|
What do today’s conservatives want?
In a blog entry earlier today on Peggy Noonan’s column on the late Pope, I wrote:
Is it possible that what drew millions of people to the Pope was not his crowd-pleasing ways and his other liberal traits, but his firm conservative stand on a handful of issues, notwithstanding his general liberalism? And therefore what people want, even if they don’t realize it, is a Pope who would be much more thoroughly conservative than this late Pope whom they revere? Could it be therefore that what Catholics (and non-Catholics) really long for is not John Paul III, but Pius XIII?These questions raise a further question. Do people really long for genuine conservative authority figures, and therefore they are prudently willing to disregard certain liberal betrayals by those same authority figures in the interest of the greater good for which they hope? Or do people only want pleasing and soothing images of conservative authority figures, to comfort them with the feeling that everything is all right with our society even as it continues to slide downhill, and therefore they will be satisfied with the most specious hint of conservatism in such figures and will deliberately ignore their actual liberalism?
In this connection, I’m reminded for some reason of Richard Brookhiser’s disappointing tv special about George Washingon a couple of years ago.
Brookhiser’s approach was the opposite of every Washington biography of the last half century: whereas every such book promises on its dust jacket that it will “Discover the man behind the marble monument” (as though that man had not already been discovered by previous biographies), Brookhiser set out to discover the marble monument behind the man. His Washington was a collection of static virtues such as patience, fortitude, and self-restraint. Nowhere to be found in Brookhiser’s portrayal was the dynamic, endlessly enterprising and striving, many-sided human being who was George Washington. I realized that Brookhiser had created a neoconservative icon. He had no particular interest in Washington the living man, the statesman, and the builder of our country. What he wanted was a high-toned but empty symbol around which to create a common loyalty for an America that lacks any particular content. Email entry |