change is gonna come

If I were to describe my political leaning, I would have to say it falls to the left. That is probably not a surprise to anyone reading this, especially if you know me or have heard one of my political diatribes live and in person. But the left is a big word, encompassing many people I have profound ideological differences with on many issues, so a more apt description is needed. To make my political worldview a little easier to explain, I would call it leftist until the revolution. What I mean by that is I think that to say reform is needed is an understatement, but I am wholly against dismantling the machinery of government. Some, not all, of the people that call for a revolution think of only the overthrow and the idealist world of [insert your political utopia], and not the string murders and instability that must follow a revolution. Revolution sounds like a great idea until the roads and schools fall apart. We live in a society that has grown dependant on its state to control so much of our day to day life that any revolution would require a massive relearning of how to live.

Where am I going with this? I’m getting there.

All this thought of revolution and reform pushed my mind to think about the other side of the matter; the conservative. The modern conservative has an interesting mindset. Conservatives, by definition, want to keep society from changing. If history has taught us anything, it is that society is going to move, forward or backward. Conservatives must know that they are going to loose on some battles. As the late great soul stirrer Sam Cooke sang, change is gonna come. I don’t mean to imply the Hegelian notion of an end to history that pushes society ever towards some utopia. It is not chaos then community, nor community then chaos, but a choice; community or chaos. But the fact is that the wheels are turning and society is going to go in one way or another. Conservatives are fighting against this push, trying to freeze society in its tracks so the world remains the same for, as Edmund Burke described, the dead the living and the yet unborn. This means then that Conservatism is defined by what it is resisting. If Italian Fascist were trying to change with their coup attempt, wouldn’t the liberal forces aligned against them be conservatives? In the same manner, the pro US Cubans that fled once Fidel Castro took power are also conservative. Both groups are trying to resist a force for change.

Within the US, conservatives were a coalition of evangelicals, hard-line foreign policy ideologues with a Hobbsian worldview, whites that feel short-changed by the civil rights movement, and small government laissez faire capitalist. With the collapse of the Democratic Party’s New Deal Coalition, Nixon’s silent majority could be argued to be the first culmination of this coalition, but the real impetus for this coalition was the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Reagan brought all of these groups together by taking a new stand at the right time. He was going to get tough with the Soviets, whose continued existence was seen as a failure of the old order to get the job done. Reagan was also going to peel back some of the entitlements and give more money to those at the top of the economic ladder in order to bring the nation into the black. This coalition elected the last three Republican presidents, split by Clinton who had help from Ross Perot’s third party campaign that pulled votes from the George H. W. Bush’s reelection campaign.

This conservative coalition’s dominance ended with the Presidency of George W. Bush. There was no single incident that caused this coalition to fall apart, but a series of scandals and failures that haunted the Republican Party throughout the last seven and a half years. This presidency was marred with corporate scandals, from the SEC to Capitol Hill hearings. These were no simply individual corporations and CEOs behaving irresponsibly, but many of these corporations funded the election and reelection of Bush. Add to that what is at best false intelligence and at worst out and out deception that led to the Iraq War, a failing peace keeping mission, a failure to find Osama bin Laden, what is at best an ill-equipped federal government struck by disaster or at worst a callous disregard for the lives of poor people living in the Gulf Coast, the string of lies that followed the tenure of Alberto Gonzalez, the Valerie Plame investigation, Jack Abramoff scandal, and the stepping down of many Generals during this Iraq war. Add all of this to the scandals that dragged down the Republican Party leadership, such as the Ted Haggard sex/drugs scandal or Rush Limbaugh’s drug addiction. These scandals all came from the top of the Party and split young Evangelicals away from the GOP. I think this is evident in hearing the issues that young Evangelicals are concerned with (social justice and community values) and the Red Letter Christian movement. Moreover, the older Evangelical voters who voted on a basis of gay marriage abortion must feel let down by a party that made a lot of promises but failed to deliver a real blow to either system. Gay marriage is still a state issue and abortion is still legal.

So this takes us to the coming election. Senator John McCain has a hefty lead over his opponent Mike Huckabee and will more than likely be the Republican nominee, but he has no base to pull from. As a friend pointed out to me, McCain will have to move right to get some of the base on his side and then move center to get the undecided, while whichever nominee wins the democratic ticket will only have to move to the center. The conservative talk radio hosts have by and large come out against McCain, some saying that they will vote for Hillary Clinton if given the chance. With the reports of McCain’s possible infidelity with a lobbyist coming from the New York Times, one must wonder, who can he call on to win? What is left of the base seems to be against him because of his less than hard right stances on big business and his own admittance of a limited knowledge of the economy. If the center was to support him, it will not so long as he continues to trumpet the need to continue this war for 100 years if necessary. The strategy of “I can manage this war better” failed John Kerry and I don’t see it carrying over too well this time around when the war is seen by so much of the electorate as a failure, with or without the surge. In the end, I don’t believe that this is McCain’s year. He is not inspiring the right the way that they would need to be to beat the charismatic Barack Obama or the experienced Clinton election machine. This year the conservatives will watch, protest, and cringe at whatever changes happen to the world they know, be it a raise in the pay of teachers, expanded higher education, an end to this war, or universal health care. But that is part of conservatism. When society is going to change, you brace against it and let as little through as possible.