Back from Africa– again– Tacitus offers up a meditation on shifting political perceptions and realities. Selected chunks of dairy cow:
I have in recent weeks started to question just what the American left thinks American conservatism is. I go through Jesse Taylor’s ‘03 Most Annoying Conservatives list to find not a single individual whom I read or pay attention to; Tim Dunlop tells me that I’m in a minority if I don’t listen to Limbaugh or Hannity; and Dave Neiwert spends a great deal of time and energy countering the eliminationist threat from the marginal idiot Misha. And now Meteor Blades is telling me that the American right is about to achieve its greatest dream. Well, no.
I mean, maybe I’m on the margins. Maybe all the other kids on the right really are taking their marching orders from NRO and Fox News. Maybe everyone else really is arming for violence against the left in ‘04, and I’m excluded due to shoddy marksmanship. Maybe we really are on the brink of pulling off a fantastic policy coup despite all available evidence.
Or maybe, just as the right could barely bear to acknowledge Clinton’s conservative achievements — balanced budgets, welfare reform — so the left can now hardly admit the liberalism of George W. Bush and the modern “conservative” movement. I could be wrong — it’s just a thought.
This isn’t exactly a new topic, but it’s an important one. I’ve found it supremely ironic that the rubric “small-government” can’t be applied to Republicans, to the extent they feel it necessary to legislate morality and private conduct at the national level. I find it ironic that Dean appears to be the fiscal conservative while Bush appears– no, IS– profligate. It’s ironic that many liberals seem to have, through a perhaps too-thorough immersion in the postmodernist version of pluralism, painted themselves into a weird little corner in which “respect all cultures– do not judge!” becomes an ethic that protects those cultural forms that, by all rights, deserve to disappear.
We’re in an amazing period of ideological flux right now. People’s perceptions and interpretations of the same event are wildly different: the world isn’t just spinning; it’s spin.
Great time to be alive and aware.
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