conservatives

Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.

Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us. Society is stronger when we make vows to each other and we support each other. I don__ support gay marriage in spite of being a conservative. I support gay marriage because I am a conservative.

Every new generation believes its own period to be absolutely superior intellectually - greater than all past cultures yet equal among its modern cultures.

In the old days, a liberal and a conservative (a __ove_ and a __awk,_ say) got their data from one of three nightly news programs, a local paper, and a handful of national magazines, and were thus starting with the same basic facts (even if those facts were questionable, limited, or erroneous). Now each of us constructs a custom informational universe, wittingly (we choose to go to the sources that uphold our existing beliefs and thus flatter us) or unwittingly (our app algorithms do the driving for us). The data we get this way, pre-imprinted with spin and mythos, are intensely one-dimensional.

In 1959, Vice-President Nixon, speaking to members of California__ Commonwealth Club, was asked if he__ like to see the parties undergo an ideological realignment__he sort that has since taken place__nd he replied, __ think it would be a great tragedy . . . if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line._ He continued, __ think one of the attributes of our political system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion._ Therefore, __hen your Administrations come to power, they will represent the whole people rather than just one segment of the people.

Watching middle-class conservatives vote for politicians who've proudly pledged to screw them and their children over fills me with the same exasperated contempt I feel for rabbits who zigzag wildly back and forth in front of my tires instead of just getting off the goddamn road.

A Radical is a man with both feet firmly planted--in the air. A Conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A Reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A Liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest--at the command--of his head.

Extremes to the right and to the left of any political dispute are always wrong.

-You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!

The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. There__ only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each other__ guts. Both conservatives and liberals agree among themselves, on their respective message boards, in uncannily identical language, that their opponents lack any self-awareness or empathy, the ability to see the other side of an argument or to laugh at themselves. Which would seem to suggest that they__e both correct.

I don't trust liberals, I trust conservatives.

I am not red or blue. I am red, white and blue. Those are the same colors in my body (my heart, blood and veins). I am only human, and the human race is the only race in which I am an active participant - mind, body and soul.

If you ask a conservative for a statement of his political convictions, he may well say that he has none, and that the greatest heresy of modernity is precisely to see politics as a matter of convictions as though one could recuperate, at the level of political purpose, the consoling certainty which once was granted by religious faith. In another sense, however, conservatism does rest in a system of belief, and is opposed as much to the theory as to the practice of socialist and liberal politics.

Minority conservatives hold a special place of gutter contempt in the minds of unhinged liberals, who can never accept the radical concept of a person of color rejecting identity politics.

If we conservatives __f color_ refuse to promote the welfare state, unfettered abortion, affirmative action, and massive immigration, we are guilty of __elling out.

Even the 'right to live'...extends no further than the right to protection against murder. Charity certainly will, morality possibly may, and public utility perhaps ought to add to this protection supererogatory provision for continuance of life; but it is questionable whether strict justice demands it.

The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Republicans has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the rest of us and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.

The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, 'Better dead than red!' are now often heard mumbling, 'Better red than eating hamburgers.