jeb-bush-donald-trump-conservative/For months, Bush has cast Trump’s bombast as disqualifying, his bluster dangerous and his foreign policy a folly. Now, Bush is going another route, arguing that Trump is insufficiently conservative and, maybe, a closet Democrat.
“If people think Donald Trump is a conservative, prove it to me. I mean, really,” Bush said during a town hall in the iconic town hall in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
“A conservative party should nominate a conservative candidate, not someone who has been all over the map,” Bush said.
Here's my question: why is Jeb treating as gospel the fact that a GOP candidate must be "conservative" based on some arbitrary definition of the word? As I understand it the GOP traditionally believes in certain principles such as small government, corporate spending to boost GDP, strong military, the 2nd Amendment, family/Christian values (this one is debatable), low taxes, and hard work rather than welfare. We can quibble about whether some Republicans have been hypocritical on some of these subjects over the years, but the party at least claims to care about these issues. Historically these GOP issues pretty well go back to the Civil War era, and so in that sense one could claim that retaining these values makes them "conservative." And yet doesn't 'conservative' mean conserving the status quo and trying to forestall making progressive changes? Isn't it a requirement of this scenario that the status quo actually reflects those values in order for being a conservative to mean you're trying to conserve them?
It seems to me that if culture and government have changed enough that the core conservative values are no longer the norm, or have even strayed quite far away from that point, then if someone wants to reclaim those lost values one isn't a conservative but is actually a progressive. The key error I think a lot of self-proclaimed progressives make is to think the progress can only be in one direction and that the 'direction of progress' leads inevitably towards some sort of particular utopian ideal as they see it. They don't tend to think that progress can occur in all sorts of directions and that not everyone might agree on what the ideal actually should be. Based on this error language in America tends to reflect the notion that if you're a progressive that means you subscribe to a very particular agenda (which is sometimes derisively called a leftist agenda), and omits the reality that
any attempt to shift away from the status quo should properly be seen as progressive. Think of some future society, for instance, with no family structure, no marriage, where no one works and machines do everything, where everyone looks the same and acts the same, and so forth. The culture in Brave New World, for instance. If someone in that culture came along and said "I think people would be better if they worked a little, and if they embraced differences rather than trying to eliminate them, and if we had tight-knit families rather than community rearing" - such a person would not be a conservative in any rational use of the word, but rather would be a radical progressive. Someone who viewed his opinions dimly might called him a "regressive" instead if they viewed the current state of affairs as being some supreme achievement, but the word "regressive" isn't much more than a way of dismissing an idea because it's something that someone in the past tried or believed in, and some so-called progressives seem to innately believe that everything from the past is inferior by definition, including written wisdom.
So tell me - why is it correct for Jeb to say that the GOP should have a real 'conservative candidate' and that Trump isn't it? If one looks at what the Tea Party believes, I can't think of a term for them other than radical progressives; they certainly aren't interested in maintaining the status quo, or necessarily even reverting the U.S. back to an earlier state of organization that they view as having been much better. In fact since technology has changed drastically recently it wouldn't even be possible to revert the U.S. back to a significantly earlier state in any intelligible sense. So what's a conservative politician, then, other than someone who doesn't want things to change much from how they are now? Just as a matter of nomenclature I'm referring here to conservative politics and not to conservative social values a citizen might espouse. The former implies a sort of correlation between conservative = GOP, and the latter is more a question of a person living with the traditions their family has passed down. But based on how I'm thinking the term "conservative"
should be used, it seems to me that Jeb and Hillary are both conservatives, as are several of the GOP candidates, while Bernie and Rand Paul (and maybe Carson?) would be progressive candidates in this sense.
