The Conservative Experiment

Not too long ago I Googled myself silly trying to find a document I had read which seemed to me to be the seed that germinated into modern Conservatism. I came up blank, but luckily, I came across a mention of the memo in another blog a couple of days ago.

The document is called the "Powell Memo" and was written as a letter to the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from corporate lawyer Lewis F. Powell in August 1971, two months before Nixon nominated Powell to the Supreme Court. In it, Powell describes a looming threat against American Capitalism by sinister forces. In describing these sinister anti-American entities, Powell ropes in everyone from Fascists to "New Leftists", hardly drawing a line between goose-stepping armies and liberal-thinking college professors. It's spooky to read this memo and see the similarities to how Conservatives view the world today - us vs. them, black vs. white, evil vs. good, Free Enterprise vs. Totalitarian Communism. This kind of thinking is the reason why many people on the right cannot differentiate between social programs and socialism. One broad Conservative stroke covers them all. This is why the righties can equate liberalism with communism, even though, in theory, they have pretty much nothing in common (see the dictionary definitions linked above if you don't believe me).

Anyhow, the last few years have taught us a lot about what happens when this brand of Conservatism is put into practice. A couple of lessons:

• A government guided by Conservative principles is not necessarily a smaller government. As a matter of fact, over the last few decades, we've learned that "Conservative" governments blow money like a drunk at the OTB.
• A government guided by Conservative principles is not necessarily a more limited government. In order to get a majority of votes, Conservatives have had to pander to an electoral bloc that demands increasingly intrusive government - one that tells us what we should be reading, what we should be saying, and whether or not we're even entitled to any privacy in this country. They've gone so far as to imply that the President, at his own discretion, should not, in certain circumstances, be bound by the law of the land.

In other words, they tried it, and it failed. And where are we now? Well, the American public is now forced to debate whether or not torture is justified; whether or not it's okay to invade a sovereign nation that poses no threat to us; whether or not we are obliged to follow the international treaties we signed; and finally, whether or not the President has to obey the law. A sad time indeed.

It's time for liberals to stop allowing ourselves to be labelled with this archaic rhetoric. We liberals represent the views of the vast majority of Americans, many of whom don't know it because the Conservatives have a thirty-year head start reshaping the vernacular and framing the debate. We have to stop assuming that the good guy naturally wins. The bad guys are determined, committed, well-funded, and in it for the long haul.