Talk:Conservative

''This article has now been merged into Conservatism and this talk has been copied to Talk:Conservatism. Please make any further comments there instead of here.''

It is very discouraging that in this United States of America, the true meanings of words like liberal and conservative are so often mis- enterpeted. Being judged as either one or the other is so unjustified. From the definitions of each, we can see a clear and different interpertation. Clearly, these changed over the years and cannot be used to lump each person into one category or the other because of their political party. I think that new words should be invented in order to clarify the true political views of each individual. I am especially sorry to see that our news media in this country is constantly being portrayed as either all liberal or all conservative. Personally, these inflamatory names have caused some very heated debates in our family. It is next to impossible to convince our 30 and 40 year old children that we are not liberals!!! To us, that is the farthest from the truth. Our intire life has been very conservative in every way. They were raised by us and use to call us "old fashioned", "not with it", "uncool", etc. But now, we are suddenly LIBERALS, because we happen to belong the the "liberal" party. Please, someone, redefine the words, liberal and conservative, to make this generation "see the light" and recognize that you cannot put people in a specific category!!!

This page despite obvious attempts at generalization, is still awfully US-centric. In Europe, for example, conservative and liberal mean roughly the opposite of what they do in the US with regards to economic policy (i.e. in Europe, "liberals" are pro-free-market and "conservatives" are pro-social-safety-net, etc.). (Or at least, so I'm told). Steven G. Johnson

...or US/UK-centered, which maybe is what can be expected in an English language project? It makes me wonder about for instance Australia, India and South Africa, where English are important languages.

This is one of the reasons why I've shunned editing this article. There is also the problem with three articles (Conservative, Political conservatism & Conservatism) which probably ought to be merged, and then put in coherence with other related articles, such as Social conservatism.

Maybe articles on Political Conservatism in USA, and Political Conservatism in UK should be written and stabilized first? -- Ruhrjung 06:50, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * I've been labouring to merge Conservatism and Political conservatism, the article at political conservatism contains my most recent edits and my first attempt at providing what hopefully will be a fully merged article.


 * My suggestion would be to merge all three of them; there's quite a bit of redundancy in the merged articles already. Being pompous and wordy, I may not be the best person to point it out.  I have endeavored to describe conservatism as a way of looking at the world, w/o reference to the politics of any particular country, to avoid the claim of "ethnocentrism" (do real conservatives say such things?) but some is unavoidable.  I do think that it's a good idea to have one merged article (at Conservatism, I think; this would be the best conformed to the de-facto standards about naming belief systems) but I did think I'd give someone a heads up before they went and made elaborate changes to any one of the articles.  There does seem to be general agreement that three is too many.  -- IHCOYC 19:55, 15 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * I have endeavoured to copy the gist of what was here into a new article crudely combining the three conservative articles, which now sits at Political conservatism. I will let that one sit so that interested people can give their thoughts before doing anything further and drastic with it or the other two pages.  It will need editing and further recombination by folks with better memories and heads for that sort of thing.


 * Maybe we need a fourth page, say at conservativism, for a sandbos? Whaddya know, there actually is a conservativism page! == IHCOYC 01:30, 16 Aug 2003 (UTC)

''This article has now been merged into Conservatism and this talk has been copied to Talk:Conservatism. Please make any further comments there instead of here.''

Conservative extension?
Are either the "conservative extension" or the "conservativity theorem" normally referred to simply by the term "conservative" without the other word of the phrase? If not, they really don't belong here. See WP:MOSDAB. I'm not deleting them because I don't enough about how either term is used in practice. --Russ Blau (talk) 01:19, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Changing redir.
I'm changing the redirect so that it points to Conservatism (disambiguation). There are many things one could be looking for when searching for "Conservative." Better let the user choose than to direct them to a specific article. This parallels a similar issue regarding the redirect at liberal. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wikidemo (talk • contribs) 14:44, 23 October 2007 (UTC)