A Progressive’s Prayer for Her Conservative Cousins

I found this quote this morning and it seemed to speak aptly to what I would see as core conservative ideology:

The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory
future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.
–Robertson Davies

Doesn’t that sound like modern political conservatives? Never look to the future, always seek to cling to the past. “If it was good enough for my father and grandfather, it’s good enough for me — and what’s more, it must be good enough for you too! Never mind that time has moved on and it’s a brand new world out there — that’s not nearly as important as maintaining my personal comfort in reality as I see it!”

Students of politics will recognize the above as a fairly pathological version of what conservatism once was. Among its best virtues are conserving what has been most important about us. They are the keepers of our history, conservators of what has been right and best about us. It’s why, in a balanced society, we need conservatives just as we need moderates and progressives — conservatives remind us what has worked for us, just as progressives seek for the next things that will work for us in a brighter tomorrow.

Unfortunately, this core function of conservatism has become lost in religious hysteria and political paranoia. It has sickened and twisted in the previous eight years during a cultural stagnation so profound it might well be termed calcification. Now an unrecognizable doppleganger of itself, it seems unable to fulfill its basic function in our modern society, acting as a balance to progressive fervor. Thus our whole society sickens; in a desperate search for a cure we fling ourselves to one extreme of the political spectrum, rolling in it like dogs roll in something smelly. Eventually, disillusioned with what could only have been a partial fix at best, we abandon ship like panicked rats and fling ourselves to yet another extreme, so long as it promises us some relief from the ills that plague us.

The extreme metaphors fit the extreme situation in which we as Americans find ourselves. If conservatives cannot get their house in order and return to their basic core functions — those functions which actually make them important and necessary in modern society — it’s probable that they will make themselves irrelevant and disappear from modern political discourse. If they cannot entertain and embrace that they are merely one slice of an entire spectrum of views and learn to function as that, they only continue to propagate what is worst about American politics.

I cannot claim to be politically moderate. I am wholeheartedly progressive in my politics and my religion. Even so, I can look across that gulf and wish my conservative cousins would wake up from their decades-long nightmare, that they would come back to themselves and what’s best about them so we can learn how to govern ourselves in moderation and equality, as our Founding Fathers once envisioned.

Worth considering: Political conservatives reclaiming their integrity, distancing themselves from the religious fundamentalists with whom they’ve been in bed for far too long. Chart a course free of the hysteria and fear-mongering that come with those who cling to belief rather than fact and who refuse to accept that the rest of us choose not to live that way. Political conservatives do themselves no favors by continuing to cater to those who would blur the lines between church and state, and such catering depreciates their credibility with moderate Americans (who mostly wish they’d keep their religious views to themselves).

In other words, conservatives, it truly is not that you were never “conservative enough.” It’s simply that conservatism isn’t THE truth, that conservatism MUST learn how to play well with the other philosophies in the political playground. As Americans we govern best when we govern collectively; in an era when our national boundaries are becoming increasingly meaningless in light of global concerns, “governing well” has never been more critical.