Conservative

[degringolade]

 

I am still working on the next couple of responses to Michael.  The real trouble is, that as I work on it, there are more and more issues being dredged up to address as I work through the paragraphs.  Things out there are looking more and more like matryoshka, opening a subject just leads to something else and I despair of ever getting to the core.

Being an old-school conservative is getting more and more difficult to pull off.  I am now labelled a "cukservative" by the bigots and the crazies that, for a brief time, had been driven to the edges of the conservative movement (I have decided that liberal and conservative are no longer worthy of the honor of being capitalized).  I miss the never-never land that I once ascribed to political debate, where civility was important and tribalism shunned.  Because now when I try to point out that AOC has some points to make that are valid, I am shunned by the right, when I point out that Trump is a symptom, not the disease itself, I am shunned by the left.

But right now, I am coming to the conclusion that that world was a figment of my imagination and the brief shining moment when I was an aspiring pundit.  It was a world where I tried to respect my opponent, realizing that he was an opponent, not an enemy.  Maybe that is where I went wrong, maybe here in America we have always been tribal.  

Maybe America has always separated itself into the paranoia of Goldwater and the mendacity of Nixon and the "aw shucks" venality of Reagan on the right.  Maybe the left has always had the privileged charisma of Kennedy, the cunning of Johnson, and the cowardice of Clinton on the left.

Maybe the problem is our need/want for a pseudo-king.  A scapegoat onto which we can load our own sins and our own fears and throw onto the altar as sacrifice.

Perhaps it is time to re-read Girard.  Maybe Mike is onto something.