Matthew James returns to his native Kansas, and laments the Conservatives’ veer into unreality.
I want my conservatism with at least a side of compassion. As a red state native, I know the answer to that. Liberal activism isn’t compassion. It’s fake. It’s a tool to gain power and reelection. I know that explanation, but to these untrained eyes it looked like you’re hammering a guy who saw a problem and had an idea. You cannot be anti-people-with-ideas, even if you disagree with those ideas, and wonder why a nation doesn’t rally behind you. I want a conservatism that believes in personal rights, but isn’t overwhelmed by the ‘my big gun and my big drink and my big country’ crowd. Conservatives have gotten really good at firing those people up while everyone else snuck out to find a quieter gathering.
Unfortunately, our corporate media has convinced themselves that whatever the Republicans present must be a rational position, because they’re one of our two major political parties, after all. Never mind that much of what they say is unhinged, the media acts as though it’s not. This distorts all kinds of things, from the popularity of single-payer health care to addressing global warming.
My fiancee primarily grew up in the Midwest and lived in small towns just like the ones the author describes. They were in Western IL and not Kansas, but I’d suspect many of the same observations apply. Conservatism used to be about building communities, relying on church, community and neighbor instead of government, and acting in a civil and respectful way. Ordered liberty is the operative phrase.
Today, the right is fueled by harsh individualists who want to severe the connections that bind us all in civil society and atomize us as individual fiefdoms totally economically, and in the case of guns, militarily self reliant. And anyone outside the narrowly defined conception of society is an ‘other’ not to be trusted. William F. Buckley made a conscious choice to expel the Birchers and anti-semites from his movement, it’s time for today’s conservatism to do the same.