By Selwyn Duke
It seems like just yesterday
that many were reading liberalism’s epitaph. After the Reagan
years, Republican Revolution of 1994, retreat of the gun-control hordes after
Al Gore’s 2000 defeat and George W. Bush’s two successful presidential runs,
many thought conservatism was carrying the day.
Ah, if only.
We might ask: With conservatives like President Bush
and many of the other Republicans, who needs liberals?
While the media has successfully portrayed the
Republicans as the party of snake handlers and moonshine, the difference
between image and reality is profound. Bush has just spun the odometer, proposing the nation’s first ever $3 trillion
budget. On matters pertaining to the
very survival of our culture – the primacy of English, multiculturalism, the
denuding of our public square of historically present Christian symbols and
sentiments – Republicans are found wanting. As for illegal immigration, both the president and presumptive
Republican nominee support a form of amnesty.
Yet many would paint America as under the sway of
rightist politics, and some of the reasons for this are obvious. Some liberals know that the best way to
ensure constant movement toward the left is by portraying the status quo as
dangerously far right. If you repeatedly
warn that we teeter on the brink of rightist hegemony, people will assume that to
achieve “balance” we must tack further left toward your mythical center. Then we have conservatives influenced by the
natural desire to view the world as the happy place they’d like to inhabit. Ingenuous sorts, they confuse Republican with
conservative, party with principles, and electoral wars with the cultural
one. But there’s another factor: One can
confuse conservative with correct.
When is the right not right, you ask? When it has been defined by the left.
The definition of “conservative” is fluid, changing
from time to time and place to place. Some
“conservatives” embrace an ideology prescribing limited government – one remaining
within the boundaries established by the Constitution – and low taxation. They favor nationalism over internationalism;
prefer markets mostly unfettered by regulation; eschew multiculturalism,
feminism and radical environmentalism; and take pride in our history and
traditions.
But there have been other kinds of conservatives. In the Soviet Union, a conservative was quite
the opposite, a communist. Then, when
Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated in 2002, BBC News ran the
headline, “Dutch far-right leader shot
dead.” “Far-right” indeed. Fortuyn was quite liberal by our standards; he
was a pro-abortion, openly-homosexual ex-sociology professor branded a rightist
mainly because he wished to stem Moslem immigration into Holland. Moreover, his fear was that zealous Moslems
posed a threat to the nation’s liberal
social structure.
So here’s the question: What definition of
conservative would a communist or European statist conform to? Answer: That which states, “One who favors
maintenance of the status quo.” This
brings us to a central point:
As society is successfully transformed by those who
detest the status quo, the status quo changes. This means that the great defender ideology of the status quo,
conservatism, will change with it.
“Progress should mean that
we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always
changing the vision.” — G.K. Chesterton
Both liberals and conservatives have shape-shifting
visions. This is because the definitions
of conservative and liberal are determined by the “position” of the given society
‘s political spectrum. Shift that
spectrum left or right by altering the collective ideology of a nation, and the
definitions of those two words will change commensurate with the degree of that
shift. This is why a Pim Fortuyn is
viewed as conservative in Western Europe. In a land of Lilliputians, even Robert Reich seems like a giant.
This isn’t to say there is no difference between
liberal and conservative visions. Liberals construct their vision based on opposition to the conservative
one; conservatives’ vision is a product of the now accepted, decades-old vision
of the left. Thus, liberals promote
today’s liberal vision; conservatives defend yesterday’s liberal vision.
“The whole modern world has
divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of
Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is
to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” — G.K. Chesterton
Perhaps one reason we’re losing the culture war is
that it’s easier to convince people to try new liberal mistakes than retain old
liberal mistakes that have been tried and found wanting. Regardless, we will continue losing unless we
change our thinking radically.
Wars are not won by being
defensive. Yet conservatives are seldom
anything but, because they’ve been trained to mistake defense for offense. When 13 states voted to ban faux marriage in
2004, some proclaimed it a great victory for conservatism. But it only was so if the conservatism you
subscribe to merely involves maintenance of a liberal status quo, for it was a successful defensive action, not an offensive one. Who was proposing the societal change to
which the vote was a response? The left
was. What kind of change was it? One that would move us in the liberal
direction.
So it is always. We play defense when, instead of striving to
eliminate hate-crime laws, we merely fight proposals to make “transgendered” a
protected category; when we accept the Federal Department of Education and
simply use it to effect “conservative” education reform (read: No Child Left
Behind Act); when we simply try to ensure that the separation of church and
state ruling is applied in “conservative” ways; when we combat the
tax-and-spend crowd by not taxing but then spending; and when we preach against
illegal immigration while accepting a culture-rending legal immigration regime.
In contrast, the left is as
steadfastly offensive as it is dreadfully offensive. If its minions’ scheme to legally redefine marriage
fails today, they’ll try again tomorrow. If a socialized medicine plan doesn’t pass congressional muster, it will
reappear five or ten years hence. If a
new tax is too rich for present tastes, they’ll wait for a more gluttonous
palate. Or they’ll sneak a different new
tax into an innocuous sounding bill or accept a slight increase to an old tax,
then another, and another, and another . . . . They simply have to wait for the political spectrum to shift a bit
further left.
This brings me to another
important point. We often talk of
compromise, but does compromising with those who always advance but never
retreat constitute fairness? The left
proposes policy, “settles” for a half-measure, and we leave the table thinking
it an equitable outcome. The problem is
that since virtually all the changes suggested are liberal in nature, constant
compromise and granting of concessions guarantees constant movement toward the
left. So we see erstwhile secure
territory that is now under attack and revel in victory when we repel a few of
the enemy’s charges. But we don’t
realize that we are defining victory as a reduction in the rate of loss of our
heartland, while the enemy defines it as the expansion of its empire. We compromise our way to tyranny.
It’s like a young boxer who
never throws punches and, consequently, becomes quite adept at blocking vicious
blows – and inured to taking them. He
emerges from the ring with a twinkle in black and blue eyes, flashes a smile
revealing two lost teeth, proudly shows off bruised forearms and says, “Look,
Dad! I blocked ninety-percent of the
punches today! This is my greatest
victory ever!”
Yes, perhaps it’s a
figurative victory insofar as exhibition of defensive skill goes. As for real victory, thus engaging opponents
time and again doesn’t even bring the Pyrrhic variety. It only guarantees slow, torturous losses,
perpetual injury, and one day, perhaps, a knock-out.
This places the current
presidential race in perspective. When some
Republicans lament the absence of good “conservative” primary contenders, they
often act as if our statist front-runners are visited upon us by an invisible
hand, as if their ascendancy was despite the culture and not because of
it. In reality, these politicians are
merely products of a society that has long been in the grip of Gramschian operatives
in academia, the media and Hollywood, leftists who have been crafting their
message, scheming, indoctrinating, and socially re-engineering the public for
decades.
Besides, can we really say
those candidates aren’t conservative? With
the political spectrum having shifted so far left, perhaps people such as Bush,
McCain and Huckabee really are today’s conservatives, defenders of a statist
status quo.
Perhaps, just maybe, we (me,
and you if you’re in my camp) are something else.
After all, I criticized Mitt
Romney for forcing Massachusettsans
to buy health insurance, but a recent
poll indicates that a majority of
Republicans support such coercion. And if some of these people are “conservatives,” I’m certainly am not
one.
I’m a revolutionary.
I don’t want to preserve the
status quo, I want to overthrow it. I
want to pull the statist weeds up by the roots and burn them in freedom’s fire,
just like our Founding Fathers did. Do
you think they were conservatives? Conservatives
don’t start revolutions; they simply make sure their shackles are made no
heavier.
Political victory rests on
cultural victory, and changing the culture starts with changing our
mentality. We have only two choices: We
can be revolutionary.
Or we can be wrong.
selwynduke.com 
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