| Deep
Background |
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I recently discovered that I am a descendant, through my father’s matrilineal line, of Tories. My great-great-great-great-great grandparents and 7 of their 8 children moved to Canada after the War of Independence, maybe because they had been loyal to the Crown and feared reprisals, or maybe because they simply preferred to remain citizens of Britain—the documents are sketchy on the details. At first, I admit, I was a little chagrined, given my Founding Father family name and all, to find relatives on the royalist side of the fence. But then I began to think about how the Revolution might have appeared to them. Did they look upon the rebellion as a kind of madness perpetrated by zealots and demagogues, and the new republic as a reckless experiment that would destroy the social order? Were they repelled by the outlandish and vicious attacks on the King and Parliament in the popular press? Or could they simply not bear to turn a cold shoulder on the motherland? Was it fear, scorn, sentimentality, or a combination of the three that drove them back into the arms of England? These
questions are interesting to me because they begin to crystallize
an unnerving idea that’s been bouncing around in my head for
a while: I wonder if I’m becoming conservative. Not conservative
in most of the ways we define the term these days, of course; most
of my political positions are straight out of the liberal Kama Sutra.
I’m pro-choice and pro-gay marriage. I’m for gun control,
affirmative action, the Endangered Species Act, and the separation
of church and state. I believed a preemptive, unilateral war in
Iraq was a mistake even when I thought Saddam Hussein really did
have WMDs. I believe careful regulation ultimately helps, not hurts,
the economy, and I believe Social Security was directly responsible
for the phenomenal rise in the middle class standard of living in
the last half of the 20th century. And while I’m no great
fan of higher taxes, I fully understand why the benefits I gain
from government far outweigh the biweekly hits to my paycheck. et even as I recite the familiar lefty litany, I can’t help noticing that what I’m really for is the status quo. Most of what I believe in has been long established as the law of the land. Even where my views may seem progressive to the point of falling outside the mainstream, i.e. supporting gay marriage, I’m still operating within the traditional view that marriage really is something more than just a “relationship,” and I tend to find the conservative arguments for same-sex marriage, like those of Andrew Sullivan, to be far and away the most compelling. On a more fundamental level, my secular humanist-civil libertarian outlook has direct and deliberate roots in the Enlightenment culture that gave birth to the very political, economic and social ideas that alienated my Loyalist ancestors and made this country possible. Those ideas may have seemed radical at the time, but as any veteran of the PC wars of the 1990s will tell you, they seem positively reactionary now. Seen through this particular funhouse mirror, where liberalism takes on the stodgy contours of classical conservatism, the hodgepodge of so-called conservative ideas coming out of the Republican Party these days begin to look more and more radical. It’s the religious right, for example, that wants to shape American culture from the top down. It’s neo-conservatives like Richard Pearle and Paul Wolfowitz who have revived the discredited Soviet notion that a superpower could change the culture in places like Afghanistan and Iraq through sheer military might and force of will. It’s the supply-siders who want to gut time-tested regulations and safety nets that keep the economy stable and relatively humane. It’s “constructionist” justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas who want to unmake decades-old legal traditions in the name of ideology. No wonder my Tory blood is on the rise. Fear, scorn, sentimentality: to paraphrase the President, lucky me, I’ve hit the triumvirate. The unsettling realization for a self-proclaimed conservative liberal is that the defenders of the status quo, whether they’re ultimately in the right (pro-democracy forces in pre-Nazi Germany) or the wrong (anti-integration forces in the American South) usually wind up on the losing side of history. Time and again, Americans have found extreme ideas—federalism, Jacksonian democracy, secession, unionism, Mutually Assured Destruction—distasteful or frightening, right up until the moment they embraced them. I’m keeping my hopes up that this time will be different, that the unease with which most Americans view the radical right’s agenda will deepen into revulsion; it all depends on what happens over the next four years. But in the meantime, I’ll be keeping one eye on that tunnel to Windsor. Or better yet, maybe I’ll pack up the family and move us all back to the motherland across the pond, so my daughter can have the chance to grow up in a proper civilization. God save the bloody Queen, lads, we’re coming home. A2P |
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