Opinion:

I lean left?

In response to some email from today, and in support of my contention that what is perceived to be the "center" has moved to the right because of the rhetoric and other excesses of the zealots, I quote from The New Republic Online:

Conservatism isn't over. But it has rarely been as confused. Today's conservatives support limited government. But they believe the federal government can intervene in a state court's decisions in a single family's struggle over life and death. They believe in restraining government spending. But they have increased such spending by a mind-boggling 33 percent in a mere four years. They believe in self-reliance. But they have just passed the most expensive new entitlement since the heyday of Great Society liberalism: the Medicare prescription-drug benefit. They believe that foreign policy is about the pursuit of national interest and that the military should be used only to fight and win wars. Yet they have embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious program of military-led nation-building in the Middle East. They believe in states' rights, but they want to amend the Constitution to forbid any state from allowing civil marriage or equivalent civil unions for gay couples. They believe in free trade. But they have imposed tariffs on a number of industries, most famously steel. They believe in balanced budgets. But they have abandoned fiscal discipline and added a cool trillion dollars to the national debt in one presidential term.

One reason for conservatism's endurance in the face of such contradiction, of course, is the extreme weakness--intellectual and organizational--of the opposition. Liberalism ceased being a vibrant force in the American public weal two decades ago. The left never recovered from the collapse of communism, the dismal failure of social democracy across Western Europe, and the demise of Japan's command economy in the 1980s. Domestically, a liberal claim on the presidency never recovered from Jimmy Carter and the first two years of Bill Clinton. Conservatism, broadly understood, has occupied the White House for 23 of the past 25 years. No unreconstructed liberal stands a chance of winning it in the near future--hence Hillary Clinton's moderate makeover.

Think about it.

Then read the prescription at the end of the article:

But that is not the prime reason for standing up for the conservatism of doubt in a time of religious certainty. Imagine if the Rove formula is actually a successful one. Imagine a dominant political party devoted to expanding government as a means of moral revival, using national security to achieve a tiny democratic majority. The long connection between Republicanism and the expansion of individual freedom could be severely compromised. The attractiveness of a conservatism of doubt rests ultimately not on its ability to corral majorities. It rests on its central insight: that politics is not religion; that the U.S. guarantee of freedom is for all, not merely the majority; that political freedom must mean economic freedom, and that freedom is imperiled by fiscal recklessness; that there are worse things than doing nothing, especially if that "something" is the imposition of a divisive moral agenda.

There may come a reckoning for this political moment--and it may soon peak or deflate or be undone by its own hubris. Or it may not. What has to endure is not merely a reformed liberalism that can one day take government away from its current masters, but rather a conservatism that does not assent to its own corruption at the hands of zealots. This doesn't mean hostility to religion. It means keeping religion in its safest place--away from the trappings of power. And it means keeping politics in its safest place--as the proper arrangement of our common obligations, and not as a means to save or transform our lives and souls. If we are fighting such a conservatism of faith abroad--and that is the core of the war on Islamist terrorism--then why should it be so hard to confront it in much milder forms at home? This was, once upon a time, the central conservative calling. Why not again?

I will not remain silent, even if I am accused of being on the "left" when instead the rhetoric has made anyone not firmly on one side or the other an apparent "traitor" depending upon the side shouting the accusation.

Just because the rest of the world has lost their minds does not mean I will succumb to the madness.