The title probably does not mean what any of you think it means, so I hope you will read the below. It's something I've been thinking about for several months now, but am still unsure how to communicate. For the gist of what I'm saying, see the red text below.
I'm not talking about the content of what America's "conservatives" believe in. I'm talking about the position those are ideas are placed in; or more accurately, how Americans are conditioned to think about those ideas.
"Conservatism" in quotation marks, because that's the label used by both sides, and because I've become convinced the label has a profound effect on how we respond to "conservative" ideas, and to the people who hold to them. This may sound like the usual, and usually feckless, rant about how conservatives are the true liberals, and liberals aren't. But that's not exactly what I'm getting at.
I think that by accepting the role of the conservative in American politics, the Right has consigned itself to the past. Calling an idea conservative means that it is old-fashioned, which in the world we live in, means it should be on hospice care. If we pick a point in the distant past, say a thousand years ago, we find ourselves in a time when not much change was expected. There were the usual changes of seasons, and changes that come from aging. There were changes of fortune. Crops thrived or failed. Wars were won our lost. People died too soon, or had plans upended by accidents or by disease. But there was not the modern (or now post-modern) expectation (however illusory) that we were moving on to better and better things by constant changing or rethinking of what came before.
In that, more static, world, it wouldn't be self-defeating to contend for conservative ideas, and call them that. But the Western world, and I'm focusing on the U.S., left that behind centuries ago. Whether it's the Enlightenment, the American or French revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, the
Market Revolution,
religious ideas of bringing in the millennial reign of Christ by improving the world or any number of other movements, we're all deeply ingrained with the expectation that the old ways are likely to perish, and new ways will replace them, as if by some natural law.
It's true some of us contend for those older ways, and even the most "progressive" nihilist wants to preserve at least something from the past. If you don't believe the latter, recall the reactions to the most recent decisions at the Supreme Court. Regardless, we each expect the old to go away, and the new to replace it. So being labeled "conservative," and accepting the label, is a rigged game.
This is tragic, as the "old-fashioned" principles on which the U.S. was built are not old-fashioned at all. They were liberal and progressive in their day, and are still liberal and progressive in the best sense of those words. They are the best way that has ever been found to organize society among human beings, and the replacements on offer are revolting. They offer no political freedom, and social "values" that lead only to misery and destruction.
So I think a way must be found to shift away from the position of "conservatism" to - something else. I don't know the way forward, but I don't think it's just a new political party, or a new label. I wish I knew what it was. If America is to continue to be America, we have to change something about the way American ideas are received, even by those most sympathetic to them - even to ourselves. Most of us seem to have accepted that the Left is going to win the day. Can any movement survive that level of despair?
Does anyone else out there understand what I'm saying? Have I lost the plot?