As we head for the home stretch in our political season and each
party reins in the votes of its membership, the focus will become
those who label themselves as independents or moderates. Both sides
will seek to claim them for their own. But what is meant by the
political labels we attach to ourselves?
Most are divided into two main groups; what we call
conservatives and liberals. Both sides have long accused each other
of a kind of religious fanaticism in pursuit of their goals and
this is in many ways true. But how to understand them? As John
Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson on this subject many years ago:
“You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to
each other.”
To be a conservative means favoring a return to or the
preservation of values that should not change with the times. A
conservative believes there are absolute moral truths; rock
foundations strong enough to bear the enormous founding weight of
even a sovereign nation. That many of these are religious
principles should come as no surprise, since real truth, real
justice and real freedom — all necessary to a governing system
they favor — have their basis in the realm of faith. These were
most gloriously enumerated by our founding fathers in the
Declaration of Independence.
And because these moral underpinnings are as wedded to the
conservative mind as they are to his soul, these truths are
non-negotiable and inform not only his personal life, but his
professional and political ones, since they are extensions of that
life. Moreover, they tend to be students of history; admiring and
adopting what they see as workable economic, legal and social ideas
and using them as blueprints with which to govern a nation. Among
these are the notions of Natural Law and a limited republican form
of government. These were most gloriously enumerated in the U.S.
Constitution.
To conservatives, because the truths upon which they are based
are inviolable, the Declaration and especially the Constitution are
and always should be the unmovable pillars of this country. The
Constitution is to be revered, and not an iota of its premise —
that our government is of the people, by the people and for the
people and under God — is to be altered. To conservative minds,
the genius of its self-contained yet deliberate adaptability only
confirms its worth as our national governing foundation. To
understand the conservative mind, read the Constitution, to look
into his heart, read the Declaration.
And then there are liberals, or progressives as they now wish to
be known. Many of them also lionize our founding fathers and revere
the documents they produced; but not necessarily as originally
written or conceived. They rightly see America as a shining city on
a hill, but one whose ethos must change with the times. They also
see things in moral absolutes, but feel that the basis for these
lies in human nature and are therefore as soaring and changing as
the aspirations of the human heart itself.
Liberals are motivated by the desire to do good to a people who
need big government to make them better, while conservatives feel
that if a people are good, they are best fit to make government
better. That is why, if things don’t go their way, liberals often
lay the fault at the imperfect feet of the American people — if
Barack Obama doesn’t win, it will surely be because we are racists
— while conservatives try and take their case to the common sense
of the people themselves. Conservatives feel that this common sense
must be rooted in firm adherence to a moral code upon which all
laws and governments should be based; liberals feel that such
immovable premises are an unconscionable horror, unworthy of a
great nation.
This is why the failure of liberals to garner the “religious”
vote so frustrates and angers them; that these people cannot see
that it is they who truly represent the brotherhood of man. If the
God served by Christians does not exist to call his followers to
make a heaven here on Earth, if he does not exist solely to
eliminate racism and injustice in this country; if Jesus is not a
community organizer, he is a failure; an unwitting tool of the dark
forces of conservatism.
Liberals here and around the world have used the specter of
Islamist terrorism, not to point out the radical differences
between that murderous ideology and the civilizing influence of
Christianity on the world, but to caution that all religious
orthodoxy is dangerous. And they have had great success, even in
this country which was founded on the premise that our rights come
from God, and not from government.
Is there room in this country for both political points of view?
Am I my brother’s keeper? Yes, but my government need not be.
