THE TRUE BELIEVER :

Why I'm not a conservative (Joseph Farah, June 13, 2002, WorldNetDaily.com)

Conservatives, by definition, seek to conserve something from the past--institutions, cultural mores, values, political beliefs, traditions.

What happens when a society moves so far from righteous values and freedom principles that there is little left to conserve?

That is where I believe America finds itself in the early part of the 21st century. Let me give you some examples of why:

* the breakdown of the institutions of marriage and family;
* the inability of many to distinguish between right and wrong;
* the consolidation of power in Washington and in the executive branch;
* the breakdown in the rule of law;
* the usurpation of power by unaccountable supra-national agencies;
* infringements on personal freedoms
* increasing vulnerability to weapons of mass destruction and government's unwillingness or inability to address such a basic concept of defense; [...]

I'm not a "conservative" because I see precious little left in this world worth conserving. Conservatives, from my experience, do not make good freedom fighters. They seem to think a victory is holding back attacks on liberty or minimizing them. They are forever on the defensive--trying to conserve or preserve an apple that is rotten to the core.

Mr. Farah is correct, he's not a conservative. In his desire to turn the clock back several hundred years at one fell swoop he truly is a revolutionary, a radical in much the sense that the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks were, confident of his own ability to remake the world, heedless of the consequences. To be a conservative, to believe in the value of the things that Mr. Farah ennumerates as desirable, is to know in your bones that revolutions like that Mr. Farah proposes are dangerous and undesirable.

His is the fanaticism that >Eric Hoffer described so well and set against the more moderate reasonableness of the healthy citizen of a free society :

Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect.  The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.

For folks like Mr. Farah, the point is the fight itself, not freedom.

(via ESR : Musings)

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 13, 2002 1:40 PM