№ 5 - 2005
Rakhshmir P.Yu.
Conservatism and Liberalism: Metamorphoses of the Consensus

An attempt has been made in the article to explain the now perceptible tendencies toward “individualization” of political life and toward appreciable devaluation of party ideologies, in terms of the development of the relationship between two political trends embodying respectively the conservative and the liberal type of policy. After analyzing the process of the formation and deepening of consensus between these trends, the author demonstrates that the now typically prevailing domination of short-term over long-term interests is to a great extent conditioned by historic success of the consensus, by its having acquired a value character. According to his conclusion, it is exactly the firm value foundation and the conversion of the values shared by the parties, into something that goes without saying and is not seriously disputed by anyone, that brought about the prerequisites for tough fights over interests, and if one observes closely the changed societal structure, if one scrutinizes the conglomeration of interests and of positions, the set of ideas that sound new, one may see through them the visible outlines of familiar, though modernized, ideological-political trends.