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- On the Defensive: National and Personal Security
- Obama Harnesses Tao and They Call it Empty
- Gay Marriage - a Conservative Cause
- Military Bureaucracy Threatens Security
- The Puzzling Fits of Mao Suit Management
- Our Common Odyssey
- Political Animal Plays God
- Empty Business and the Crystallization of Mind
Navigational Currents - Political Turnings
March 29th, 2008
It is said that novice pilots flying into cloud cover tend not to trust their instruments. A turn here, an adjustment there, and it is surprising how many emerge from the canopy of clouds flying upside down.
Political parties have a way of making the sort of adjustments which leave them flying upside down as well. Over the years, platforms are transformed along with the ideologies which motivated them. With the parties, drift the constituents of which they are comprised. Swept along in the current of media events and emerging issues, we lose of track of our convictions - if ever we knew them. Such drift may be inevitable. The problem is it is rarely conscious. More often than not, it is about the parties themselves building a winning coalition and attracting some pivotal block of voters. But somehow our personal identification with such ideologies as liberalism and conservatism drifts with the necessity of party strategy. Personal identities are like this. As we grow, we change, unremarkably and unintentionally. A decade here, a decade there, until we wake to discover conservatives are radicals, liberals moderate, and the coordinates upon which we have premised our movements no longer apply.The cloud cover of party politics is thick and the level of drift is vast. Whether the result of deliberate obfuscation or simple necessity, it should not surprise us that Republican party politics have inverted the meaning of conservatism over the years. Somehow conservatives have passed into power upside down. And the meaning of liberalism is been turned inside out.
We have inverted the meaning of stability in America even as we have sought to rediscover it. So a conservatism that used to be associated with decency has come to be characterized by indecency. A conservatism that used to uphold social conventions has begun to flaunt them. Meanwhile a liberalism which used to hold to the vital center in our nation has come to be associated with license. What happened?
Having passed through the milieu of the sixties cultural revolution or outlasted the downfall of a Mussolini or Hitler, true believers were challenged to reconfigure their lives and reconstruct their political beliefs - often in stunning reversals, often with nuanced moderation. In the coming years, it may be the case that every self-identified American conservative, like so many adherents of revolutionary ideologies that arose and fell before them, will be forced to ask themselves how it was they were turned upside down in the cloud cover of national political debate around the turn of the millennium. Like the summer we almost joined a cult, like the time we were prepared to die for a lover we now wonder how we could stomach, most of us have some experience with following a subset of our values so far it turns on all the rest.
So I wonder: does conservatism mean anything at this stage? And what should those who were spellbound by it for so many decades make of the results of their ideology? Will their identities drift with the meaning of conservatism? Or will some reconfigure themselves along an ever shifting political spectrum of possibilities? Finally, for those who reject “conservatism,” what will take it’s place?
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