The Founders of the United States created multi-dimensional yet limited government that allowed genearations to pursue their own visions of freedom.
Since the signing of the Constitutions, freedom lovers have fallen into the pattern of defending their freedom by reacting to encroachments on their freedom. Sadly, this method of trying to defend freedom by reaction has become the hallmark of modern Conservatism.
The primary goal of a reactionary conservate is to preserve the status quo. Conservatives have a horrible record of defending compromises of the past.
Following the lead of Hegel and Marx, the left has developed a machine that herds society by tweaking the reactionary impulses of Conservatives.
Reactionaries are quite easy to manipulate. One need simply create a series of crises. One takes two steps forward during the crisis, followed by a step back in the reaction. Reactionary conservatives then accept this new stance in the set up for the next crisis.
The entire ideology of progressivism is built around the predictable nature of reactionary conservatives.
A case in point is insurance. Employer funded insurance was the creation of progressives. Today, conservatives line up like clowns to defend an institution that has destroyed the pricing mechanism within medicine and systematically centralizes industry and impoverishes the people.
Progressives can bank on the reactionary impulses of Conservatives to create a one way political process that systematically destroys individual freedom.
To make matters worse, the Left has captured the schools, and has managed to distort the vision of freedom to the point where students come out of schools seeing government as the solution and freedom as the problem.
This is problematic as governments tend to be the source of problems.
Because the right relies on reaction, not vision, the left has been able to project the cause of modern day problems onto the free market. Most of the people I know are absolutely convinced that it was the unregulated free market that caused banks to make bad loans and not the regulations established by Fannie, Freddie and Community Reinvestment act.
Conservatives can no long depend on reaction alone as a mechanism to defend freedom. To defend freedom, Conservatives must find a way re-invigorate the vision of freedom.
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The first thing that needs to happen is the decoupling of economic conservatism with religious fundamentalism. Too often the base the "conservatives" have to pander to seems to be comprised of closed-minded wing-nuts that see themselves as the voice of some God character. This de-legitimizes the entire movement before it gets anywhere.
ReplyDeleteReligion, in many of its forms, has been wrong on so many issues in regard to scientific achievement, social justice and general human rights issues for 500+ years that it casts an uneducated and/or ignorant stigma on anything you attach it to.
The minute anyone starts or ends a phrase with something like "As God intended" you are going to loose a huge part of your audience
I wrote a longer reply, but will summarize it.
ReplyDeleteThere is as much religious kookery on the left. The intelligentsia makes an effort to associate kookery with the right and disassociate it with the left, creating a false illusion.
The question about religion being wrong most the time is also a bit of an illusion. Modern dialecticians wanted a conflict between science and religion, so they took the things from the rational classical tradition and atributed those that were proving out to be true to science and those that appeared false or superstitious to religion.
If a partisan group attributed all of the failures of a period to their enemy and success to friends, they would make a compelling case for their superiority. However, such an effort is not an authentic search for truth.
I happen to be a big fan of science. I am actually really upset with the dialectical game because this game of creating an artificial conflict between science and religion appears to be having a negative effect on science.
(It's also had a horrible effect on religion, which is less a concern of mine.)
The longer post listed a string of left wing religious notions, and talked about how superstition is working its way into science.