Selwyn Duke

It seems like just yesterday that many were reading liberalism’s epitaph. After the Reagan years, Republican Revolution of 1994, retreat of the gun-control hordes after Al Gore’s 2000 defeat and George W. Bush’s two successful presidential runs, many thought conservatism was carrying the day.

Ah, if only.

We might ask: With conservatives like President Bush and many of the other Republicans, who needs liberals?
While the media have successfully portrayed the Republicans as the party of snake handlers and moonshine, the difference between image and reality is profound. Bush has just spun the odometer, proposing the nation’s first-ever $3 trillion budget. On matters pertaining to the very survival of our culture — the primacy of English, multiculturalism, the denuding of our public square of historically present Christian symbols and sentiments — Republicans are found wanting. As for illegal immigration, both the president and the presumptive Republican nominee support a form of amnesty.

Yet many would paint America as under the sway of rightist politics, and some of the reasons for this are obvious. Some liberals know that the best way to ensure constant movement toward the left is by portraying the status quo as dangerously far right. If you repeatedly warn that we teeter on the brink of rightist hegemony, people will assume that to achieve “balance” we must tack further left toward your mythical center. Then we have conservatives influenced by the natural desire to view the world as the happy place they’d like to inhabit. Ingenuous sorts, they confuse Republican with conservative, party with principles, and electoral wars with the cultural one. But there’s another factor: One can confuse conservative with correct.

When is the right not right, you ask? When it has been defined by the left.

The definition of “conservative” is fluid, changing from time to time and place to place. Some “conservatives” embrace an ideology prescribing limited government — one remaining within the boundaries established by the Constitution — and low taxation. They favor nationalism over internationalism; prefer markets mostly unfettered by regulation; eschew multiculturalism, feminism and radical environmentalism; and take pride in our history and traditions. 

But there have been other kinds of conservatives. In the Soviet Union, a conservative was quite the opposite, a communist. Then, when Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated in 2002, BBC News ran the headline, “Dutch far-right leader shot dead.” “Far-right” indeed. Fortuyn was quite liberal by our standards; he was a pro-abortion, openly homosexual ex-sociology professor branded a rightist mainly because he wished to stem Moslem immigration into Holland. Moreover, his fear was that zealous Moslems posed a threat to the nation’s liberal social structure.

So here’s the question: What definition of conservative would a communist or European statist conform to? Answer: That which states, “One who favors maintenance of the status quo.” This brings us to a central point:

As society is successfully transformed by those who detest the status quo, the status quo changes. This means that the great defender ideology of the status quo, conservatism, will change with it.

“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.” — G.K. Chesterton

Both liberals and conservatives have shape-shifting visions. This is because the definitions of conservative and liberal are determined by the “position” of the given society’s political spectrum. Shift that spectrum left or right by altering the collective ideology of a nation, and the definitions of those two words will change commensurate with the degree of that shift. This is why a Pim Fortuyn is viewed as conservative in Western Europe. In a land of Lilliputians, even Robert Reich seems like a giant.

This isn’t to say there is no difference between liberal and conservative visions. Liberals construct their vision based on opposition to the conservative one; conservatives’ vision is a product of the now accepted, decades-old vision of the left. Thus, liberals promote today’s liberal vision; conservatives defend yesterday’s liberal vision.

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” — G.K. Chesterton

Perhaps one reason we’re losing the culture war is that it’s easier to convince people to try new liberal mistakes than retain old liberal mistakes that have been tried and found wanting. Regardless, we will continue losing unless we change our thinking radically.

•
Selwyn Duke is a columnist, public speaker, and Internet entrepreneur whose work has been published widely online and in print.