In response to great responses

Well...I'm thrilled to see my previous post evoked such thoughtful responses. (And I encourage everyone to read them).

BUT...I'm not teaching history here, guys, but rather developing a marketing strategy.

The idea is to SELL it...to youth and low info citizens. To sell the idea that the time of the Progressives is over. That they're passe, that their ideas belong to the early 20th century and the rather primitive industrial age—that they're about as hip and cutting edge as a steam engine.

I'm using it as shorthand & symbol, not history.

If you wish to focus on the agrarian age as peopled by kings and warlords rather than by our founders in the early republic with independent citizens living on the land, then it still works! In fact, I daresay it works rather better because that's pretty much exactly what our target audience thinks "conservative" means. So let's use their definition and make it work for us. I've argued for a long time that the English word "conservative" is not one that evokes anything good in the mind of most young people, or anyone else interested in innovation, improvement, new and exciting human inventions and frontiers or anyone interested in fashion, style, trends. It sounds antithetical to anything new and fun, and frankly, how boring is that?

Conservatives insist on saying that they want to rehabilitate the word. I say use the popular conception to our own advantage.

Look, what we need to do is surrender the WORD. Not the principles. Almost everyone is a conservative. But because they have a complete misunderstanding of what the word means...even though for at least 40 year conservatives have had the opportunity to explain themselves...they reject people and ideas described or defined as Conservative.

When will we learn this particular lesson?

The Marketing Plan is to agree with our target audience that Conservatism (as THEY understand it) is old-fashioned, stodgy, tired, frumpy, boring, conformist, uncreative, soggy, humorless, musty, dusty...and so over. We will freely admit it belongs to the bygone Agrarian age which was replaced by the Industrial Age: where everyone congregated in the cities, and found themselves under the harsh rule of the Robber Barons, the Tycoons, the Rich who partnered with the Ruling Class who ran everything including the government with an eye to consolidating both political and economic power in their own hands in order to live in luxury on the backs of the poor and working classes laboring in dirty factories, crushed together into company housing, losing their independence, their individuality, their land and property and finally their spirit.

We want to convince people that the Progressive Age is over. That it's a relic of the past...and that its pitiful, sad and desperate adherents are trying desperately to stay relevant by grasping as much power over individuals as possible to prevent their own inevitable decline into irrelevance as the world moves on and passes them by.

We want to celebrate Libertarianism as the face of the Information Age. To the name Libertarianism (or whatever cool buzzword we choose to call it) we will attach all the important principles of Conservatism. And the young and the stupid and the low information citizen (which includes most "liberal" people) will never know the difference, because they have never known what conservative principles are anyway.

When we say the Information Age is about individuality, creativity, non-conformity, about being left alone, about choosing our own path, our own fortunes, about building our own futures...they will never know that we are merely quoting age-old Conservative principles we have believed in for decades. It sound like tomorrow, freedom, artsy-fartsy hipster creativity.

And so it is.

The funny thing is, we won't even be lying to anyone...just manipulating a few symbols and may coining a few cool phrases.

It could work.

TBC