In this forum I have often questioned this president's motives and actions. That seems to put me at odds with a majority of Americans who have followed wartime trends and increased the congressional power of the party that holds the White House. Others have pointed out that when a people feels threatened, conservatism gains strength, often with disastrous results.
Liberals such as myself are often loath to consider the idea that the masses are not capable of governing themselves. Our nation is based on the premise that they are both capable and endowed by God with the right to do just that. But it does worry us when we see them voting in ways that, could they clearly understand, are not in their own best interests.
I have often considered why people are divided between "liberal" and "conservative." Having been raised a staunch conservative (with often conflicting beliefs) and having survived college with that conservatism intact, I feel I should have some clues about the fundamental differences in world view that make us one or the other. My political "conversion" is a separate story linked to the beginnings of the fall of the Soviet Union.
As I write this I will make plain why I believe the religious conservative movement is fundamentally anti-christian. I'll look thoughtfully at the threats we face and see that religious conservatism here is the same animal dressed in mild-looking skins. Hopefully I will encourage you to examine your own world view to determine why you hold your own political beliefs.
In another article on this site I discuss the apparent disconnect between many people's beliefs on the origin of life and their social/political world view. Many who claim to believe in evolution as the origin of life hold to very non-evolutionary social policies, while many others who claim to believe in special creation support social policies firmly founded in evolutionary principles.
This is evidence to me that many people have not carefully thought out what they believe. Like myself in my conservative days they accept what they've been raised to believe as if it were truth etched in stone before the ten commandments. Ultimately their religious beliefs teach the inherent immorality of conservatism, but they cling desperately to the shallow immorality of many liberals (such as Slick Willie) as proof that they have to be right.
Political conservatism is based largely on a belief that the present social system (whatever that system is) is basically moral, right, and good. That makes it easy for the conservative to believe he or she stands on the side of "truth, justice, and the American Way." Political conservatism generally also includes a belief that certain people are irredeemably evil and that these people have no social or human rights. Hence there is no conflict between a religious belief in the sanctity of life and a political belief in the death penalty, either as applied by society when your society is in power, or as applied by dissidents when your society is powerless.
But standing on the side of the status quo usually also means supporting those who currently hold power. In every society that ends up being the wealthy. This is where I find the conservatism of the masses contradictory. It would be in their interest to eliminate the consolidation of wealth, but they continue to vote for politicians whose clear goal is to remove limits on such consolidation.
Why the wealthy? Because money IS power. Any attempt at campaign finance reform will always fail to bring about real change because you cannot separate money and power. Money IS power, and as long as we allow a small number of people to control a large amount of money the political interests of the masses will not be given serious consideration.
Karl Marx envisioned a political system which forcibly ended consolidation of wealth by putting the government in control of the means of production. It's easy to point at the fundamental ineptness of government bureaucrats as one of the failings of the Soviet attempt to bring his ideas to life. It is also easy to point to the totalitariansim inherent in such a system and to the mean-spirited use of that power by the early Soviet leaders. But the ultimate weakness that brought down communism is that it's a political system that opposes true power, and those who hold true power must NOT allow it to continue. The continuing health of Chinese communism is based in part on that government's willingness to allow limited forms of capitalism.
Yes, I know that's a very pessimistic outlook. But what is worse is that our nation's forefathers managed to wrest power from the powerful and give it to the people, and the people are being duped into giving it back. No, maybe you cannot END the power of the wealthy, but a government committed to the principles stated in our Declaration of Independence and in the preamble to our Constitution SHOULD stand as a wall of protection between the powerful and the masses.
That is why George Bush is so dangerous. He has used the fear of this nation to back his policies, policies which dismantle that wall of protection. Limits on how much you can own? Immoral. Remove them. Guarantees of basic human rights such as food, shelter, and an assumption of innocence? Useful only when they protect the wealthy. If they start redistributing wealth or protecting "criminals" they're immoral and need to be reformed.
As I already stated, conservatism believes that the ability of a limited number of people to accumulate wealth is both morally acceptable and economically mandated. They have no problem with the powerlessness of the masses, for the masses are needed as producers of wealth. Empowering the masses threatens the ability of the wealthy to skim from them the wealth they produce. Thus the conservative abhors labor unions.
One of the political scuffles of the world between September 11, 2001 and November 5, 2002 involved this issue about labor unions. George W. wanted to prevent employees in the government's new Department of Homeland Security from gaining the power of unionization. The "loyal" opposition saw that as an immoral power grab and said so. How did George try to get the masses to support him in thus robbing them of their power? He stated that Democrats weren't interested in protecting the American people (this from a man who originally opposed such a department). He is using our fears to enslave us!
What George is doing is so fundamentally immoral and obscene as to make the previous president's private deportment seem saintly in comparison, as immoral and obscene as it was! Slick Willie had at least some sense that government needed to put limits on the consolidation of wealth. He had [has] the support of the black community because he upheld the fundamental dignity of EVERY human.
That's where I find religious conservatism essentially contradictory. A Christian supposedly believes that God created humans. That belief is stated explicity in the Declaration of Independence which goes on to state, "and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights...." We do not "earn" these rights, they were given to us by the God that created us.
Wisely, of course, the authors of the Declaration of Independence avoided naming this "creator." But your beliefs about who or what created you should inform your interpretation of those "inalienable" rights. What kind of God do these Christians worship if "he" allows some of his creatures to control the lives of others of his creatures? Have they not read that Christ said, "the love of money is the root of all evil," and that he also said, "How hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven!"?
The conservative claims to believe that a person must "earn" what they get. That's their argument against welfare. But their definition of "earn" is a little warped, for the people that perform the most essential functions of our society are rewarded with the least money. Someone who merely makes decisions is assumed to have earned much more than the person who actually produces the product or service that makes a company's income possible. Generally, the closer you come to actually doing the needed work, the less you earn.
And what about crime? The conservative believes a criminal is someone committed to doing evil and proposes treating them accordingly. The liberal believes few people TRY to be evil. Even Osama and Saddam believe that what they're doing supports the real good of this world. I say that with some reservation about Saddam since it appears his primary value is his own power. But it could be argued that the same is true about our current president.
Since most people do what they believe is right, or at least justified, the liberal believes empowerment of the underprivileged will best reduce crime. Relieve them of the sense that most of the benefits of their labor go to someone who has never done physical labor all their lives long, and they're less likely to seek to forcibly right this injustice or to act violently against their oppressors.
Religious conservatism in the United States is the same animal that seeks to link Islamic law and civil law in the Middle East. Christians in the United States, like Moslems in Saudi Arabia (and elsewhere), believe that their religion is morally superior to the other, and that it's appropriate to use the standard mechanisms of political power (usually some sort of war) to maintain their beliefs against the beliefs of the other religion.
As long as both sides maintain this self-righteous mentality, bloodshed is inevitable. This bloodshed will likely be no more conclusive than were the Crusades of a thousand years ago, but given the technological advances of the last thousand years (and particularly of the last hundred years) the results of the conflict could be far more devastating. We could well stand on the brink of a second dark age, and humanity may not survive.
I said at the outset that we may well have Bill Clinton's immorality to thank for limiting what George can do. How's that? In his fight to stay in office Bill, like Dick before him, managed to weaken the presidency. Maybe there's a God after all. How else can you explain that before an opportunistic power-grabber like President Junior got into office, two holders of that office found ways to dilute the power he would hold?