What are They Conserving?

One of the major problems of conservatism is that it no longer speaks its purpose clearly, or debates fairly. T ridicules. It makes false charges. It seeks only the negative and condemns the positive. Doing so, it loses support of those who want to be fair and honest, and rallies a base of the already converted, the coarse and the greedy. Making an enemy of education, it cuts itself off from those who could assure its proper survival. Doing so, it has become an inarticulate jumble of angry clichés trying to find its own identity.
    They don't like taxes. Who does? To be good citizens, they need to grow up and talk about issues with intellectual honesty. Cutting taxes first, without straightening out the spending, leads only to bankruptcy, which is another thing we have to thank them for.
    They want small government. Where do they think they live? It's a huge nation with a huge military and vast international influence. If they want small government, they should find their own island somewhere and collect sea shells.
    The existential question that conservatives face, and hardly realize it, is this: What are they conserving? To the rest of us, it seems they are conserving the anger left over from the Civil War. Does that make sense? They want their particular form of Christianity to rule the government that separated church from state at its inception. Is that respect for the Constitution they say they hold in reverence? No one is threatening your religious beliefs. That's why they flourish, among others as well.
    It would be admirable, and we would thank them, if they were conserving exactly what we need to make our democracy thrive. Virtue. Instead they give us the interference of thousands of K Street lobbyists. Unprecedented corruption and hypocrisy, pitting one region against the other, redefining liberalism into the enemy while hoping that liberalism fights back to justify its subversive claims.
    With technology and globalization transforming the entire world faster than most of us can even conceive, Americans need an ideology that conserves real virtue, and not just lip service about family values. What do we get from conservatives? A party that aims to conserve prejudice, that denies people their rights, that tries to raise a theocracy that would alienate the majority of people and Talibanize the nation with biblical law. We get a party that obsesses about sustaining inequality by showing marked preference for the wealthy, and throwing away lessons learned fro the Great Depression, that has carried us into a global economic crisis. Despite the results of all these errors, they stubbornly want us to live that way.
    They are conserving fear instead of courage, hysteria instead of intelligence, inappropriate answers to important question, that marks them as no longer relevant. They invite poor examples of leadership with throngs of fanfare for no other reason than their conservative appeal. That they don't even know what newspapers they read doesn't matter. They are ready to hand the nation over to incompetents. The lack of ability of these leaders merely place our future into the hands of unelected, manipulative corporate interests. These embarrassing so-called leaders make us look like fools to the rest of the world.
    But, of course, conservatives do not care what the rest of the world thinks. They are more offended by international praise of President Obama than they are pleased for his success. What they fail to realize is that a lot of Americans don't want to look like fools, to the rest of the world or to us. We ant a president we can be proud of, one who shows how reasonable and virtuous our nation can be.
    Conservatives should quiet down the knee-jerk rhetoric for a while and do some soul-searching. They should dump all their old strategies and suppositions and examine what the nation really needs. Virtue. Intelligence. The capability of preserving what is best while incorporating what is new and cannot be avoided.
    If they do not, they will either erase their own significance entirely, or drag us all down to their putrefying level.

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