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Wednesday, July 13, 2005
RINOs
The Truth Laid Bear, a site that includes one of the main rankings of blog traffic, has added a community feature where like-minded blogs can be listed together and have their recent posts conglomerated. On a lark I decide to join the Raging RINOs, a play on "Republicans in Name Only" which here stands for "Republicans/Independents Not Overdosed (on the Party Kool-Aid)."
I still wonder whether I should have included myself in such a group. For one, I really don't care much for the "Republicans in Name Only," who I identify with what used to be called "Rockefeller Republicans." That strain of the party smacked too much of the patrician class, its social policies inspired from some kind of noblesse oblige. Second, my concerns with this administration, such as its fiscal irresponsibility, are concerns common throughout the party and therefore do not necessitate identifying with a splinter group. Third, I don't really share the anxiety over the affiliation between the Republicans and the religious right, although I do think that the Republicans have milked that relationship about as far as it will go. Basically, I don't think the religious right will ever have enough power to accomplish much more than symbolic victories, and I don't even think of the rank and file members as being terribly political. The Republicans put so much energy into them, not because they constitute a majority of the nation, but simply because they won't turn out to vote otherwise.
The most obvious reason for me not to have joined such a group, however, is that I just don't write about politics as much as I did before the election. In part this reflects a change in where my attention is, and in part it reflects the fact that I don't have much to add to the conversation. My writing lately has been more personal and philosophical.
Nonetheless, I decided to join, and I stand by that still, because I have come to a conclusion over the last three or four years that surprises me, namely, that I am a liberal. When I was a teenager, I identified strongly with Ronald Reagan (and still do), so I learned what it was to be a liberal from his account of it, which was not very flattering. In retrospect, I think Reagan was describing what the term had become, not what it is at its best, and perhaps he longed for a restoration of true liberalism. His fondness for Roosevelt suggests as much.
Anyway, I think of myself as both a conservative and a liberal, which I reconcile by recognizing that this country was founded on classical liberal principles that I wish to conserve. I realize too now that my conservatism has important limits. For example, I am strongly in favor of medical research to greatly expand the human life span. Nothing could be less conservative, because we have no way of knowing what the social and moral consequences of such an advance would be. If we were to live 150 years, for example, I think our sense of the family would change a great deal. I am not certain it would make for a better world, but I am willing for us to give it a try. My willingness to take risks like this is not very conservative, at least if being conservative means a resistant to change.
It may be, however, that this is the wrong definition of conservatism, at least for an American conservative. In The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides writes about the Sicilian Expedition, a military expedition in which the ever-ambitious Athenians decided to conquer Sicily. The expedition was a reach, to be sure, but the downfall of the expedition seems to be that the Athenians wanted to have it both ways: they wanted to take the risk of a difficult invasion but also wanted the security of placing the invasion in the hands of a trusted but somewhat risk-averse general, Nicias. Nicias failed to take advantage of the opportunities as they presented themselves, and the expedition came to ruin, which lead to Athenian weakness at home as well.
In other words, a liberal polity like the United States is a polity whose nature is to take risks. Our economic system brings a fair amount of unhappiness to those who cannot compete or who find themselves dislocated by the constant shifts of capital. Nonetheless, we endorse it because it is so powerful, and because we are not content to live with the world as it is. To change our world, to not just sustain it in its present form, requires a great deal of additional wealth. Socially, we are willing to take risks as well, as can be seen in all of the social liberations of the last century. This is who we are. To resist change would be to resist our nature, to call into doubt our very being. I do not think this is very conservative either.
The Democrats call themselves liberals, at least when they think they can, but I don't believe them. They are a party of critics, who seem to think this country should be anything but what it is. They are concerned about the freedom of individuals only when it means freeing individuals from the reach of more ancient institutions like church and family. Otherwise, they are more than happy to centralize power. They do not trust the country and are quite willing to bind it to international bodies and precedents. Thus I do not vote for them very often.
So, I tend to vote Republican instead, but I recognize that quite often I am at odds with the party itself. I tend to read center-left journals like The New Republic in part because it is less painful to disagree with those writers than to realize how much I disagree with writers at The National Review or The Weekly Standard. My joining the Raging RINOs then is a small gesture of confession.
Afterthought: Reading this post the day after, I realize that I probably should qualify about a dozen or so of the things I've said here, especially concerning the Democratic party. I will leave it to the generosity of the reader to supply them.
Eddie 10:08 AM
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