A few years ago I was at a happy hour with a few coworkers in DC. One girl brought along her boyfriend who came from his job across town at the Justice Department. I asked him what he did over there, and it turned out he was working in John Ashcroft's office as some kind of legal underling.
Here was a guest from a parallel universe, drinking Miller Light right across the table from me. I wanted to learn more about the kind of people who would willingly show up every day to such a work situation, so I drilled him with questions. The basic gist of those questions was: "what's it like to work for John Ashcroft?" his boiled down answer was, "it's really something to work for someone who has such principles, who sticks to his convictions."
Being really open minded at the time, I mulled this over. There was something to say for a person who has principles. Reasonably, I may not agree with someone else, but having a belief system that consistently guides their actions is intriguing. There is something that could be learned from this.
A few weeks later I was having lunch with my dad. I retold the story to him, remarking on how this whole idea of sticking to principles had gotten me thinking. My dad's characteristically terse answer was,
"yeah, well his principles suck."
In the weeks and months that followed, my thinking underwent a 180 degree paradigm shift. I was trying to make an internal peace with my political enemies through some kind of sportsmanlike respect. This was the mindset of a loser. Such thinking was a distraction from the real moral reasons of why we choose sides in society.
John Ashcroft principles did suck and probably still do.
I'll go further. Conservatism sucks. After these elections, there is much talk about how if only the Republicans had stayed truly conservative, they would have retained the permanent majority they'd planned out. Well, the permanent majority sucks. Who wants that? It sounds like a phrase Mao would use, or the power players in Mexico's PRI... Hell, the Duma and Politburo back in the USSR were run by "permanent majorities." Weren't we fighting against that not long ago?
But I digress. Conservatism sucks because they have galvanized themselves with economic principles that sound good on paper, but are really about stacking the rules in favor of the exorbitantly wealthy. It sucks because they draw from a form of religious fundamentalism that believes (though quietly) that anyone who is not exactly like them is going to burn in hell. It sucks because it offers peace and justification to the mindset of the selfish. It sucks because of the archaic and disproven approaches it offers for social policy in every arena from law enforcement to labor. It sucks because of the mean-spirited, arrogant and self-centered thinking at the center of all of the complex beliefs of the theoretical conservative society.
And history proves that conservatism sucks. In any long term sense, conservatives always lose. Think of the great conservative causes of old. Jim Crow laws, ownership and voting rights exclusively for white men, civic marraige, and really any threat that industry and progress posed on their genteel, isolated lives. With enough hindsight, conservatives will always be looked back on as the barbaric old-timers who wish for the days when they could lord over others with impunity, when high morality and poverty conspired to make everything stay the same for generations, where technological and social advancement could proceed at a snail's pace for fear of retribution or a lack of protection against failure. Even today, its diehards are almost all the same old white men they have always been. They don't care about you. Look at places where conservatives dominate, like Afghanistan, Iran, or Mississippi.
The Republicans lost because they were too conservative. It was nothing else. People don't want what they were trying to offer, and were sick of the rabid push-button moralizing employed to distract them from this basic truth. Politicians drifted away from their original mission set out by Newt Gingrich and others precisely because, one by one, their ideas were simply not politically feasible. Those ideas were not politically feasible because people didn't want them, because they mistakened a set of principles for a set of policy solutions. People want a balanced budget more than tax cuts. People believe there is value to the services that government provides, and that their elected officials' mission should be to enhance and expand that value, not to dismantle these cornerstones of civilization for the sake of some preindustrial beliefs from the nobility about freedom. People want rational approaches to our social problems, not kitchen table psychology or bully demagoguery.
Here are some examples: Health care an issue? People just need to pay more out of pocket and the market will sort it out. Crime? Just hire Marriott to build more prisons and tighten up on law enforcement. Poverty? Let them eat cake. Jobs? Market. Education? Market, oh, and more standardized tests. Terrorism? Kill 'em all, forget the constitution.
They were wrong. It's time to govern and get on with things. Forget American conservatism as we've known it. It's an allergic reaction to change, not change itself.
Burrrp. That feels better.
Anyone got an Alka Seltzer?
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