I once heard a rumor that there is a strong presence of this phobia in some north american crypto-philatelist communities.  
 
There has also been some talk of secondary exonumic affinities among needle-phobes, a counterintutive notion to be sure. I would be interested in taking a look at the heritability of exonumia among philatelist subrogees in particular, although the key factor, what I call the "Fagus Signal," is itself still very hypothetical at this point. Of course I am referring here to the involucres of curious sort that the ancient Celts once relied upon for sustenance in times of famine and persecution, and in particular, the Fagus Signal's tangible counterfactual residue.  
 
To this day the "Saxons," in fact, draw their namesake from the ancient word "seax," which referred to the special type of yatagan employed in their rites of wafture, whether for fratrimonial desplumage or for exodemic prejunctive replevin. Alas, most of the cliogenometric data in these cases is patchy at best, and is, to date, also quite unsatisfying.

IÂ’ve read the evidence posted here of Obama being a wild-eyed fanatic. I wonder if this is anything new, that is a politician using every bit of leverage he can to win an election.  
 
I believe chemists would call it “activation energy.” The point, I think, is that the yield products are of a different character than the reagents, even if the vast majority of the initial mass is conserved. 
 
Interesting that the very theme of this discussion seems to be one of increment versus cataclysm. The very difference rather teeters on a sense of proportion.  
 
If Obama be a wild-eyed fanatic, then I wonder what we might make of McCain for his outreach to evangelicals, scorned feminists, and, well, various other types of romantics, whether fiscal or social, or with regard to foreign relations. Or the evidence of uncivilized habit of mind that has gushed forth from the last 8 years of rightist patriotism in the U.S.  
 
For those of you who doubt that high priests often reinterpret their religions to take a position 180 degrees opposed to the one they previously had, I recommend taking a look at contemporary American “conservative” leaders currently making accusations of Marxism or Ayatollism toward their opponents. 
 
What a useful scientific study would that be: a way to actually measure projection. Anyone have any good theories on the evolutionary origin of projection? The stuff currently out there isnÂ’t really satisfying. 
 
Also, anyone here interested in the free-market character and policy behavioralism of ObamaÂ’s current economic advisory junta? Seems to be relatively empirically-based, in fact. Hopefully posting a TNR article here isnÂ’t worse than posting an LA Times article. Sorry if I offend anyone; I am well-meaning even if I am often empirically misguided.

The question now in the US, then, is how did this ?conservative? movement derail? Bad students? Bad management? Sure. Somewhere along the line, these conservatives lost their bearings to the schizophrenia of American democracy; The same way, in my rough estimation, that continental liberals lost their bearings to relativism, and eastern liberals lost their bearings to Bolshevism. It surely looks to me that too many shares were issued to the barbarian elements during the initial public offering, to where the question of clearing a new path has become one of dissolving the brand entirely.

I think this is the general disappointment with Marx to this day, namely that he was a natural empiricist-inductivist, but compromised his entire project for sake of activation, i.e. clearing a path through thickets of rationalism and religion with hegelian messianism. The best part of today?s US conservative project, which I consider conservative on the Hobbes-Rousseau continuum, is certainly a study of conserving ?legitimate? democratic liberalism by avoiding such massive self-defeating programs. In practice, it is intimately the study of these fatal romances with pyrrhic victory that Marx, among others, have exemplified ? usually in massive culminations of phantasmagoric horror and crimes against humanity ? in past practice. At some point in 20th century American history, the stated goals of western political conservatism converged rather well with the better goals of science itself: Inuring to the mechanism of reality, as opposed to simply a schedule of wishes. Is this not still recognized as the difference between science and mere metaphysics, as it was once the difference between an open society and its enemies?

I think looking under the historical taxonomy is necessary to discover what conservatism really is. Further, if politics is viewed strategically, the accuracy and cost to identifying allies and enemies (intelligence) becomes important. Another cheap abstraction to throw in here might be the case of convergent evolution, which highlights the strategic inadequacy of nominalism as an account of historical relationship. The emergent reality for conservatives to walk behind certainly includes the endurance of an occasional revolution, path-clearing quakes and deluges, to be sure. But the mere identification of nationalism with liberalism would not account for a flourishing liberal democracy like the US being able to distinguish Ally from Axis, or acts of God from acts of unspeakable human evil. 
 
That the territory, in fact, matters as much as the map when evaluating policy, is the principle that ultimately "won" the Cold War under a largely ?conservative? banner, even as today?s American conservative agenda claims to promote and protect liberal democracy around the world. At the highest levels American conservatives knew that the ?sticky tar? of historicist dialectics was incompatible with a sustainable liberal society, regardless of how wide-open the path to utopia appeared in the euphoric aftermath of revolution. When every foreign relationship counts as an investment, analysis goes to the heart of how ?natural laws? are posited in a nation's social covenants. The difference between a winner and a loser is in the mechanism to power; Where continental liberalism got stuck in the tar of rationalism, anglo liberalism tempered all its logic with a deliberate agnostic spirit. The reason is the huge opportunity cost of its absence; It's what caused the Icelandic anarcho-capitalist experiment to collapse, and every failed liberal enterprise since. A gradual, cumulative overflow of waste that eventually reaches socially untenable levels.

I didn't take it to mean conservatives are simply slow to negotiate new ideas. Your comments about creating liberal industrial nations "from scratch" and nationalism as "useful" for initiating the modernization process in many cases. You then intuitively credit some pre-existing condition to nations that didn't have to resort to the radical nationalism found in non-Anglo modernization efforts. That's generally an acknowledgment of path-dependence effect, which I would agree with. 
 
I think the dilemma for American conservativism, then, is how one conserves liberalism, or more specifically how one allows for the benefits of modernization and industry to flourish without advocating fascist liberalism. 
 
We can now agree that nationalism was liberal in most 18th and 19th century contexts, including and most preeminently the nationalism of England and the US. But throughout the 20th century, we don't conjecture some fundamental reversal of principle to explain that US-global flyswatting was directed at nationalist regimes. At some level the American ?conservatives? behind Cold War policies knew what distinguished ?viable? liberalism from other forms, most notably Marxist communism, even as most modern liberal movements would acknowledge a certain progressive, dialectic quality to the course of historical events. Analytically, that is walking behind reality and seeking principled decisions, I think what Cold War American conservatives ultimately relied on to distinguish ?legitimate? liberalism from the doomed variety ? Goldberg?s ?liberal fascism? ? regimes was indeed an abstract ideal, a principal component without which an emerging nation could be reliably expected to stall, and backslide into barbarism. This view, which in its 20th-century revivalist form might be called Straussian, was a direct refutation of the secular rationalism underlying the entire Enlightenment project, and a direct refutation of the practice of historicism itself in legitimating "liberal" political claims.

Conservatives walk behind reality. 
 
Well put. You go on to describe a certain path-dependency effect that encumbers late nationalist movements in a degree not suffered by Anglo liberalism, historically by case. I think there are ways to deal with that in policy that are not entirely new, but just need some maintenance, some updating. Some conservation.

On that note, the history of 19th Germany, not to mention the Weimar era, is one hell of a can of worms that, as much as I might believe I know a little about, I can?t imagine anyone resolving without some kind of giant matrix. I will submit that the continental Renaissance and Enlightenment was fundamentally subversive to both orthodox Judaism and the Romanism that controlled most of the above-ground politics through the middle ages, and in that sense there was a constant convection of liberalism and conservatism happening there prior to the Unification. Industrialism, which is generally the condition most historians consider sufficient in cases of modern European nationalism, didn?t fail to arrive concomitantly in Prussia, et al., as it did in western nations. So, if we drain away the slurry of de facto serfdom, lutheran/calvinist ascetism, and mercantilist protectionism still irrigating the ditches of the German Confederacy in the mid-late 19th century, then yes, the nationalism movements of the early part of the century are generally liberal. 
 
Yet for the most part 19th century Germany, Unified or not, agitated by crude social-democratic, labor and guild institutions, or not, was still fundamentally a syndicate of militarist vassal-states, fueled by ethnic and religious remnants, pervaded with dynastic privilege, and varnished with thick cameralism at the executive level. It was precisely that high-level conservative nationalism that stunted its eventual Unification, even after the industrial republics of the West had been trailblazing for a century. Once 1871 passed, it is important to note that even though the new Empire?s liberal parties drank merrily when Bismarck yielded to various constitutional reforms, and the Kulturkampf had the splendidly iconoclastic effect of enraging the Pope, we are still talking about a nation whose net political action for the next 70 years after the Unification remained a fairly wretched melodrama of militarism, reactionism, and fiat. 
 
The other instances of late nationalism resulting in right-wing baits-and-switch regimes seem sufficient enough for me to conclude nationalism and liberalism are independent properties without considering mechanism, but I can?t say I?ve read enough about Italy, Spain, or eastern bloc nations to place bets on my superficial suspicions. And my suspicion is that whatever liberal clothing these fascist juntas wore to their inaugurations, the underlying character and motivation doesn?t match other 19th-century cases of nationalism. I find the clear marriages of liberalism and nationalism in England, France, and the U.S. compelling, but not indicative of a mutually necessary relationship. 
 
Further, I am considering the source of that "nationalism is illiberal" comment. I have witnessed Emerson argue before about the nature of framing foreign histories in retrospect of western liberalism ? his lens tends to seek ground eff
More....

Thanks Luis: Refining my own mess of text above, I?ll use j mct?s more succinct account of liberalism as simply an expression of latent dissatisfaction with conditions, growing to radicalism in frustration of the delivery of desired changes. Leaving out my identification of liberalism with the economic waste product of any given status quo, and sticking simply to the issue of taxonomy, I still think historical classifications of conservatism/liberalism need to consider margins. As a very cheap abstract way of explaining, I might consider the case of a geometric progression where X < Y < Z, with the rule Conservative > Liberal. If we only select X and Y, then Y is ?Conservative.? But only the appellation for Y changes as the frame advances; the value stays fixed. Clearly everyone already gets that; I?m just reinforcing the concept that the scale of one?s historical focus can make agreement look like something else.

I may be naive, but the current flux that US conservatism/liberalism is currently undergoing might be something of a benchmark by which most any dichotomous notions of "conservatism" could be measured. There seems to be an emerging portrait of the kind of universal conservatism of the kind that J Derbyshire has spoken of - simply the better position on a dichotomy of civilization and barbarism. 
 
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/red-state-triumph.html 
 
I think the schisms on either traditional pole in the US already suggest a movement more mature sense of "conservatism" that speaks to concern for mechanism over mere end-state. I think this is generally what Von Mises attempted with his praxeology but had little institutional support in the way of a mature scientific apparatus. Yet, it is also what Marx exploited with his iconoclastic hero myth, in the absence of the same. So has gone the mechanism of rent-seeking in the US when either inchoate dogma has been put to experiment through legislation over the last century or so, when the vast majority of the populace has little capacity to articulate optima beyond class or race aggregations. 
 
I think the thing to remember about any political dogma or allegory is that they are provisional, and should be understood to depreciate like any other intangible thing of value. Every inductive update from the ambience generally dilutes yesterday's investments, and so goes the current arguments about political "brands."  
 
In a construct of fundamental notions of "natural" rights and ownership, then, I think the practical dilemma with any contemporary revision of party or platform will always be a matter of equity in the waste and salvage. In the US case, the grotesque evangelism and civil tantrum coming from the delinquent/peasant apparatus are a liability for both "conservative" and "liberal" enterprises. For any enthusiast of facts and data looking to get into left-right politics, whether one would want to invest in either label exclusively at this point is probably the more critical question. Most indicators here would suggest the outcome frontier for those already vested is much grimmer. Does this not apply to other regions equally, or at least very closely, as it does in the US? 
 
It's been a while since the last behavioral economics thread. What say the gentlemens and gentlewomens of this thread of the prospects of behavioral economics for, say, a conservatism premised on equity-efficiency optima in policy? My apologies I've missed the overall trajectory of the discussion.

http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/08/0508neural.html 
 
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/equityefficiencytradeoff.asp 
 
democracy = bikeshed.