Bloody difficult finding a conservative these days
By Irrational Robot points out that the Republican platform is calling for four constitutional amendments. These include a) an amendment in support of “human life” which presumably would ban abortion, b) an amendment to protect marriage from those pushing “the homosexual lifestyle”, c) an amendment to give victims of violent crimes specific rights, and of course d) an amendment to prevent flag burning. As Irrational Robot helpfully points out, the Libertarian Party only calls for three amendments, including the repeal of the 16th (won’t be too long before the Republicans jump on that one, too).
People who call themselves traditional conservatives, like David Brooks (sometimes) and Andrew Sullivan, should be pretty appalled by all this. If the word “conservative” means anything politically, it has to include the concept of political conservation, which means that we grow wary of altering the things that our forefathers and foremothers have passed down to us. In short, it means that we don’t fuck with things like the Constitution unless we have a really good reason.
People who want to re-write the Constitution, revolutionize American foreign policy, reconstruct the entire tax code, and destroy the institutions that have safeguarded the nation since the New Deal and longer are not conservatives; they’re radicals. There’s nothing particulary wrong with being a radical, but you’re really not supposed to refer to yourself as a conservative if you are one. I wonder if at some point it will be a) desireable, and b) possible to take the label “conservative” away from the Republican Party, as they certainly have done nothing to deserve it, but have derived great benefit from it. Edmund Burke continues to spin in his grave; I hope that his ghost haunts Jonah Goldberg.