What is Conservatism?

Aside from being the idea that limiting government promotes freedom, stout defenses prevent war, and our rights are gifts from a creator, conservatism is also the unwelcome task of having to point out the obvious to those too blinded by ideology to see it for themselves. Victor Davis Hansen provides one example from this never ending election season:

Had Gov. Sarah Palin just been a mother of a single child at Vassar rather than of five in Alaska, married to a novelist rather than a snow-machiner, an advocate of pro-choice, who shot pictures of Alaskan ferns rather than shot moose — feminists would have hailed her as a principled kindred soul, and trumpeted her struggles against Alaskan male grandees.

So there was something creepy about droves of irate women, in lock-step blasting Sarah Palin from the corridors of New York and Washington, when most of them were the recipients of the traditional spoils of either family connections, inherited money, or the advantages that accrue from insider power marriages. Indeed, very few of Palin’s critics on their own could have emerged from a small-town in Alaska, with an intact marriage and five children, to run the state of Alaska.

Of course, it's not just the women. The point is that for all their talk of intelligent rational thought, and appreciation for nuance, Democrats seem to be completely ignorant of anything outside their accepted group dogma. They don't seem to realize that republican and conservative are not the same thing. Unseen, is the fact that the Republican party has many factions competing for dominance, and conservatism has many nuanced thinkers. I suppose we could blame this on a fractured media. When all they're news comes from CNN and the Huffington Post, can they be blamed for having a jaundiced view?

No, but they can be called hypocrites when they claim intelligence. Passing off the entire right side of the political spectrum as gun toting, bible thumping racists is the height of unthinking religiosity. Joyously accepting campaign cash from 2 out of 3 New York bankers while celebrating the end of capitalism, union chiefs claiming to be for the common man while riding in limousines and staying in 5 star hotels, requires a willful blindness to the world as it is.

One thing that has become clear to me over the past several months is that unlike Democrats, the Christian right, with their acceptance of the presence of sin, are far less superstitious. While the left places their faith in the hollow hope of free money and the forgiveness of debts, my hope is that Democrats will develop an interest in how things really work. "There's no free lunch" and equal treatment aren't just bumper stickers.