November 14, 2004
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After elections the democrats have been arguing about whether to move
further left or move further right in order to have a chance of winning
elections in the future. It looks like the idea of moving ‘right’ seems
to be winning. I cannot possibly stress how bad an idea I think this
is. I would even go so far as to say that any kind of serious
significant move to the right would have a good chance of ruining the
democrat’s chances of ever regaining power in the near future. It might
work as a very long term strategy if sustained but even then I don’t
think I’d like very much the nation we’d end up with.The reason this won’t work as a quick fix is rather simple really. Such
a shift would fit perfectly into the republican narrative. It would
give them fuel with which to fight for years and years to come. You see
conservatives have not just been painting all democrats as liberal
elites over the years, they’ve also been painting them as unscrupulous
people willing to say or do anything to win an election. This is the
underlying argument beneathe the claim that John Kerry “flip-flops” on
issues. It is the idea that Kerry has no core beliefs and just wants to
win. This argument which most democrats think that no rational person
would believe actually has a profound impact on your average person.How much worse will it be if democrats start talking more and
more like conservatives, especially right after their loss in the
2004 elections? Much worse I’d say. The right will keep pulling up
quotes from years ago to ‘prove’ how dishonest democrats are in their
current endeavors. There will just be no end to it. Worse, if
democrats went too far they would have a hard time convincing a number
of people who regularly vote for them to go to the poles at all. People
who now think the conservatives are the devil incarnate may start to
think that the democrats are nothing but the devil’s younger brother.
Of course the ultimate irony here is that both parties have been
shifting left and right as needed over and over again through American
history. Many a ‘conservative’ ideal so strongly argued by the
republicans was once a major tenant of the democratic party and vice
versa for liberal principles.What we have to talk about though as a nation is bringing the entire
political landscape back into a more coherent line. Less trickery
and more truth needs to be the way of the future. People need to have
parties that much more clearly represent their core beliefs not just
parties that are striving to win at all costs.The only way for this to happen is to have more parties. Despite what
some people argue, 2 is by no means enough to represent even a majority
of belief sets held by the American people. We need many many parties
for a fair balance.But as we won’t get that anytime soon, I propose an immediate smaller
measure that would be a huge step in the right direction. I say we need
to create a flat out “liberal party”. The liberal party would flat out
defy the common wisdom that paints liberals as evil or dangerous. It
would be a party of change oriented, future oriented reason and would
be determined to demonstrate its beliefs with profound, direct,
irrefutable arguments.A liberal party would be a solid admission of the fundamental truth
that you can’t really stop a party that is pushing far in one direction
by pushing on the center or worse in that same direction. The best you
could hope for if you do that is a false victory where you’ve won power
but only by becoming that which you were striving to defeat. The result
would be a society so shifted to the right that it is a virtual alien
to the rest of the world at large.The liberal party would simply be a large group of people who refuse to
let that happen. They would adopt real liberalism, strong
unapologetic liberalism, and a liberalism that is willing to attack
conservatism on the same level as conservatives have been willing to
attack liberals.The irony here is that although you’d think that all of the members of
this liberal party would come from the democrats, a great many I
suspect would come from the current republicans as well. You see a
great many modern republicans are really near liberals in disguise. The
very existence of the neo-conservative movement to me only goes to show
how very liberal many republicans can get.. What’s more there can be no
doubt that a great many republicans are totally unconfortable with the
highly liberal dialectic of some of their high spending allies, just as
many others are uncofortable with the heavily religious portions of the
conservative population.Now this split would leave conservatives able to actually be
conservative in truth. That means status quo, business pro,
nationalist, patriots, small government, state centered,
preservationalist, strict interpretationalists conservativism.
The overwhelming principle behind conservativism would be the idea of
change only when that change is necessary to preserve the current
American way of life. No more. Where of course that American way of
life is largely based on certain christian religious values and
business principles. This in strict contrast to the liberal idea of
change is necessary and inevitable and must be embraced in order to
improve the nation and the world in the near future. The new republican
party would probably end up reabsorbing a number of splinter parties
that have come into existence because they claim that republicans
aren’t nearly conservative enough, especially as they would get a new
opportunity to influence their party’s direction, just as the liberal
party would absorb a great many of the secondary parties that now exist
and syphon off a good number of votes from the democrats each year.Now once republicans have become the true conservative party and
liberal party has been created but sucking away half othe democrats and
taking a good chunk out of the republicans as well, this would leave
room for the large portion of remaining democrats to become a truly
Centrist party. That is, the democrats would be a party representative
of the idea of moderation between the principles of change and
consistency. They would take the stance of those normal regular people
who think that we need to face our future with caution and care
but not too much caution and care. They would want to react decisively
when emergency change is necessary whether it be to preserve a
necessary existing system or value or to adopt to a budding future
systems or values rationally and fairly. They would want to
examine other issues before making decisions and their general
inclination would be toward the middle concilliatory ground when
conflicts arise. They would be the ones to want to go a little bit in
both directions as necessary until it becomes clear which direction is
best.Now this new democrat or centrists party would bleed off some
republicans too. Namely those republicans that are only republicans
because they’ve always been republicans and don’t agree very much with
either the strongly conservative republicans or the nearly liberal
conservatives in the party. It would of course also take in the other
half of the democratic party especially those who were on the verge of
defecting to the republicans because they were afraid that the
democratic party was becoming “too liberal”.The most important gain of this new trichotimy is that by making very
clear distinctions between the three parties it should make some of
those who are entirely uninterested in politics because they feel they
don’t fit in either of the two dominant parties willing to re-examine
the political scene. They may find themselves quite in line with one of
the three parties in terms of beliefs and principles. Getting
these people into the politcal arena would spell more votes for all
three parties and would be overall a good thing.This would of course be a first step in the direction of spanning
political landscape where all ideas can be treated equally and compared
and contrasted against one another without the baggage of the dirty
tricks and deceit that rules politics today. In such a world the best
ideas whether they come originally from the right or the left should
bubble up to the foreground and be largely adopted by all three parties
in the end proving their worth. What’s more the US would end up
looking a lot more balanced when compared to the rest of the
world rather than seeming like a nation barinwashed by some weird
neo-conservatism philosophy.This would only be the first step to an ideal world of course where
parties are much less significant than individual ideas but it would at
least be a step in the right direction and a much better system
than we have today.
