[AAACE-NLA] a note on the term "conservative"

[SUSAN DEMETRION]

Like the terms, "liberal," or "progressive," political and moral conservatism has many hues.

What I am not focusing on are the beliefs of individual citizens, but of (a), the conservative movement as an organized phenomenon, which emerged out of the Goldwater campaign; (b) the neo-conservative impetus, which has at least some of its roots among the disillusioned cold war liberals, who migrated increasingly toward the Right in the 1980s and 1990s, (c), the Christian right as an organized movement and a critical underbelly of the republican Party,  (d), the pervasive and enduring influence of big business (e) and the political/media consolidation of mass public opinion that broadly fall under the conservative banner, and which by and large support the current administration.

To put it in other terms, what I am focusing on are some of the ways in which these organized interest sectors that converge within the current conservative movement (notwithstanding diverse factions and even conflict within it) are shaping public knowledge through the exertion of their collective power.

However, this rise may be interpreted, I believe it is a relatively objective matter of historical investigation and not simply a personal opinion.  

I cast no aspersion on the individual views of citizens in which a wide set of beliefs are often very sincerely held.  However, I do seek to get beyond the merely personal to an analysis of cultural, political, and social causation in the grounding of an interpretation, which focuses on broad tendencies rather than individual sources of motivation, which, obviously, are exceedingly complex.

George Demetrion
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