Posts tagged Conservatives

Margaret Thatcher Dies

9
1 month ago
by Monotreme in
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

For­mer British Prime Min­is­ter Mar­garet Thatcher

For­mer British Prime Min­is­ter Baroness Mar­garet Thatcher, who led the coun­try and the Con­ser­v­a­tive Party from May 1979 to Novem­ber 1990, has died of a stroke at age 87.

Thatcher was, para­dox­i­cally, both a uniter and a divider. Her hard-​​charging style helped win 10 Down­ing Street for the Con­ser­v­a­tives, but also alien­ated her allies and helped lead to an inter­nal coup in 1990 which removed her from the party lead­er­ship. She inspired her ene­mies on the left to write the famous ska clas­sic “Stand Down Mar­garet”.

She was the first female Prime Min­is­ter and the longest-​​serving Prime Min­is­ter of the 20th century.

What is her legacy? What lessons may we learn from her leadership?

 

The Loss of Jack Layton

24
1 year ago
by Monotreme in

Jack Lay­ton, 1950–2011

Amer­i­cans, even those who have a strong polit­i­cal bent and pop­u­late web­sites such as Log­a­rchism, tend to be blind toward the pol­i­tics of other countries.

So it was that a major Cana­dian polit­i­cal fig­ure died a week ago today, and few on the south­ern side of the bor­der marked his pass­ing. I’m here to rec­tify that, at least for the cor­ner of the world I control.

New Demo­c­ra­tic Party leader Jack Lay­ton died Mon­day, August 22, at the age of 61.

Since 2006, the Cana­dian gov­ern­ment (a par­lia­men­tary sys­tem) has been con­trolled by the minor­ity party, the Con­ser­v­a­tives, led by Prime Min­is­ter Stephen Harper. In the 2011 elec­tions, Cana­di­ans stirred up the House of Com­mons, giv­ing the Con­ser­v­a­tives a major­ity but weak­en­ing the tra­di­tional Lib­eral oppo­si­tion. Con­ser­v­a­tives now con­trol 166 of a total 308 seats in the House of Com­mons. There are four oppo­si­tion par­ties hold­ing seats — the New Democ­rats (102 seats, with Layton’s now empty), Lib­er­als (34), Bloc Québé­cois (4), and Greens (1). Tra­di­tion­ally, the Lib­er­als and Con­ser­v­a­tives have alter­nated gov­ern­ments, with the Bloc Québé­cois (formed as a Que­bec sep­a­ratist party) and New Democ­rats (formed from a fusion of Social­ists and labour/​workers par­ties) rel­e­gated to shout­ing on the side­lines. For the first time in Cana­dian his­tory, the New Democ­rats (formed in 1961) are the offi­cial oppo­si­tion party, with the Lib­er­als and Bloc Québé­cois weak­ened con­sid­er­ably from their ear­lier pow­er­ful role. (more…)

Doomsday

171
1 year ago
by filistro in

Social con­ser­v­a­tives tend to be fond of end-​​time sce­nar­ios from an escha­to­log­i­cal per­spec­tive, but not too many of them know (or will admit) that a dif­fer­ent sort of dooms­day is threat­en­ing the Repub­li­can party…and this one is based on demographics.

A cou­ple of months ago I wrote “El Prob­lemo de los Repub­li­canos,” exam­in­ing one half of this soci­o­log­i­cal wreck­ing ball that is hurtling toward the GOP. That is the grow­ing pop­u­la­tion of minori­ties in the United States, all groups who have his­tor­i­cally not been well-​​treated by con­ser­v­a­tive law­mak­ers and have no par­tic­u­lar rea­son to feel voter loy­alty toward them. Now let’s take a look at the other half of that demo­graphic doomsday…the increas­ingly lib­eral social views of a whole gen­er­a­tion of younger voters.

Smart con­ser­v­a­tives are not entirely unaware of the danger…but at this point they are still fool­ing them­selves (and each other) with arti­cles like this one by Michael J. New, enti­tled “Should Social Con­ser­v­a­tives Worry About the Next Gen­er­a­tion?” The answer is always the same as the one reached in New’s arti­cle. “No,” they say. “Everything’s fine.” They reach this con­clu­sion by cit­ing stud­ies that show younger peo­ple are more opposed to abor­tion than they used to be, and same-​​sex mar­riage is still not widely accepted.

But are they just whistling past the grave­yard, and run­ning a grave polit­i­cal risk by refus­ing to mod­er­ate their rigid atti­tudes on social issues? It appears that answer may be yes. (more…)

Humpty Dumpty and the Conservatives

0
2 years ago
by Monotreme in

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scorn­ful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The ques­tion is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many dif­fer­ent things.”

“The ques­tion is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be mas­ter, that’s all.”

Dana Mil­bank reports on the death of the Con­gres­sional conservative.

Mil­bank was taken to task by a reader who claimed that Lisa Murkowski was “the most lib­eral … Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor west of Maine and con­sid­er­ably to the left of most of her con­stituents” and invited him to check her life­time Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive Union rat­ing. So, he took the reader up on the offer. While he was at it, he checked the rat­ings of Murkowski L (70.2%) and Ben­nett (83.6%) vs Repub­li­can lead­er­ship of years past.

Fail­ing the Ben­nett test at under 83.6% were, well, almost all of the Repub­li­can lead­ers of the past 40 years who served in Congress.

So, what is a conservative?

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