China, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Russia... Aren't progressive by any metric.
There is no connection whatsoever between progressive social policies, and macroeconomic planning.
Denmark is an extremely progressive country, way more than China in all aspects, yet they run under a free-market capitalist economy.
I disagree that this is a partisan thing however. Whether it's Canada, the UK or anywhere else it seems each party in power just pushes for more surveillance and more censorship, just using different excuses to justify their actions.
For example, Harper's conservative government put forth bill C-13 (online crime excuse) and C-30 ('think of the children' excuse), which arguably laid the way for much of the spying apparatus that is currently in place against Canadian citizens. And while Obama allowed the NSA's warrantless internet surveillance program, Trump extended it until 2024.
All governments want to spy on you, and all governments want to be able to control what you say, period. They just want you to beg for it first.
(Side note: the American Republican party is big government conservatives. Their rhetoric is irrelevant - look at what they do, not at what they say they want to do.)
Is this common knowledge? It's the first claim I've encountered of Canada attempting Internet censorship.
Pre-Elon Twitter compared Canada's proposed regulations to North Korea and China.
>Newly released documents reveal Twitter Canada told government officials that a federal plan to create a new internet regulator with the power to block specific websites is comparable to drastic actions used in authoritarian countries like China, North Korea and Iran.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-twitter-com...
Are you sure you are not speaking of liberals, who believe government should be applied liberally?
Not like any of them act as they speak, but if I am not mistaken, that's what the words mean.
No, they believe "traditional" systems should be retained (i.e. conserved).
> government should be applied liberally?
That is almost diametrically opposite to the use of the word liberal as applied to politics.
Either way, many conservatives are collectivists: they believe the needs of society and preservation of tradition outweigh the desires of individuals, and so they tend to be in favor of concepts such as the traditional family excluding gay people, the rule of mothers in child rearing being more important than the freedom of women to pursue careers and so on.
The opposite of conservatives are progressives, people who believe the status quo is not generally good, and who seek to use the power of the state to change the status quo in a direction they believe is progress.
There are also many collectivist progressives, and as such tend to want things like egalitarian schooling even if certain extraordinary kids may be kept behind, or supporting progressive taxation such that those who have more have to give more to the collective.
On a different axis, we have liberals, who are the opposite of collectivists. Liberals can be conservative or progressive, but they ultimately believe that the most important value is individual freedom.
An example of a liberal conservative is someone like Ron Paul. He believes the status quo is generally good and shouldn't be changed to much, except where he thinks government has over reached. However, he also believes government shouldn't involve itself in people lives, even to preserve societal values, so he tends to support the legalization of Marijuana and perhaps even gay marriage (though given electoral realities, in not sure of his public position on the second). Contrast this to a more collectivist conservative like justice Clarence Thomas, who believes the state should ban gay marriage and even sodomy and contraception.
But behind this fundamental position, there still lies the position that the current state of affairs is fundamentally ok, or very close to it (or if not the current one, then some previous one that you aspire to return to). You can't truthfully be a conservative while believing everything is rotten and always has been - you would have no reasonable reason to oppose change, even change for change's sake.
(1) This is a good overview, but conservatives don't believe in the status quo for the status quo's sake. They believe that our traditions are highly optimized, essential components to living a fulfilling life. We don't even know why many of the rules even exist, the exact problem they solve has long been forgotten to history; so we should be careful when changing these rules.
There is an element of caring for your long-term health as well as the larger society, and raising the next generation of humans, which most everyone agrees with in some form (even libertarians argue that absolute individual liberty is what produces the best outcome for society). This not necessarily make you a collectivist, in the way that progressives push for labor unions, economic planning, and intersectionality.
What you're missing is a description of when conservatives support use of force to promote social values. Modern American conservatives think that rights come with responsibilities, that neither unfettered libertinism nor enforcement of responsibility with police power is legitimate.
(2) Clarence Thomas has never spoken from the bench about what laws the state ought to pass, he is careful to emphasize he is not a lawmaker and that is not his job. When he dissents in Obergefell and other cases that rely on "substantive" due process, it's because i legal rationale invented to uphold slavery in Dred Scott v. Sandford.
Longer version: this is a discussion of a bill in progress in the British parliamentary system, where the current government is by a party known as the Conservative and Unionist Party, or "Conservatives" for short. This should not be confused with any colloquial meaning of the term "conservative" that might be familiar to you from American vernacular usage.
Note that political party names undergo drift from whatever they originally described over a period of decades to centuries. For example, the Australian Liberal Party is anything but "liberal" in the US context -- they're roughly equivalent to the US Republican mainstream in terms of ideology. Nor is the Australian "Labour" party a party of organized labour. Neither is the British Labour party -- it used to be, but the party leadership embarked on a protracted and mostly successful campaign to cut it off from its grassroots over a decade ago.
Anyway: the Conservative and Unionist Party has a very specific policy platform, which is described by the word "conservative" in British political discourse and which does not map neatly onto the American concept of conservativism because large chunks of American conservative culture simply don't exist in the UK. Yes, there are out-of-the-closet libertarians and objectivists and Christian dominionists in the Conservative party, but they're minor factions. The main faction can loosely be described as post-Thatcherite free marketeers, with a recent influx of hard-right racists and xenophobes who migrated en masse from UKIP, the UK Independence Party, after the Brexit referendum in 2016. There is no equivalent of the US Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, so there can be no equivalent of Constitutional Originalism in British conservativism. It's a different animal.
