Winston Churchill Was A Liberal

Quote Falsely Attributed To Winston Churchill

These quotes make
for good story-telling
but popular myth has
falsely attributed them
to Churchill.


"Conservative by the time you're 35"

"If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain." There is no record of anyone hearing Churchill say this. Paul Addison of Edinburgh University makes this comment: "Surely Churchill can't have used the words attributed to him. He'd been a Conservative at 15 and a Liberal at 35! And would he have talked so disrespectfully of Clemmie, who is generally thought to have been a lifelong Liberal?"

MAKE CONSERVATISM HISTORY


"I don't want to abolish government, I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

Grover Norquist

It's time to drown Grover Norquist and today's conservatives in the filthy sewer from whence they came. Make Conservatism History. End "compassionless conservatism" now before it "kills with kindness" again.

Kevin Drum:

IDEOLOGY AND REAL LIFE....One of the things that Hurricane Katrina has done is shine a very bright light on the different worldviews of liberals and conservatives.

Conservatives fundamentally believe in a limited role for the federal government. They believe in downsizing, privatizing, and placing greater reliance on state and local government to provide essential services. It's easy — too easy — to blame George Bush in hindsight for specific things like cutting the Corps of Engineers budget for the New Orleans district, but the reason this criticism is legitimate is because this wasn't merely a specific incident. As even some conservatives tacitly admit, it was a direct result of George Bush's governing ideology.(emphasis mine)

FEMA was downsized and partially privatized because modern Republican leaders think that's the right thing to do with federal agencies. (emphasis mine) Budgets were limited for levee construction and first responder training because Republicans have other priorities. The federal government was slow to respond to Katrina because conservatives believe states should take the lead in looking out for their own needs. George Bush talks endlessly to the cameras about the private sector helping to rebuild the Gulf Coast because that's the kind thing conservatives believe in.

Liberals, by contrast, believe in a robust role for the federal government. We believe in sharing risk nationwide for local disasters. We believe that only the federal government is big enough to coordinate relief on the scale needed by an event like Katrina, and that strong, well managed agencies like FEMA should take the lead role in making this happen.

Both of these governing philosophies are defensible, but too often they seem like nothing more than opposing sides in an intellectual game. Katrina demonstrates otherwise. It's what happens when a drowning city runs smack into a conservative movement that believes in drowning the federal government in a bathtub.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan says I'm wrong about conservative ideology:

"Real conservatives believe that the state should do a few things that no one else can do — defense, decent public education, police, law and order among the most obvious — and leave the rest to individuals. Funding FEMA and having a superb civil defense are very much part of conservatism's real core."

I'm not so sure that disaster relief is truly part of "conservatism's real core," but really, this is neither here nor there. Rarefied arguments about "real" conservatism aside, the brand of conservatism actually on offer today clearly doesn't value things like disaster relief and doesn't care much about competent management of anything else either. On that much, at least, Andrew and I appear to agree. (emphasis mine)

Air America Radio Katrina: How you can Help

Air America Public Voicemail Air America Public Voicemail
1-866-217-6255

Air America Radio's Public Voicemail is a way for disconnected people to communicate in the wake of Katrina.

Moveon.org helps secure more than 49,000 beds for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Update on the obvious failures of "small government conservatism" and "compssionate [sic] conservatism via AMERICAblog (which has some fantastic posts you must see to believe, like Fox News' Greta Van Susteren praising a looter).

Ezra Klein:
Ideological Casualties

And...

(On this point, check out TPM's story about the administrations attempt to get the Christian right highlighted in the relief effort, though it quickly died on the vine.)

"Bush, of course, has been this strange mixture of government growth and administrative incompetence, almost as if he's running a kamikaze mission to prove the Republican case against government. But conservatives, generally, are all for the private market and individual charity. If Bush really was so uncomfortable with government involvement, he could still do a bang-up job relying on his church/industry connections to create a parallel and powerful rescue effort. The government could take care of the basics, but the private and theological spheres could provide much of the material, cash, and space. In doing, Bush would help discredit Big Government and legitimize the conservative philosophy.

He hasn't. And that he's hasn't demonstrates his basic absence of a driving ideology. He's neither able to effectively deploy government or call on his friends outside of it. He's just incompetent, as I said before, a small man in a big office."

From PERRspectives:

Compassionate Conservatism, RIP

Over two years ago, I wrote the words below as part of long piece titled, "The Opt Out Society: The GOP Threat to National Unity and the American Social Contract."

Now, two years later, with New Orleans in ruins, hundreds dead and thousands more at risk, we see the willful neglect of the Bush administration and the morally bankrupt conservative public philosophy behind it in the clear light of day.

Theirs is the Opt Out Society indeed. And in it, you are on your own:

"It is American national unity itself that is under attack by the GOP during a time of war. The American people, standing shoulder to shoulder against foreign foes, are being divided and splintered by a Republican public philosophy of market worship, the privatization or abandonment of traditional government roles and services, and a radical individualism. The Bush philosophy represents an all-out assault on common national purpose in the United States. Government not only can't solve problems, it has no moral claim on its citizens' participation in a shared national effort to try. At the end of the day, you're on your own in a Hobbesian struggle of each against all; the government's role is to stand aside and let you fight it out.
This Republican program seeks to undermine the traditional American social contract and create what can be called an "Opt Out Society." That is, the GOP will abrogate the unwritten agreements that have defined the national bargain for three generations, such as hard work in exchange for social mobility, commitment to public institutions in exchange for growing personal freedoms, and those disproportionately benefiting from the American system disproportionately contributing to its maintenance. Instead, conservatives push to privatize social services like education, health care, and retirement, while rewarding Americans for withdrawing their support from their country, their government, their communities, their schools - and each other."


Compassionate Conservatism, RIP.