Ever since the internet was monochrome, I've been discussing politics online. Most of that time I spent doing what I called "stomping leftist grapes", or telling Democrats how wrong they were. In all the time since then, I haven't changed much. I've been a secular American conservative all along and proud of it.
Starting with the big change in the Republican Party in 2007, I was no longer "conservative enough" for the wave of dittoheads and Tea Party phonies who were becoming the new face of the GOP. Since then, even though my politics haven't really changed, I've been routinely labeled a liberal or even a socialist in online discussions.
What's weird about this is that none of the people calling me a liberal can even begin to explain what conservatism is about or why it's necessary for a healthy society. For them, "liberal" has become the new "nigger", and they seem to think that all you have to do to call yourself conservative is to hate liberals. This amuses me on a number of levels.
So let me lay out again for the dittoheads and Tea Party phonies what conservatism is really about.
Conservatism is about preserving the good ideas of the past.
Period.
The reason a healthy society needs a conservative element is simple. Some new ideas work out, but a lot of them don't. Even the ones that work can have unintended consequences that make them problematic. Since the people who come up with new ideas, the progressives, tend to like the ideas they come up with, a healthy society needs a second set of eyes to review those ideas.
Conservatism isn't about resisting all change no matter what. It's about filtering the good ideas from the bad and then pinning down the good ideas.
You can see this cycle throughout human history. Everything a modern conservative values today started as a progressive idea. We value those ideas because they've proven their worth over time. Agriculture was a new idea. Cities were a new idea. Specialized labor and the free market were new ideas. Monotheism was a new idea. Christianity was a new idea. Even America and her Constitution were new ideas.
Okay, not all of us value Christianity, because conservatism isn't specific to any single religion, but the things we do agree on were all progressive ideas that made it through the conservative filter.
That's the value conservatism brings to a society when it's working properly. We preserve the ideas that have proven their worth.
None of the dittoheads or Tea Party phonies I've run into can explain that. They don't even understand it. They've been fed a brand of "conservatism" that lives in a world of paranoid conspiracy theories, a world of lies and fantasies. They don't see Obama for what he is, which is a fairly typical Democrat president. They see him as a secret Muslim who wants to destroy America. They don't see progressives for what they are, which is the group that generates new ideas. They see progressives as secret socialists who want to destroy America. They don't even see conservatism for what it really is, which is the preservation of the good ideas of the past. They see it as movement whose mission to radically rework America in ways the progressives never dreamed of.
And they've been conditioned to call that radical reworking an expression of conservatism. The problem is that reworking America is not even close to conservative. We have a pretty good working model for American society, and making changes like attacking American science, treating corporations as American citizens, or saying that you don't have to obey a law if you have a religious objection to it are not ways of preserving that societal model.
They're ways to change it. That's what the dittoheads and Tea Party phonies support, a different kind of America that we've never tried before.
And they have the gall to question my conservatism? It's laughable.
The Republican Party didn't use to be populated by people so gullible that you can sell then a radical agenda and convince them that it's conservative, but that's the kind of party it's become. That's not going to change until more thinking conservatives come out of the woodwork and shout down the radical voices that have corrupted our movement.
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