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82 books match the query 'Conservatism' and 9 start with c

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Confidence Regained

Economics, Mrs. Thatcher, and the British Voter

Helmut Norpoth

University of Michigan Press, 1992

Elected to office at the end of a decade of economic decline, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher set out to cure Britain's ills with daring new free-market policies. Putting financial stability first on the agenda of macroeconomic priorities, the Thatcher government pursued this goal with rare tenacity. In Confidence Regained, Helmut Norpoth examines the electoral risks and rewards of this economic strategy.Professor Norpoth paints a vivid picture of the fierce battle over the economic policies and record of the Thatcher government. Using electoral surveys, Norpoth reveals how British voters sorted out the competing claims of economists and politicians in their various partisan choices. Turning from election outcomes to government popularity between elections, Professor Norpoth charts the rise and decline of Margaret Thatcher's approval ratings and Conservative party support, showing how responsive these ratings were to economic performance. The statistical evidence presented shows that economic views significantly affected voter choices in the Thatcher elections. But the author reveals that the Conservatives under Mrs. Thatcher owed their ability to regain the confidence of the British electorate not only to the nation’s economic success, but also, in large measure, to the British victory in the Falkland Islands.Confidence Regained is an invaluable source to scholars of electoral politics, especially of British elections, but it will also interest historians of Thatcherism and scholars studying the role of macroeconomics in elections.

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Conservatism and Southern Intellectuals, 1789-1861

Liberty, Tradition, and the Good Society

Adam L. Tate

University of Missouri Press, 2005

In Conservatism and Southern Intellectuals, 1789–1861, Adam L. Tate discusses the nature of southern conservative thought between 1789 and 1861 by examining six conservatives whose lives and careers spanned the antebellum period: John Randolph of Roanoke, John Taylor of Caroline, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, William Gilmore Simms, Joseph Glover Baldwin, and Johnson Jones Hooper. Tate contends that southern conservatism derived its distinctive characteristics from its acceptance of aspects of John Locke’s political theory as it was articulated during the American Revolution.

Locke argued that the state and society were two entities that could be reformed and manipulated by men. Showing that most southern conservative intellectuals accepted Locke’s premise regarding separation of state and society, Tate examines both the political views and social vision of the six conservatives surveyed. He pays special attention to how these conservatives dealt with states’ rights, republicanism, slavery, sectionalism, and religion, as well as western expansion and migration.

Tate maintains that while southern conservatives forged a common political tradition based on Old Republican interpretations of the Constitution, they did not create a unified tradition of social thought. Even though most of them desired a cohesive southern intellectual movement, as well as a homogenous southern culture, their disagreements over the good society prevented them from creating a common southern social vision to accompany their states’ rights political tradition.

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Conservatism

Burke, Nozick, Bush, Blair?

Ted Honderich

Pluto Press, 2005

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Conservative Counterrevolution

Challenging Liberalism in 1950s Milwaukee

Tula A. Connell

University of Illinois Press, 2016

In the 1950s, Milwaukee's strong union movement and socialist mayor seemed to embody a dominant liberal consensus that sought to continue and expand the New Deal. Tula Connell explores how business interests and political conservatives arose to undo that consensus, and how the resulting clash both shaped a city and helped redefine postwar American politics. Connell focuses on Frank Zeidler, the city's socialist mayor. Zeidler's broad concept of the public interest at times defied even liberal expectations. At the same time, a resurgence of conservatism with roots presaging twentieth-century politics challenged his initiatives in public housing, integration, and other areas. As Connell shows, conservatives created an anti-progressive game plan that included a well-funded media and PR push; an anti-union assault essential to the larger project of delegitimizing any government action; opposition to civil rights; and support from a suburban silent majority. In the end, the campaign undermined notions of the common good essential to the New Deal order. It also sowed the seeds for grassroots conservatism's more extreme and far-reaching future success.

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Conservative Ideology in the Making

Ivan Zoltan Denes

Central European University Press, 2009

The fifty years or so preceding the watershed of 1848–49 witnessed the emergence of liberal nationalism in Hungary, along with a transmutation of conservatism which appeared then as a party and an ideological system in the political arena. The specific features of the conservatism, combining the protection of the status quo with some reform measures, its strategic vision, conceptual system, argumentation, assessment criteria and values require an in depth exploration and analysis. Different conservative groups were in the background or in opposition from 1848 to 1918, while in the period between the two World Wars, they constituted the overwhelming majority of ruling parties. During the one-party system, from 1949 to 1989, the liberals and conservatives—like all other political groups—were illegal, a status from which they could later emerge upon the change of the political system. The inheritance of the autocratic system frozen up and undigested by the one-party state was thawed after the peaceful regime change, the constitutional revolution and its discrete components began to be reactivated, including the enemy images of earlier discourses. "Liberal" and "conservative" had become state-party stigmas in line with fascist, reactionary, rightist, and bourgeois. In reaction to that, at first conservative then liberal, intellectual fashions and renascences unfolded in the 1980s. The attempts by liberal and conservative advocates to find predecessors did not favor an objective approach.The first step toward objectivity is establishing distance from the different kinds of enemy images and their political idioms. This is a pressing need because, although several pioneering works have appeared on different variants of the Hungarian liberalisms and conservatisms, there are no serious unbiased syntheses. This work is urgent because the political poles of the constitutional revolution and the ensuing period have up till now been described in terms of different conspiracy theories.

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Conservative Innovators

How States Are Challenging Federal Power

Ben Merriman

University of Chicago Press, 2019

As American politics has become increasingly polarized, gridlock at the federal level has led to a greater reliance on state governments to get things done. But this arrangement depends a great deal on state cooperation, and not all state officials have chosen to cooperate. Some have opted for conflict with the federal government.

Conservative Innovators traces the activity of far-right conservatives in Kansas who have in the past decade used the powers of state-level offices to fight federal regulation on a range of topics from gun control to voting processes to Medicaid. Telling their story, Ben Merriman then expands the scope of the book to look at the tactics used by conservative state governments across the country to resist federal regulations, including coordinated lawsuits by state attorneys general, refusals to accept federal funds and spending mandates, and the creation of programs designed to restrict voting rights. Through this combination of state-initiated lawsuits and new administrative practices, these state officials weakened or halted major parts of the Obama Administration’s healthcare, environmental protection, and immigration agendas and eroded federal voting rights protections. Conservative Innovators argues that American federalism is entering a new, conflict-ridden era that will make state governments more important in American life than they have been at any time in the past century.

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Conservative Thought in Twentieth Century Latin America

The Ideas of Laureano Gomez

James D. Henderson

Ohio University Press, 1988

Laureano Gómez was president of Colombia in the early 1950s until overthrown by a military coup. He was also, for some fifty years, the leading exponent of Latin American conservatism, a political philosophy with roots in both nineteenth–century politics and religion. Focusing on Gómez, and other prominent conservative politicians, Henderson traces the evolution of Latin American conservatism and demonstrates the scope of its influence throughout the continent.

While much has been written about particular Marxist movements and right–wing regimes in contemporary Latin America, little attention has been devoted, in recent years, to the more moderate political institutions and individuals which dominate twentieth–century Latin America. This first account of Latin American conservatism should be of interest to all students of the history and politics of the region.

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