Posted by
Gestell on Sunday, July 09, 2006 9:34:19 PM
This blog may raise an eyebrow or two. I'm a liberal with a blog on a conservative site. For about a year or so I've engaged in discussion and argument with folks through the old soapboxes and c-log features on TH. I'm old enough, and old-fashioned enough, to think that liberals and conservatives may still have something to say to each other besides slurs and near-obscenities. Am I a majority of one in this sentiment? I'm not sure, but I do expect TH people will let me know.
It's too bad that the topic list doesn't include conservative thought and principles, since that's what I'll try to steer my comments on most topics in that general direction.
As I learn my way around the new TH, I'll begin to provide some links to things I think conservatives might find interesting--starting with conservatism. If people want to be ideologues, then I'd appreciate it if they became literate ideologues.
Unlike all too many of my fellow liberals, I regard myself as a patriot. One of the nastiest and most effective moves that the Right has pulled off in American politics--and I claim no originality in noting this--is to hijack much of the American political vocabulary from liberals, with the result that now only conservatives are allowed to be patriotic, or religious, or brush their teeth regularly (not too regularly, though, since that sounds very nanny-state).
I'll add a pinch of humor (or what I think is humor) as needed--and often it is sorely needed.
I'm also nostalgic--unlike many liberals. I'm nostalgic for an American politics that was more about bargaining (yes, "deals," that most horrible thing for the ideologue to contemplate), interest groups, and governing--as opposed to calls to Armagaddeon and effusions of moral purity as the stuff of politics. I tend to find Pat Buchanan and Al Gore equally tedious and politically loathsome because both couldn't cut a deal behind closed doors to save their lives.
I don't think the political process should be contaminated by disputes about the origin of the universe or the life in it. The establishment of a functioning and effective government, in fact, the oldest such government on the planet was and is a magnificent achievement. One of the things that contributes to both its durability and its majesty is that it was designed to solve practical, perennial problems of governing--not to save our souls or pronounce metaphysical truths. I think many conservatives no longer truly respect, because they do not truly understand, the government they claim to support; indeed, more than a few conservatives today would reject that government in favor of something the Founders would not recognize.