This article on the right's continued devotion to abstinence-only got me thinking: I used to be a Republican when I was growing up, and I identified as such for most of my life, but one of the things that really annoyed me about the party (and was instrumental in why I ended up finally leaving it for good a few years back) was that their ideology did not map onto the real world. They believed in continuing things like the Iraq War and abstinence-only education despite their ineffectiveness not based on a careful inspection of reality but rather because that's what ideology dictates. It's not unlike Czeslaw Milosz's classic The Captive Mind, in which the Soviet Union tells its writers to write according to "socialist realism", which basically means that every character conforms to the New Soviet Man and propounds the lessons of the revolution. Art was not based on a careful inspection of reality but rather on a careful inspection of Soviet dogma. There's a hubris and a sense of infallibility inherent in both faiths, a sense that the human being can be changed with the proper application of determination and regulation. It is incredibly ironic that conservatism has come full circle: where the guiding light of conservatism used to be an opposition to Utopia, it is now a full-throated belief in the idea that a change in one's society, in the rules, customs, regulations, and laws of a nation can lead to freedom and morality and goodness. Just read this post by conservative Republican Daniel Drezner who is evidently a member of the far left because he is not an outspoken supporter of empire.
It is supremely ironic that the GOP, an organization that has accused the Democratic Party of being a quasi-socialist (and often just socialist) organization, actually shares a far similar worldview to the Marxist-Leninist camp than do the Democrats. Both groups believe that you can change people by merely altering their surrounding society, and it was about this time that I got off the boat. You see, I agreed with the old-fashioned conservatives to begin with. Perhaps not as hard-line: I do believe that government can do many things just as well as private industry, for example, but I'm not trying to fundamentally alter human nature by saying that the government should run the health care apparatus. The far right is really unrelated to the Buckley-style conservatism that emerged in the 1960s, and its underlying philosophy bears little resemblance to that of WFB. They've tried to do their business here, and they've tried to do it in Iraq, and it's not working by any standard. The only acceptable critique, though, among conservatives is the critique that a given policy isn't conservative enough. It's okay to criticize George Bush for being insufficiently conservative. It's not okay to say that his imperial dreams are wrong-headed hurting America economically.
It merely underscores why we need to boot these folks out of office. I have nothing against conservatism per se, and I think that it can only be helpful to have a counterbalance to big-government liberalism (though one that is not relentlessly opposed to progress). Maybe, at some point, we'll be able to see a less-ideological, sensible conservative party in America like the David Cameron's U.K. Conservative Party. That is only going to come about if the GOP loses a lot of elections such that it feels its vision has been repudiated and the party is thus forced to move to the center in order to actually win elections. That's what I'm working toward. That's my vision.
