Not So Social Conservatism

Considering the near anarchy that the Students for A Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, The Weathermen, and Timothy Leary were belching into American society in the 1960s, it is understandable that several significant socially conservative movements began to seek political expression, a tsunami that took over many American power centers through the Moral Majority and the Reagan revolution in the 1970s and 1980s. I imagine that many social conservative were trying to conserve America and the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There were and still are several Marxists in American Higher Academe, theoreticians who have theorized about the supposed innate depravity of a country that has spread freedom and prosperity to billions of human beings, but for Marxists since truths are always non-truths, constructed by power structures, freedom and prosperity were mere bourgeois mirages.
The problem is that liberals learned from the 1960s and conservatives are still running against the liberalism of the 1960s. Speaker Pelosi, as liberal as they come, does not seek to send Christians to concentration camps; truth be told she is quite the believer herself. Moreover, our good (and potentially great) president is no advocate of socialism, the one word epithet that the Rush Limbaughs of the world impulsively belch back. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton informed us that the era of big government is over, and indeed it is. The Democratic party does not seek to turn the US government into a nanny state. It merely seeks to prevent another financial collapse so that Wall Street gives up its need to be nannied by Uncle Sam.
Now, I have tremendous respect for people of all political stripes. I like ideas and it doesn’t matter who is formulating them and I admire institutions that serve human beings well (I have a few ideas about them myself). A good friend of mine once quipped that conservatives have a “good sociological nose.” They tend to notice things that liberals miss and are willing to speak up about them. A good example of this is the attention conservatives drew to the need for fathers to be involved in their childrens’ lives. There were liberals who poo-pooed the notion in the 60s, 70s, 80s and then in the 90s quietly acquiesced. The same is true regarding the dangers of drug use. Conservatives were willing to mount “the just say no campaign,” which many liberals mocked (some while inhaling). That said, let’s be real: the greatest principle to value, to conserve, to incarnate in a tradition is charity (last time I checked the Bible I tote around that Christ guy we Christians worship said lots of stuff about that) and charity is something that is lacking in a lot of our public discourse. Many Republicans do not take on Rush Limbaugh because they are afraid of him so they empower Rush and his shoutmeister ditto-heads to take over more and more of the Republican national strategy.
This is not a positive development. Limbaugh is not George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Andrew Sullivan or William Safire. Rush really doesn’t think. The man just reacts and bellows about his Institute of Advanced Conservative Studies. He holds no advanced degree. He just creates sound bites that resonate with the anxieties of many.
I respect conservatives. I look up to many of them hoping for an intelligent challenge to the policies that I advocate because reasoned discourse and debate strengthen American policies and strengthen my mind. It comes down to this: what essentially is conservatism? What is it trying to conserve and how is it trying to conserve what it should conserve? I will be the first to admit that there are fascists on the left and right and conservatives have the nose to sniff out liberal fascism, but if conservatives are then going to use fascist methods of shouting and intimidating people to try to move people away from certain forms of liberal fascism, what has America gained? “Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss” to quote a creaky, old 60s band. We gain nothing in this country from abandoning policy proposals because of fear of shoutmeisters and we gain nothing in this country from maintaining policies, like a health system that abandons 40 million working people, because we fear being shouted down. The most important principles that conservatives worked hard to conserve in the 60s and 70s—the values of reason and charity—they are about to abandon. What kind of conservatism is that?