Conservatives against Conservatism

[elfs]

Over the weekend, I briefly dipped my toe back into the Honor Harrington universe to read the second and third books, The Honor of the Queen and The Short, Victorious War, both of which are among the better books in Weber's oeuvre. As I read them, I was as usual pummeled by the way Weber portrayed the liberal vs. conservative divide on Manticore, but you have to admire the fact that his conservatives were absolutely not racist in the least, and even their religious conservatism was extremely well-tempered and moderated by a classic liberalism expectation that where the human condition had weaknesses, the human mind could be turned to deal with those weaknesses without futher deprecating the human mind.

Weber's "conservatisem" is a paean to the finest of human qualities, and the expectation that every human being wants to be a perfect expression of those qualities.

So, of course, I wake up this morning to find that Whitney Houston has died, and FOX News "conservatives" respond with anything but decency and dignity.

I'm still thinking that Corey Robin's book, The Reactionary Mind, may have gotten it essentially correct: conservatism is always about the maintenance of power in those who currently have it, and who therefore conclude that they are fit to rule, and ought to always be the ones to rule. The currrent ugliness about Whitney Houston and Barack Obama is what happens when the convinced power base sees that, even though it has maintained its half of the bargain, its privileges are not being maintained.

George W. Bush's won the 2004 election with his promise that he would protect the US from gay marriage, welfare cheats, and Muslim terrorists. He dismantled the regulatory system, turned a blind eye to mortgage market pillaging by private interests, and allowed cronyism to rampage through US-owned natural resources-- all the while, more states allowed gay marriage, and a black man ended up in the White House. The bargain has not been upheld.

You go to war against the conservatism you have, rather than find common cause with the conservatism you wish you had.

Comments

[tagryn]

I could probably do the same cherry-picking thing that LGF did there with any comment thread on the Internet that went on that long and was unmoderated. I see the same thing on CNN comment threads, as well. I don't think its a symptom of conservatism, either, I've seen the same phenomenon from both sides of the aisle at different times. I recall there being a lot of ugliness around William Buckley's demise at the time, as an example.

The cure IMHO is the old axiom of the Well: you own your words. Take away the ability to register anonymously, and things tend to be become a lot more polite real quick. Even Facebook comments tend to be a lot more civil for that reason.