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Why It’s Hard to Be a Conservative
Is it difficult to be a conservative? That’s the question I was asking myself this morning. It seemed like an odd question, like some hidden part of me invading my psyche and challenging me to look at the truth.
The question seems strange because it’s like asking myself if it’s hard to breathe, or if it’s hard to exercise regularly — uh, well, no that one really is hard. But then I realized there are, for me, responsibilities, limitations, and even difficulties with my wearing the conservative mantle. (Many of you may choose to substitute “conservative” with “Republican,” because they are similar, but in certain cases, the distinction matters.)
It’s also one thing to hold certain values, but to practice them and own up to them can be something quite different and awkward. Conservative values, after all, don’t include moral relativism, nurtured emotion, distortions, and lies. It calls us to be upright citizens, to honor the Constitution, morality, and truth.
So when is it hard for me to be a conservative? When I’m dealing with people who aren’t conservative, or who don’t know what they are. Or when I’m with a person who defines conservatism differently than I do. You could say that we conservatives are not creating the dissension, but our holding to our beliefs with determination and commitment certainly contributes to the strain in relationships.
It’s hard to be a conservative when I have to limit the ideas I discuss with others: we can’t talk about values, laws, customs, or culture because none of those areas is free of politics anymore. As a person who is curious, eager to learn, and friendly, conservativism requires me to be discerning about whom I share with. That means a relationship with a person I disagree with has built-in roadblocks. I don’t like that fact.
But I’m committed to being a conservative, to honoring and living my values. I also value harmonious relationships with friends and family. So, estrangement, whether I like it or not, is part of the equation.
It’s just hard sometimes to be a conservative.
Published in Politics
I consider myself to be conservative not necessarily a conservative because that subjects me to much interpretation I’m probably not inclined to accept. About the only area I have concerns regarding this issue is in interpreting the U.S. Constitution and what that means in terms of my approach to political issues. There I am an originalist in interpreting the Constitution and believe in federalism and a significant deference to States’ rights. Being conservative, I think, in the process of correcting things gotten wrong in the original Constitution, we have added many new wrong and unhelpful elements, both as amendments and in interpretation. It is indeed hard to deal with some of that.
May I ask what your birth order was amongst your siblings? I have read that later-born siblings feel way less pressure to reproduce than earlier-born siblings.
Whether you’re Shinto, Catholic, Hindu, Baptist or a fill-in-the-blank, you have a set of beliefs. This is common among mankind. If it were not so, we would not have the thing we call culture. Not one of these belief systems is easy because it remains mostly unchanged in the course of a lifetime.
Members of the other club, the ones who don’t adhere to a set of fixed principles, may seem to have it easy in comparison because there’s no immovable boundaries they must deal with, as we must daily. But what does your observation tell you? Do these folks seem like a really happy, successful bunch? Do today’s Progressives seem to have high satisfaction levels?
Here’s some data.
And specifically in the distribution of happiness you can see that things aren’t all that different the world over. The highest scores are from the wealthiest nations, so if we corrected for wealth, the differences would be less noticeable.
Life isn’t easy for anyone, but it’s very subjective. The good life for some is at least a meal a day. For others, it’s the year they kept up with the Joneses.
My point is the folks who rewrite the rules have burdens just like those of us who have fixed values. They may merrily navigate a situation the fixed values camp struggles with, but I believe they struggle greatly in circumstances where we might rest easy, knowing we did the right thing.
The piper gets paid either way.
Right, I understand all that, but what a faith teaches, and how its followers act on that teaching do not always correlate, and individual outcomes are very often taken as signs (rightly and wrongly) of higher things. Among the Puritans, for instance, who were Calvinists, while they did not teach that prosperity was itself always an outward sign of election, their social structure nevertheless put a high emphasis on working hard and frugality, which often brings prosperity. Thus prosperity was taken as a sign of your inward faith. It could be a way of signaling to your neighbors that you believed you had been elected, and were being blessed. Incentives, such as the good opinion of your neighbor, do matter, and faith can be twisted and misdirected at times.
Which was the larger point I was trying to make regarding Conservatism: Conservatism values hard work, strong families, and personal restraint. These very often can (but do not always), lead to certain outcomes. There is therefore a temptation for some to point to someone who, having a problematic family, lousy economic luck, or other issues, and say “they obviously haven’t been Conservative enough, for if they had been Conservative, then these things would not have happened to them.”
Well, that was flipped in my family. I’m the eldest, with 4 kids. My next youngest sister has 3, my youngest will likely never have any.
The part I bolded there is why I haven’t described myself as a conservative for years and don’t know how to describe myself today, despite having a what I think is a very clear sense of what I believe.
Mike Huckabee isn’t what I’d consider conservative on anything else other than social issues. That is, if there was a version of Mike Huckabee that didn’t believe in Jesus, nearly everyone would say that he’s indistinguishable from a big government liberal. Yet, somehow, he still counts as conservative.
I don’t discuss politics that often off of Ricochet, but when I do I find it more useful to not talk about who I am, but what I think about an issue. It leads to less bickering if people don’t have a preconceived notion as to what my identity is.
And frankly I get tired of feeling like I’m beating on a brick wall, PH. I’m running out of patience to even consider doing that anymore.
So if you’re saying some people wrongly ascribe success or lack of it to pet behaviors, I agree. Anecdotal evidence of this sort has been misused perhaps more than it is properly used.
But is there any -ism that doesn’t get perverted? My objection was that the core of Calvinism and the core of the prosperity gospel are diametrically opposed. You portrayed one as dependent on the other. One may have grown from a misuse or misunderstanding of the other, but the core points of each have no common ground.
Excellent ideas. I hate being misunderstood, never mind underappreciated! But that is a fascinating idea, @hoyacon: talking about conservatism theoretically might defuse a potentially hostile discussion. I’ll have to think that one over. BTW, I saw that article and even thought about addressing that topic (someone should) but the one I wrote on resonated with me more.
Thank you so much. Beautifully said. And so true.
Today earlier I had 2 odd encounters. The first was with a generally conservative niece, but somehow the DACA issue came up and she thought me heartless to think legalistically instead of feel emotionally about how a majority of these people “came here as children”! I tried in vain to say that there has to be some kind of moral hazard for that, and maybe we should put some focus on deportations of guilty adults who have stayed in the country illegally, while offering some leniency to the minors brought along in the family package. But she couldn’t grasp my point about sending out a message that we intend to protect the country and the conversation ended as she exited my car with a loud pronoucement that “KARMA IS A BITCH.”
Don’t ask me why karma can’t apply to the gate-busters I referred to. And no, she didn’t offer specifics of what this karma is going to do to me but I’ll come back to report when it shows up, lest my ignorance endangers any of the rest of you.
The second incident was a lunch with a person who I know is as democrat party-voting far lefty as they come, but who I want to retain as a friend on other levels. I had pre-determined to stay clear of politics but she related her recent experiences with some cousins at a dinner where she tried to hide her own loyalties. Finally she shared that she has totally written off a lot of people during the last year, as she judged their different mindsets as basically “indecent.” So again, I was on thin ice but having learned from the morning experience, this time I think I escaped detection by nodding.
Yes it’s a challenge being conservative.
The hardest part is realizing that a lot of your countrymen are enemies who would take away your rights to free speech, to defend yourself, to educate your children as you see fit, and to practice a non SJW converged religion; they will categorize you as mentally ill if you disagree with them. That’s if they’re feeling nice. Otherwise, you’re just evil and they hate you. You used to think of some of them as friends, more of them as congenial and liberal people whose company you might enjoy.
Your illusions are dissipating and that isn’t easy.
You might want to tell your niece that everyone has karma, good and bad. On balance, your conscience is clear. Is she so certain about her own? (I know you can’t say that, but it sure would be tempting. )
The arrogance that leads to this point of view is hard for me to comprehend. How is it so easy for friends to demonize us? What did we have in common with them before this happened?
Actually, it’s not hard at all. Why, it’s just like this:
So is that us or them?? ;-)
I have no problem being conservative (now). Selling conservatism is a whole ‘nother balla wax.
Inequality is a natural state of being… personal success is proportional to personal responsibility… life is not and never will be fair… These are not palatable ideas to many, many people.
@skipsul put it this way:
Part of this isn’t a specifically conservative thing. Everyone loves a good story better than a bad story. And what makes a good story? A narrative arc where a struggle is overcome. Maybe not overcome completely, but an ending where the first tender shoots of regeneration have at least begun to sprout. Americans are an optimistic people: where there’s life, there’s hope; call no man tragic until he dies.
Writing compelling tragedy is hard, whether the tragedy is historical or fictional. Writing compelling tragedy about someone still alive is even harder – and in a way, it’s unAmerican. Underdog stories, not tragedy, are the American Way. I know it annoys @titustechera to be mentioned, but he might be able to put it better.
And I do think Skip is right that there is a pop-religious element to this. American religion puts a premium on a good conversion story. No theology (I think) requires one to invent a good conversion story, but there is social pressure to have one, to demonstrate one’s bona fides.
Got it. We don’t appreciate tragedy, but we love the underdog–one especially who finds his or her way. Thank you, @midge. And @skipsul, too.
I am the oldest, with one younger brother. My parents married older, otherwise they probably would have had far more children. In the extended family, though, I am one of the youngest: I have a slew of cousins, nearly all of whom are older than me.
No, that’s exactly the right progression according to the theory. The eldest feels the most pressure to reproduce. The youngest feels the least pressure to reproduce.
The idea is that, if the goal of reproduction is to pass along one’s genes, then the youngest doesn’t have to reproduce because they share enough genes with their older siblings that their own genes will get passed along by proxy if their older siblings have enough kids.
Well, that doesn’t fit the hypothesis then. You need multiple older siblings who have lots of kids of their own for the hypothesis to fit.
I have my doubts about the hypothesis :) There may be something to it, but culture probably plays a much greater role. Some people think everyone should marry young; others think that everybody should wait until they are older, some people think everybody must have a large family, others think anybody with more than 2 kids is a freak. I think it takes all kinds of different people to make the world go around, and I am grateful to have been raised with that ethic :)
Well, I’m the oldest and had no kids. My brother, two years younger, had no kids. My sister, seven years younger than I, had no kids. So much for passing along the genes. Then again, maybe society is better off!
I would add, though, that I am not childless on purpose: I was open to having children, but just never got pregnant, and circumstances, financial and otherwise, were just not conducive to adopting. When I was younger, I would have been distraught if someone had told me that I would never have children, but I am strangely ok with it. I never had any real interest in a career, so now I am a housewife and I spend a fair amount of time helping my elderly parents. If this makes me a loser, I am ok with that :) It is unfortunate that some circles within conservatism have picked up on feminist themes, such as, women have to always be doing something or working towards something all the time or else they are losers. I don’t see that as Calvinism, I see that as feminism, but maybe the two things have something in common? Honest question, I know very little about Calvinism.
I don’t think it’s just feminist themes, though. It’s also antifeminist themes.
Because a pretty popular antifeminist theme is that women should marry to become breeders – that motherhood is the higher calling. While the naturally barren are exempt from this duty, reluctance to have children when you can is seen as shirking. And if you’re shirking the higher calling of motherhood, you’d better have a pretty damn good excuse, some great accomplishment to serve as the “consolation prize”.
It’s naturally easy for “pro-family” and “pro-natal” to become entangled.
People can also feel pressure to have kids so that they don’t outbreed us. Who they are depends, but in my experience, they are usually either the low-IQ or immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants. Whether it’s doing one’s duty to up the population’s IQ or to populate Christendom (or at least dar al-harb), the pressure may not be very effective (else it’d be working better), but it’s not nonexistent.
Well, I think that some feminist themes have crept into anti feminism :) Most of the Catholic pro-lifers I know teach natural family planning. They are very accepting and supportive of large families, but it’s not a requirement by any means. I do see what you are describing on the internet, though, so I definitely agree that it’s a problem. But to the extent that many anti feminists seem to think that all women should be very busy all the time doing something-anything-preferably having children, but really, anything-that is a feminist idea. It’s at least partly a symptom of a workaholic society, which feminism has played a big part in creating.
I don’t feel guilty about not having children- I didn’t choose that-and I don’t feel guilty about not having a career either. If I had reason to believe that I was the one person on earth who could cure cancer, than I would feel guilty, but I have no reason to believe that. :)If I had pursued a career, I probably would have been either a lawyer, or a college professor, and there are far too many of those already: the world doesn’t need more. I do not believe that I would be making the world a better place by doing those things, and I believe that many hard working women who think they are making the world a better place are deluding themselves. Just because you are busy all the time and working really hard, and getting paid, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re being helpful. I wish women like Hillary Clinton understood this, and a lot of men would do well to understand this too.
My father is now 93; I spend on average 20 hours a week helping my parents, and if I am lucky, those hours will increase in coming years. But I am on call 24 hours a day; there is no way of knowing when or for how long they will need me, and there is no way to schedule ahead of time. I have witnessed career women trying to care for elderly parents, and I don’t want to be them. Of course, not all women will have children, and not all women will have elderly parents and a very tiny number of women won’t have either, but the vast majority of women will have both.
True.
For me, the hardest part was facing the fact that it was the type of people whose company I enjoyed the most, the people who self identified as “free spirits”, who actually had the least respect for the idea that everyone should have the rights you mention.
My brother the athiest once told me that Christians deserve criticism because they are judged by their own standards. And according to him, those standards are what he says they are. It is the same as being conservative. That’s what really makes it hard, that you are first of all misunderstood, and secondly, don’t want to be understood.
Conservatives and Christians know that man is flawed and cannot be perfected. Liberals do not hold that view. It is a powerful differential that is very difficult to bridge. When conservatives fail, they look inward, when liberals do, they seem to look outward.