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The fallacy of conservatism as celebration
Conservatives see the unending indictments of America coming from the American left, the famous “blue” half of the map that voted for the bellowing class warrior Al Gore in the 2000 election, and they cry, “Not true! America is in great shape.” We’ve pointed out how a conservative politics that consists of nothing more than the celebration of America as against the leftist denigration of America stifles critical thought on the right about all the things that are—from a conservative point of view—truly wrong with America, ranging from the dangerous confusions enveloping the misnamed war on “terror” to a host of existentially threatening domestic issues. We’ve also pointed out how a conservatism defined as opposition to leftist anti-Americanism leads conservatives to go along with any left-liberal policy that does not explicitly present itself as anti-American, such as homosexual rights, racial group rights, mass third-world immigration, vastly expanded federal entitlements, and so on. In other words, conservatism as celebration leads conservatives to celebrate an America that is itself largely a creation of leftism. But the conservative celebration of America, offered as the counter-truth to the leftist denigration of America, is also false in a more immediate, logical sense: If half of America is anti-American and leftist, then America is not in such great shape, is it?
Comments
Important and incisive analysis. I indulge myself in one tangential cavil: Al Gore was never a class warrior. The Democrats, the “left,” the media, have no interest in class war. They just use the language of class war to buttress their New Class power, wealth, privilege as against people who actually accomplish things. Millions of dollars are evil when derived from industry, cool when derived from show business (or even inherited). So this has not a great deal to do with the proletariat. Posted by: Shrewsbury on December 16, 2003 6:10 PMGood point by Shrewsbury. However, whatever his real positions, Gore’s rhetoric and tone, especially in his acceptance speech, but in other speeches as well, was more aggressively “those bad people are hurting us good people” than that of any other major presidential candidate in American history. And he won more than half the popular vote. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on December 16, 2003 6:16 PM |