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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (26991)	8/22/2006 3:24:29 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 542059

In the long run, parties and movements moving up and down over decades is a very normal cycle in American politics Its very normal in American politics, but I'm not sure it could accurately be called a cycle. A cycle is moving up and back down and back up etc. You can have a cycle like that every election, or over several elections. But a movement moving from obscurity to being a major factor isn't really cyclic, unless you are saying they will go back to obscurity and than back to being a major force and then back to obscurity. Eventually what could now be called the modern American conservative movement will decline, or fragment, or change beyond recognition, but its unlikely to return to it previous extreme weakness and then still intact emerge as a very powerful movement again and again in a cycle. It is rather a major change, in a specific direction. Yes such changes are not unusual, and they don't continue forever, but they aren't really cycles. The labels we give the movements can obscure the changes in the movements themselves. Someone might have described themselves as conservative in 1820, but the connection to a conservative in the 21st century or the 2nd half of the 20th is probably minimal. Someone who was liberal in the 18th and 19th century would likely be a supporter of less state intervention in life, while someone called a liberal in 2006 might be more of a social democrat, or perhaps a "green", or a pacifist, or some combination of the above. In a sense "Liberals" and "Conservatives" may have waxed and waned in that time, but not really, the groups with those labels aren't the same groups.