The Ideological And Political Turn Of The Conservative Party At The Beginning Of The Thirty Years

Abstract

The present paper attempts to argue in favor the thesis that
the Conservative Party, after the Ibáñez dictatorship, culminated
a political and ideological transition which moved from a
practical liberalism, –that the Party was professed from the
second part of the XIX century with the purpose to defend the
Church–, to an authoritarian anti liberalism, based on a traditionalist
framework. This transformation was consequence
of the considerable historical changes that happened in the
country, among them, the irruptions of working and middle
class, based on the Social Church doctrine, which could not
be coopted by Conservative Party. Hence, the party began to
see in the mentioned classes a threat that it was necessary to
control. In this line, the article –after to describe the historical
trajectory of the Party– analyzes the speech pronounced by
Héctor Rodríguez de la Sotta in the XI General Conservative
Convention, which seems it culminated the mentioned ideological
and politic evolution.

Keywords: liberalism; authoritarianism; traditionalism; ideological
and politic evolution.