We conservatives need to change our strategy because, despite the groundswell of emotion and action to be seen in events like the Tea Parties, for the most part, we’re talking to ourselves, and nothing gets done that way. In order to make any headway for your ideology, you have to talk to the other guy. The Left figured this out fifty years ago. Since that time, their message (social values and otherwise) has gotten out, in particular to children, in the form of television, movies and public education starting at age 5 and lasting through university. Now, I know what you’re thinking; talking to many of those on the Left with whom you cross paths in a given day is usually about as enjoyable as performing your own dental work and as effective as quite literally banging your head against a wall. But it doesn’t have to be.
As I was reading a required text for an English MA, it struck me what has been going on with the ideological dialogue in this country for quite some time. In his book, Falling Into Theory; Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, David Richter defines “theory” as “the talk we talk when a consensus breaks down, when we begin to disagree about fundamental principles and to argue about which principles are truly fundamental.”
For those of you who are not graduate-level English majors, allow me to say that there has been an explosion in the different ways we approach literature in the last half of the last century: Freudian, Marxist, post-colonial, new historicist, feminist, new criticism, Africanist, deconstructionist, nativist, semiotic, &c, &c. Each of those theories springs from a shift in fundamental principles and assumptions from the others. They can each insist on their interpretations until they’re blue in the face and never get anywhere. Not only that, but the more each side finds itself shouting into the wind, the more frustrated they can get – anger rises and the discussion becomes more shrill.
Does this sound familiar? The “falling into theory” that the literature field has done did not happen in a vacuum. It was precipitated by a similar shift in the social order at large and has affected politics even more.
The Right and the Left have lost consensus about the nature of government and the nature of rights; this period of political rancor and stonewalling will not give way to one of more prosperous productivity until a consensus is again reached. This was driven home to me when, in private conversation with some personal friends who read my previous article, it became immediately clear that while to a conservative things like healthcare and housing are unquestionably not “rights,” it is equally and unquestionably clear to his liberal counterpart that they are the most fundamental of “rights.”
America finds itself at a tipping point as the last of the pre-FDR generation dies off and the 20-30somethings that have taken their place in the voting booths have spent their lives indoctrinated with liberal ideology and social values from the time they were old enough to speak. Even at home, their parents (the 50-60somethings) grew up entirely post-FDR and were encouraged to rebel against their parents’ values throughout the 60s and 70s.
The conservative (and historically accurate) argument that christening such things “rights” is completely at odds with not only our Constitution, but the entire concept of rights that fueled the creation of this nation, will get the conservative nowhere fast. Consensus has also broken down on the issue of the importance of the Constitution and its ideology. The liberal will argue that “times change” and anything in the Constitution that conflicts with their utopian vision is cruel and should simply be discarded.
That is what we’re up against. If American conservatism and individual liberty are to survive, those on the Right need to begin a campaign of justifying our founding principles to those who have been raised to reject them. The Left has spent the last half-century in a concerted (and phenomenally successful) attempt to undermine those very principles as irrelevant. While they were doing that, those on the Right kept fighting the individual battles without addressing the underlying liberal movement that fueled the opposition. Because of this, the Right seeks to limit the power of the Federal Government as a threat to our liberties, while the Left favors increasing that power because a powerful central government is required to compel the unpleasant burdens that will need to be borne in order to achieve some semblance of their utopian vision.
To the conservative, individual liberty is the reason there is an America. To the liberal, individual liberty frequently stands in the way of a “collective good” which they consider the primary purpose of government (the fact that the government then gets to define the term doesn’t seem to bother them).
And so we now have Right/Left, conservative/liberal, red/blue discussions similar to those in the literature field described above. Conservatives will never be able to have a productive discussion about national healthcare, auto bailouts or “stimulus packages” without first having the discussion about which fundamental principles are important, which ones are right and which ones are wrong. And it needs to be done in terms that actually matter to “the other guy.” This doesn’t mean we have to change our principles, just the language by which we justify them.
So when it comes to making headway in reinforcing our ideology, conservatives should neither be arguing the forest nor the trees, but rather why they need to be planted in the first place.
