Conservatism: A Conversation with Roger Scruton on How to be a Conservative - by Roger Scruton

We begin with the law that governs the contractual relationships of people, a law not shaped by the legislature, but by social and economic interactions. We can say, Scruton observes, that this law is the people’s common law, one that guarantees their property and associations. Centralization is impatient with this private ordering and attempts to upend it with efficient legislation.

While European elites look to the transnational governance of the European Union as the condition of peace and prosperity, Scruton puts before us the nation-state and its borders as the first order of democracy and political accountability. Scruton notes that limited government is about being relational in a particular spot, ring-fenced by borders, and that allows a common life to develop and evolve.

Rulers and ruled can hold one another accountable because the terms of government have emerged from the people of this defined group with their particular history, myths, and shared commitments. Such forms of social, moral, and political capital are eroded, Scruton argues, by a boundless and unaccountable European Union, for whom the principle of subsidiarity is, paradoxically, only the powers that Brussels decides to let member states retain rather than a bottom up conception of government and order.

In this regard, we also discuss the “to hell with us” mentality that is multiculturalism. Scruton notes that it’s cold comfort that major leaders are belatedly coming to terms with its wreckage.

Multiculturalism’s existence in the government education system, laws limiting speech, and the soft tyranny of political correctness have ensured its ability to redefine life in his native United Kingdom and throughout much of Europe.

Finally, this conversation explores Scruton’s argument that a free market depends not only on an Austrian understanding of the need for local knowledge but on traditions that encircle goods, practices, relationships, excepting these from the market itself. In short, Scruton argues, an enduring free market will have the sense to recognize its limitations. There really can’t be markets in everything.

Read more: A Conversation with Roger Scruton on How to be a Conservative | Online Library of Law & Liberty

Conservatism Thrives on Low Intelligence and Poor Information - by George Monbiot

Self-deprecating, too liberal for their own good, today's progressives stand back and watch, hands over their mouths, as the social vivisectionists of the right slice up a living society to see if its component parts can survive in isolation. Tied up in knots of reticence and self-doubt, they will not shout stop. Doing so requires an act of interruption, of presumption, for which they no longer possess a vocabulary.

Perhaps it is in the same spirit of liberal constipation that, with the exception of Charlie Brooker, we have been too polite to mention the Canadian study published last month in the journal Psychological Science, which revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of low intelligence. Paradoxically it was the Daily Mail that brought it to the attention of British readers last week. It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is, on average, more stupid than our own. But this, the study suggests, is not unfounded generalization but empirical fact.

For more: Conservatism Thrives on Low Intelligence and Poor Information | | AlterNet

Conservatism: income inequality makes even the poor more conservative

Income inequality makes the poor more conservative -- more likely to support smaller government and actually to perpetuate income inequality, two academics argue in a report released earlier this year.

The report, "Inequality and the Dynamics of Public Opinion: The Self-Reinforcing Link Between Economic Inequality and Mass Preferences" (pdf), authored by Nathan J. Kelly and Peter K. Enns, says income inequality is a self-perpetuating condition: As it increases, public opinion among both the rich and the poor shifts increasingly in its favor.

The authors' conclusion, which they say is likely to be "surprising to many readers," is that "both the rich and the poor respond to rising inequality by shifting in a conservative direction." This conservatism includes a desire to cut government programs such as welfare.

For more: KellyEnns_preprint.pdf - By Nitro PDF Software