German Chancellor Angela Merkel, pictured here with French President Emmanuel Macron, has managed to keep centrists happy while holding on to her conservative base.
Reuters/Fabrizio Bensch
Looking like a centrist, but governing as a conservative, Angela Merkel has cleared the decks before the coming German election.
Federal political leaders attend an ecumenical church service to mark the start of the parliamentary year in February.
AAP/Lukas Coch
Christianity plays a relatively minor role in Australian politics. Instead, it takes the guise of a general cultural conservatism, as demonstrated by the same-sex marriage and school funding debates.
Graham Richardson, Janine Perrett, Paul Murray and Ross Cameron shoot the breeze on Sky News.
Sky News (Fair Use)
Sky News Australia has two personalities: straight-down-the-line news service during day; right-wing warrior mouthpiece at night.
AAP
Bernardi’s defection from the Liberal Party this week is less important in itself than what it says about a wider trend towards a fracturing of Australian politics.
Weddings among the super rich reinforce conservative values among the Indian elites.
Yogita/Wikipedia
Indian elites’ extravagant weddings are a show of strength, a glamorised return to traditions, and a celebration of social conservatism.
Some of Goldwater’s more extreme supporters in 1964.
Warren K. Leffler via Wikimedia Commons
The Republicans’ hardline 1964 candidate famously said that ‘extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice’. Sound familiar?
Liberal senator Cory Bernardi claims his ‘Australian Conservatives’ movement has recorded more than 50,000 registrations.
AAP/Sam Mooy
In the last 12 months, under the leadership of an eastern suburbs small-l liberal, the Liberal Party has decided it wants to look more like the party of Hewson than the party of Howard.
EPA/Tannen Maury
After a year of trying to bring him down, the Republican Party will rally behind Donald Trump this week – sort of.
Shutterstock
New research explains why habitat loss means male willow warblers now outnumber females – and that’s bad news for the species.
Pauline Hanson’s policy agenda includes an inquiry into Islam and an end to Muslim immigration.
AAP/Dan Peled
Pauline Hanson and her party will potentially be a divisive presence in the next parliament. The challenge, for a potential Coalition government in particular, will be just how to handle her.
Many members of conservative political parties, like the Republican Party in the US, undoubtedly subscribe to the values captured by ‘conservative syndrome’.
Reuters/Mike Segar
Several recently reported cross-cultural studies show the correlation between social conservatism and intelligence is lower than previously thought.
Do the divisions within the Liberal Party reflect differences of personality and tactical emphasis? Or do they come down to differing worldviews?
AAP/Mick Tsikas
The decline in Malcolm Turnbull’s popularity and the increasingly explicit critiques of his leadership have raised the question of whether the Liberal Party has a unifying ideology.
Managing the ‘broad church’ of the Liberal Party is one of Malcolm Turnbull’s greatest challenges.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
Ultra-conservatism has a rich and complex history within Australian parties, and Malcolm Turnbull has the difficult task of balancing the more extreme elements of his party with his own liberal views.
Dynamic duo?
Reuters/Mark Kauzlarich
Sarah Palin may have been relegated to the fringe, but Trump needs the fringe to win.
Cliven and Ammon Bundy.
Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons
The violent American militias of the 1990s faded from view long ago – but have they begun coming back in a new form?
In a league of his own.
Reuters/Brian Snyder
George Wallace, Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan all reshaped American elections with their populism. Is Donald Trump just standing on their shoulders?
Tony Abbott’s modest domestic policy record in office is dwarfed by Margaret Thatcher’s dismantling of socialism.
AAP/Lukas Coch
Tony Abbott’s Margaret Thatcher Lecture, delivered in London on Tuesday night, provides a fitting epitaph to his government.
Livid.
Reuters/Lucy Nicholson
The angry right wing of American politics is mired in a swamp of outrage and victimhood. ‘Twas ever thus.
The GOP’s problem with Pope Francis is that he may be too conservative.
Reuters
Republicans’ problem with the pope is not that he’s too liberal on issues such as capitalism, it’s that he’s too conservative.
It’s not that studying psychology made me a bleeding heart, but that studying psychology gave me a better understanding of how people think and behave.
Sign via www.shutterstock.com.
Learning about social psychology can make you more liberal. I know this because it is exactly what happened to me.