A Conservative Critique of the Hosting of the Olympic Games

A Conservative Critique of the Hosting of the Olympic Games

By: Sam Drinovz

POLI 1110

Gregory Millard

This paper will criticize the hosting of the Olympic Games from the standpoint of a Burkean conservative. A series of basic ideas and background information must be presented before the argument can be properly understood. The conservative ideology in general will first be discussed. In doing so, the general ideology of liberalism will be examined briefly in order to understand more fully the concept of conservatism. Once this foundation is established, the variant of conservatism will be analyzed. This is known as conservatism in the Burkean tradition, or simply British conservatism. This type of conservatism will then be applied to the problems of hosting the Olympic Games. The economic benefits or deficits, the use of human rationality, the scale of the event, the lack of experience officials may have, the rapid change the event leads to, and the opportunity costs will all be discussed in this paper.   Furthermore, counter-arguments from the possible viewpoints of other conservatives will be considered. The first counter-argument involves the promotion of communities that the Olympics are supposed to create. The second counter-argument deals with the idea that some cities have benefited economically from hosting the Games.
The term “conservatism” today can lead to all sorts of confusion as a result of the term being used in a variety of ways. One should not get mixed up with the relative usage of the term and the ideology itself. The term is often used to describe the act of referring back to tradition, regardless of what this tradition may entail.[1] For example, an individual who has lived in a communist regime (a society in which there is equal distribution of wealth, and thus no private property.[2]) for an extended period of time may refer to communism as conservative in the face of a democratic revolution. Though communism is very different...