"The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made. This quarrel is the subject of civil history. The conservative party established the reverend hierarchies and monarchies of the most ancient world. The battle of patrician and plebeian, of parent state and colony, of old usage and accommodation to new facts, of the rich and the poor, reappears in all countries and times. The war rages not only in battle-fields, in national councils, and ecclesiastical synods, but agitates every man's bosom with opposing advantages every hour. On rolls the old world meantime, and now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
We like to pretend that the cultural war raging around us is a new phenomenon... or at least the press does. And while I (and many others) would argue that recent American political history reached the tipping point in 1968 when the peace movement sold its soul for spectacle at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, some might disagree. Nevertheless, so much of the conservative movement that has dominated politics since that time was borne of the backlash from those events as the electorate recoiled from that horrible spectacle and voted for the guys they saw as promoting "stability" for another thirty years while their more liberal counterparts retreated into a mantra of 'My vote doesn't count anyway' which held until a presidential election was decided by a little over 450 votes, which signaled a shift in the tide as young people (and certain candidates) suddenly woke up to the power of the franchise.
This was recent history, but is not the entire history of the struggle between those forces known as liberal, and conservative. Emerson wrote the essay I quoted above in 1841. The same forces were at work in the English Civil War and earlier.
Every few generations, the battle is renewed, and in the course of the ensuing conflict, out terms are redefined. So-called 'Liberals' so often allow themselves to be defined by their opponents. "Socialist" was a word bandied about a great deal by the McCain campaign in the wake of "Joe the Plumber's" entrance onto the world stage. But nothing they did seemed to stick. Maybe because of the bailout plan and the nation's $700bn experiment with state banking, everyone looked like a socialist this year. Maybe Barack was just the teflon candidate. Maybe he defined himself strongly enough to defy his opponents' efforts. Maybe he defies description.
I think some temporal distance will be required before we can really get a good read on that. As Denny and I recently noted with regard to W, true historical perspective requires a certain amount of distance to really grasp.
But I digress...
In the wake of election day, I posted a series of questions that can be summed up as: "What now for conservatives?" But as I read the press coverage of the Republican's 2008 denoument (which sounds so much better than "Sniping and finger-pointing") the central theme seems to have shifted from "What now" to "What is conservative?"
Perhaps that conversation was inevitable, especially in the wake of a campaign that seemed tailor-made to shatter what remained of the Reagan coalition. A candidate that first ran away from the social-conservative base and then ran back to reluctantly embrace it and then didn't seem to know what to do with them once they started showing up.
Here on HOCF, I've heard any number of views on conservatism, but nothing that approaches a definition. So I'm curious: What is conservative to you?
Not "What is the fantasy conservative candidate", but what really makes a candidate a "Conservative"... or a political party for that matter. What is it?
And does it matter at all? Do the labels mean anything anymore? Does Emerson's bald description of the conflict as being between the party seeking a status quo and a party seeking to advance into something new still hold?
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1 comment:
Scott, I do not doubt that the conservative/liberal debate has always been raging, rather I argue that the debate has become more polarized in recent years. I think what separates this polarization from previous occurrences is the unlikelihood that it will result in physical blows. It is this tendency for this polarization to remain rhetorical though vicious that I think quantifies the ideal of a "cold civil war".
As to your question of what is true conservatism, I think part of the problem modern conservatives have is accepting that the definition is entirely relative.
From my point of view, the Founding Fathers were radical liberals compared to their monarchist opponents. Yet, not a hundred years later, the liberals were the states-rights supporters who supported the South's secession from the Union. Then, a hundred years after that, it was arguably liberals who supported civil rights.
I point out what the liberals were doing in each of those cases because their causes define what the conservatives were doing--objecting to or opposing those changes.
Am I maligning conservatives here? No, I am pointing out that the whole conservative vs liberal idea is a bogus one because it restricts us to a single dimension of definition in a three dimensional political world.
Frankly, if I had to define what a modern conservative should look like, I would not actually use conservative anywhere in the description. Instead, I would use words like libertarian (supporting individual rights), Constitutionalist (supporting limited government), republican (supporting state's rights), fiscalist (supporting limited governmental spending), and securitist (I made that one up, supporting strong national security).
I suppose that some of these positions are in some way conservative compared to other positions, but I do not think they define Conservatism--what I define as the ongoing resistance to change.
Unfortunately, the so-called conservatives of the Republican party represent neither the ideals that I presented previously nor the simple resistance to change. Instead, they represent the ongoing desire of the politically powerful in the United States to continue to dictate to its citizens how they should live their lives, only under a red mantel instead of blue.
So, what would make a true "conservative" to me is a Constitutionalist, fiscalist, securitist, republican libertarian.
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