When I am critical in these glosses, I am critical of schools of thought to which I am somehow close. I don’t criticize the Greens, for example, because I just don’t care about them. But more often I lean towards economic liberals and conservatives. This time, an observation from blogger Z-Man: Conservative politics in the 20th and 21st centuries is the worst political debacle in history. Their whole business is to try to prevent things from happening. It’s just that they’ve never been successful at anything. Whatever they’ve tried to prevent, it’s happened. An incredible record.
Five times you prevent it from being voted on. And it gets voted on a sixth time or the Supreme Court decides it.
Z-Man gives a complicated philosophical interpretation, but the reality may be much simpler. Conservatism – as it has profiled itself – is just such a car slower. When you think of such a device, it is clear that if you put it on a car, that car will still reach its destination. It will just get there later. So when conservatives defend some crazy thing like introducing special benefits for pedophiles, it’s going to happen anyway. Just a little later. Five times you prevent it from being voted on. And it gets voted on a sixth time or the Supreme Court decides it.
The slowdown is only good to buy time to redirect in another direction. And if you don’t have a redirector other than a time machine to go back to the Middle Ages, you don’t gain much.
That’s one of the reasons I promote Ivo Budil’s national conservatism on this site. Because it’s not another nostalgic daydream. It’s a forward-looking vision that uses conservative principles as some of the building blocks.
