The Pros And Cons Of Extreme Relativism

Many neoconservatives were horrified at the extreme relativism that had grown in the 1960s. Simplistic ideas such as “it’s all right if it feels good” and “it just depends on your point of view” and “multiculturalism”-drove professors who had earlier tried to broaden their students’ views by stressing the relativity of all view points and cultures. Instead, students became vacuous rather than enlightened. In the Bush43 administration, highly placed neocons promoted war with Iraq both to protect the United states and to pull the Muslim world into democracy so that it would no longer spawn terrorism. Many old-fashioned republican conservatives, who dislike overseas crusades, despised the neocons, and they faded from power.
For the nationalist,
what is indigenous is ipso facto popular; must therefore rediscover the culture of the people we through popular education and instill a national love of the people. But this popular, national culture is not just a private The nation's culture demands public expression and gives birth to a political symbolism. The return to an authentic history and a vermicular culture must take a public form and The cultural nation must become the political zed. culture the mound and measure of society public nation, with nation is therefore characterized by a 'political culture’. The culture, with its distinct political roles and institutions call anthems, festivals, ceremonies and its unique symbols flags, and the like. Basis of prior Where the nation in question emerged on the its public ethnic ties, forms of culture permeate its public life and identify its political culture, as in Poland.
The strong revival of conservatism in the 1980s, both as a governmental force and as a body of political thought, is frequently portrayed as a flowering of beliefs and attitudes attached to new theoretical frameworks, meriting the designation New Right or neo‐liberal conservatism, as distinct from plain neo‐conservatism. Those frameworks, it is often asserted, have substantially reformulated conservative doctrine and launched a cohesive set of positive ideas Page 3 of 3 matching progressive ideologies in sophistication and breadth. The contemporary study of conservatism is thus confronted with two conundrums: is there now in evidence a new type of conservatism, breaking with its past incarnations and embarking on a programme of change so active that it may no longer be conservatism; and moreover, is there an unbridgeable rift between two concurrent conservative creeds, neo‐liberal and traditional? It is argued here that late twentieth‐ century conservative thought occupies fundamentally the same semantic field as its predecessors, granted that the cultural constraints within which its network of concepts is decongested have been considerably transformed; consequently, conservatism appears to be attached to an innovator range of substantive ideas and policies.
The latter part of the twentieth century has seen the emergence of a number of groupings of political thought that attempt to escape from the morphological and interpretative constraints of the older established ideologies. One way of affecting this has been through the processes of redefining the domain of the political, re-conceptualizing the ideational elements of the contending ideologies, renaming the components of political vocabulary, and revalorizing marginal political concepts. Another has been through decreased internal integration in comparison to existing ideological families, the outcome being the formation of thin‐centered assimilative ideologies, which then either challenge the relevance of additional ideological baggage, or thicken by ingesting the patterns of other ideologies.