BY THE PRONOUN SHALL YOU KNOW HIM :

Just a Party Pooper? No, Just Independent (Marshall Wittmann, September 15, 2002, Washington Post)

If it is true that life is a journey, then my political voyage has been the mother of all odysseys. [...]

As you might have detected, the one consistency in my long political journey has been my contrarian nature. Sadly, I shall have to give that up; there is no such thing as a contrarian independent. But I have simply had enough of the smelly little orthodoxies that too often animate our political life to remain with either party.

So here I am, neither a donkey nor an elephant, but a cheerful Bull Moose grazing in the vital center of the political plain.

And there's plenty of room.

Perhaps the main reason that conservatism will always remain in the minority is that it requires you to accept that your father may have been smarter than you, not specifically your father, but figuratively, our ancestors. Conservatism makes the thoroughly anti-modern demand that one recognize that our culture's ideas and traditions, having withstood the tests of time, contain a wisdom that our individual notions are unlikely to match. In the words of Russell Kirk, conservatives believe "society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine." Thus, we should be deferential, though not imprisoned by, to the past. Conservatism is the politics of We the People.
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 21, 2002 11:14 AM