'A Conservative Society?'
By David Tatosian (06/15/08)
There's no shortage of pundits, commentators and scribblers who've convinced themselves that the United States is a conservative society.
The Tarrance-George Washington University Battleground Poll (Questionnaire and Percentages, section D3) puts conservative respondents at a whopping 62%. (22% very conservative and 40% moderately so.) The May (29-31) Cook Political Report/RT Strategies Polls (page 6) puts the number of conservatives at 37%.
No doubt one can find similar results in other polls in the effort to support the conservative society argument, but the reality is that American society has been moving to the left for decades.
And frankly, the very term conservative is, I believe, somewhat amorphous and imprecise. For example, the Rasmussen Demographic – 2008 Presidential Race, June 10, states in part, “The presumptive Republican nominee (McCain) was seen as politically conservative by 31% of all voters in December, by 41% in April, and by 67% today.” But McCain isn’t a conservative. That he is increasingly perceived as such indicates a failure of conservatives to clearly define who and what they are to American voters.
Clearly, a description of what conservatism is is necessary. And in the process of discovering what conservatism is, statements like- tending to conserve; preservative; disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and having the power or tendency to conserve- inevitably appear.
Given those definitions, one should ask what specific American societal traditions conservatism has preserved since the Goldwater era forty years ago.
For example, according to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life Survey conducted this year, 78.4% of Americans (approximately 220 million people) are Christians. Yet our Christian heritage, a tradition worth conserving because Christianity has been a guiding principle since the Declaration of Independence, has all but disappeared from the public eye. That is to say that conservatism, in what some consider a conservative society, could not prevent the beliefs and traditions of some 220 million Americans, a clear majority, from being vilified and cast from the public realm.
And what has replaced those Christian traditions and beliefs throughout the public sphere?
Empty Secularity and, increasingly, the vile barbarism of Islam.
How does that reality make ours a conservative society?
The disassociation doesn’t stop there.
American traditions (which conservatives champion) such as individual rights, equal justice before the law and equal opportunity, rights which I believe rest upon the Christian ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” philosophy, now take a back seat to rights, justice and opportunities based on skin color, gender, sexual preference and ethnicity. Not to mention the right to proselytize for any religion other than Christianity.
How can one claim to live in a conservative society when the principles and traditions upon which that conservatism is based have little or no influence in the governance of that society, the education of it’s citizens or the portrayal of that society by the various media?
Clearly the reality refutes the claim.
Certainly there are tens of millions of conservatives in this nation. But they are essentially a faction without a voice and without real representation. Their dependence on and support for the Republican Party, a party that has become increasingly liberal and therefore hostile to them, has been their undoing.
And unlike the illegal aliens, racial supremacists and Muslims who have planted their flags, maintained their tribal loyalties and succeeded in having their respective cultures granted equal status with our own, conservatives suffer their own disenfranchisement and hope Republican liberals will do the right thing for them.
An exercise in futility.
144 days before the next president, a liberal or a raging progressive, ascends to the American throne and for whatever reason, the varied and many factioned conservative “movement” has not yet summoned the wherewithal to strike out on its own.
One can’t help but wonder; if not now, when?
David Tatosian
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