House of Eratosthenes

I keep hearing how GOP candidates are distancing themselves from President Bush. Sounds like we’re all fed up with conservatism, naturally…until you hear the issues over which the candidates are distancing themselves. Immigration. The War in Iraq. Hurricane Katrina.

Hmmm.

We have an obvious problem here. The President has never been a conservative on immigration. The conservative position on the War in Iraq is that it is a War on Terror…and I’ve heard far fewer candidates, from either party, distance themselves from WoT than from WiI. And as that goes, the candidates campaigning in favor of another Hurricane Katrina, are rather few and far between.

I think the American electorate understands this. There are “issues,” as in, Mr. candidate please tell me your positions and if they comport with my own, you stand a better chance of getting my vote. And then there are “issues,” like — your boss called you into your office and it turns out he has issues with your performance. Those are different things. The voters understand this. The people who make good money telling voters what to think, don’t quite get it. Pundits. Pollsters. Newscasters. Columnists.

I’m a voter. I can promise you this. Any asshole who’s in favor of another Katrina disaster, isn’t getting my vote. But that’s not the question is it.

I wish this distinction on the word “issues” was made more prominent. And you know, it strikes me as a tad strange: It’s an odd-numbered year. Pretty damned early in one. Not Father’s Day yet. And we are deep into a campaign season, which essentially means American is now living perpetually in a campaign season. Would it not, then, be appropriate to use words in such a way, that the message from the electorate is made more clear when they cast their votes?

Perhaps not.

Since childhood, I have been regaled with an abundance of legends about “conservative” themes prevailing in entrenched, elitist governments, mostly in America but occasionally in foreign lands, which in turn “oppress” the people until there is a “revolution.” Said revolutions are supposed to install more “progressive” personalities in positions of power, who then responsibly service the interests of “all the people.” It has not been completely lost on me, that this is what revolutions are supposed to be inclined to do: Tilt things to the left.

And yet, in my lifetime, the American revolutions I’ve seen have gone the opposite way: 1968, 1980, 1994, 2000.

I suppose you could talk about 1974, 1992 and 2006. I know it rankles my liberal friends for me to say so, but let’s just get this out of the way becaues it’s a hard, bitter truth: Those are different. They are subordinate. They simply don’t stand out. They don’t carry a message. In other words, in modern times, when our liberals carry a victory nationwide, they’ve managed to do it by means of a scandal, or with mindless cheerleading; by diverting attention away from the issues.

Conservative revolutions are genuine revolutions; the numbers involved tend to be overwhelming, involving landslide victories. Strengthening the criminal justice system in 1968. More commercial-friendly energy and tax policies in 1980. Welfare reform, personal responsibility and tax relief in 1994. And 2000 was all about getting rid of our personable, “popular” President Clinton, the guy whose glowing words and boyish charm made everyone forget all about their problems and could brighten a room by walking into it. People understood this guy was more entertainer than executive. We’d had enough of him. We elected a President to reverse his policies and gave that new President a friendly House and Senate so he could get it done faster.

Seven years on, that President has completed his trifecta of converting to liberalism. Government spending. Immigration. And now, the global warming scam. He’s still the guy who took down Saddam Hussein, but it seems he’d just as soon we all forget about that.

And it gives me cause to reflect on the past: Highly successful presidents, tend to be highly successful conservative presidents. Even Clinton had his moment in the sun when he was pressured into passing welfare reform, which nowadays even our left-wingers are going to be quick to highlight as a Clinton victory. But our conservative presidents aren’t very conservative when they wind up their second terms, are they? This current President seems to be worried about his legacy. And that’s a real shame, because people who are worried about legacies tend to lean left. How stalwart of a conservative was Reagan, after about 1986?

It would seem this is the flaw in American government. Our politicians tilt toward the right to get us to vote them in. And then they list left, so the history books might write something glowing about them. Who’s writing those history books?

Perhaps that is the question we should be asking. After all, the history books tell me 1960 was a successful, progressive, peoples’ revolution that gave us Camelot. The hard data tell me the victor received 49.7% of the popular vote.

Whatever the cause, it seems the voters are engaged in an effort of getting some sensible, right-centrist policies going in our government: Bring justice to the guilty, or at least make it so that guilty people don’t live at the expense of the innocent; stand up to terror; make government work with the businesses that provide jobs to everyone, or at least don’t get in the way.

And it seems to be like nailing jello to a freakin’ tree. Because, I’m gathering, our historians want something different and our politicians want to please the historians.

Look no further than the global warming scam to see what I’m talking about. Sometime in the next ten years, something’s going to get passed. It will be crushingly expensive for American businesses, or it will be a simple pain-in-the-ass inconvenience. But something will get passed. The earth — being, y’know, really big & all — will continue to do whatever it will do. And our history books will sing glittering generalities about this initiative. If the “mean temperature” somehow continues to rise according to the statistical curve that’s gotten us all angsty and agitated up ’til now, the history books will clamor gloomily about how things might have been, if we didn’t do what we did — something completely unprovable, but they’ll definitely say that.

Well, long-term there isn’t much reason to worry. Human nature favors the conservative side. If people go to work and pay taxes and follow the rules, it’s against their nature to support the lifestyle of someone who thinks hard work is for suckers, or that laws are made to be broken, or that it’s okay to hurt people and take their money, or that a nation’s borders can be crossed at will just because someone wants to cheat. And I think deep down, people understand that a society isn’t really free if it has a government deciding how much money people need to live — as opposed to a people, deciding how much money the government needs to do it’s governing. People understand the word “greed” is thrown around, nowadays, to excess. And if greed has any definition at all anymore, it damn sure doesn’t mean a desire to hang on to the money you earned yourself, that you know in your heart belongs to you.

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On RevolutionsWednesday, June 6th, 2007

On Revolutions
Wednesday, June 6th, 2007