As a dreamy observer at night I gaze into the political cosmos. I am now old enough to make my own astronomical observations. I've been around long enough to see some familiarity in the passing of political movements over grounded points of reference like the tides of the news cycles, and the deeper patterns of mid-term and presidential elections. I've watched parties pass through elections changing their positions from the last time they were in full view. I've seen the meteoric careers of politicians soar overhead, burning themselves out. I've watched the brilliance of primary candidates be eclipsed by something bigger and closer.
Of course, this is a metaphor... knowing where a stellar body is going to be this time next year is a different thing from knowing the outcome of an election.
But consider the conservative movement as a star. In the 50s and early 60s, scattered particles of thought began to coalesce into one region of political space. A gaseous object was formed. As the 60s wore on and the clusters of leftist thinking was pulled apart by its own mass, those particles gravitated towards the increasingly massive body of a political movement. The old political coalitions from the New Deal wore down to elemental hydrogen, floating in a torrid vacuum through the 70s. Somewhere in that epoch, the movement reached critical mass, fusing into a blinding star, releasing energy even as its mass grew to ever greater proportions. And the mass of past brilliance continued to drift towards the Conservative Star.
By 1980, the Conservative Star was fast on its way to red supergiant status. Whole planets of belief fell into its influence. Christian fundamentalist particles fused with free marketeers and civil libertarians.
The 80s was a period of runaway growth. But a challenger came into view around 1992, another stellar body began to orbit in a binary fashion, taking some of the Conservative Star's mass for itself, grabbing votes at the center. But galactic catastrophe struck our region. The political pieces all fell into the Conservative Star's gravity well, some of them not so conservative. A tipping point was reached. The coalition was too big. Deep in the hellish core of the star the original members felt marginalized and began to bubble and vibrate furiously. The red supergiant swelled, charring and consuming planets and interstellar dust as its diameter grew to precarious proportions.
If my observations are correct there will be a supernova in November of 2008. From where I view it, a political object can only get so big before it destroys itself, only to create something new. It's a force of nature that cannot be prevented. Once the Conservative Star casts off its mass and energy in a brief blaze, an angry brown dwarf will remain; a stubborn group of Ron Paul zealots and fundamentalists without a political home. Their energy will one day be subsumed into some other stellar body.
A universal truth is that our region of space will continue to knock the same particles back and forth. We'll continue to hear the same arguments over moral issues like abortion, economic ones around public or private investment, and basic cultural forces separating urban existence from suburban and rural, rich from poor. Energy will shift from one star to some future object to gravitate towards, but the mass and energy in the system will remain. The law of conservation of matter and energy means that conservatives and conservative ideas will not go away with a massive loss, they'll just lose coherence and influence only to reform with different constituent parts at some later date.
To borrow a line from Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun.
No comments:
Post a Comment