Hopefully I'll have a lot more to say on this later, but since it's been weighing heavy on my mind the last few days given the unfortunate events you're all aware of, I thought I'd ask the question of you in hopes of getting some reasonable impersonal, and insofar as possible, neutral responses.
We're all aware of what happened and we all have our opinions as to who's most at fault, and so on and so forth. Personally I think there's probably enough blame to go around, so I'm not particularly interested in your opinion as to who can be assigned the most blame. What I'm most interested in is how you would answer the question in the post title, and how the events mentioned have, if at all, contributed to or shaped your thoughts on the matter.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Is Conservatism a "House Divided"?
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2 comments:
Yes, of course conservatism is a house divided because all human associations - whether political, social, cultural or whatever - contain factions. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Conservatism isn't a set of immutable attitudes and values to which people mindlessly subscribe, but a coalition of interests. And the conflict of internal factions, when interests collide, can be productive. Granted that friction will generate a lot of wasteful heat, but perhaps the sporadic insights that also occur are often worth the aggravation.
(I've deliberately made these paltry observations rather abstract to avoid commenting on the "unfortunate events" that you refer to.)
Conservatism is a blending of all attitudes in the American sector. I think Alex phrased it perfectly,
"Conservatism isn't a set of immutable attitudes and values to which people mindlessly subscribe, but a coalition of interests."
It is not so much that the coalition is divided as that it is ignored and without power. Government is no longer controlled by the people and until it is, or seriously challenged, there can be no effective conservatism.
Despite all the talk about Reagan having been a conservative, he was more a populist. I don't think there has been a conservative as President for the history of living men. Conservatives are always divided because we have no candidates of our own. We can only pick among the ones we consider the least evil and call them conservatives (even when we know better).
We have lost much base because we had no national communication ability, and have had to rely on MSM to set up our "conservatives".
Now that we have communication ability we are in a struggle to find our true definition, but seemingly cannot get away from the choices made for us by the same failed leftist establishment and MSM.
We will remain divided until a uniting figure comes along with whom a large base can identify. That figure will not be in the two major parties.
We all feel that we could define such a person, but we are aware of none with national stature. Some day we will have such a candidate. It is then that I hope we can unite.
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