The present state of affairs in the primary race has me looking at that most basic of philosophical questions: under what circumstances could optimism, in the broadest, most cosmic sense, be justified?
Fred’s poor showing to date is the real catalyst for this revisiting of that question. The great swath of American voters doesn’t begin to seriously examine what’s available to it until this point in an election cycle. If those citizens are more inclined to do their comparing and contrasting on the GOP side, they will be left with the impression that the array of hopelessly polluted non-Fred offerings is the full spectrum of what’s available. That’s not the case. There’s a bedrock core of principles and a vision informed by it that could be brought front and center for the casting of a ballot.
America is free, robust, obviously vast and teeming with people. Its history is overwhelmingly one of honor, vision, invention, and cultural richness. It’s brimming with various ethnic inputs, demographic variances, levels of refinement and differing sets of priorities, all vying for prominence, clashing and occasionally finding synthesis into synergystic new possibilities.
This means that some less-than-laudible elements find their way into our national life. On balance, these have not prevailed.
Most of the pundits and public intellectuals I admire still sound the drumbeat of optimism. They posit that, in spite of the unfortunate developments of the last sixty years in the governmental and cultural arenas, the majority of America’s people are smart, good and ready to create a golden future.
I wish I could wholeheartedly get on board. Through the past several decades I have done a reasonable job of signing on, even through the deterioration of our sense of what it means to educate ourselves, live in dignity, express ourselves artistically, and employ our reason. We have, after all, remained prosperous, comfortable, and able to defend ourselves.
But we now look past an obvious voice of consistent fealty to freedom, dignity and reason and instead fixate on a lineup of of practitioners of candidate-speak whose self-proclaimed conservative mantles are each fatally damaged by completely contrary and harmful tenets.
My second choice is Mitt Romney, but he greatly underwhelms me. I wish I’d see eveidence that he was done with the vernacular of buzz phrases like “change” and glad-hand concepts like “the brokennes of Washington” and his record as a manager. And he downright scared the s— out of me the other night on The Tonight Show when he told Jay Leno, “I actually like Ted Kennedy.”
Under him in numbers of delegates - and above Fred - are McCain and Huckabee, each of whose views of leading America look like amorphous blobs in which swim such disastrous notions as smoking bans, global-warming legislation, paths to citizenship for illegal aliens, curbs on free speech, and biparisan measures for confirming federal judges.
Rudy, of course, is pro-choice and his personal life indicates that he doesn’t set much store by family, the bedrock institution behind America’s greatness. I will say this about him: he forever has my admiration for removing Yasser Arafat from a private UN fucntion at Lincoln Center, proclaiming, “I wouldn’t invite Yasser Arafat anywhere, any time.”
The spirit-of-Reagan meme has been given dismally shallow treatment in this campaign season, but it has served a function. The towering embodiment of love of freedom from Dixon, Illinois does indeed serve as a repository of the core of bedrock principles that is now fading so alarmingly from sight. That set of verities is what’s at stake.
Is free-market economics always right and good or not? Is an ability to recognize evil and a willingness to fight it always good and right or not? Is fealty to the original intent of our Constitution’s framers always right and good or not? Are decency and dignity always worthy of upholding or not?
It should be onbvious to BN readers how I answer, which makes it all the more irritating to hear pundits - even standard bearers for neoconservatism - say that Reagan was unsusual as a candidate who also led an ideological movement and that we should just reconcile ourselves to this year’s more “historically normal” slate of candidates. To me, that smacks of inside-the-Beltway / conservatism-as-just-a-brand-name / nothing-too-big-is-at-stake Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Alas, it looks like will it be, though.
What gets lost as a result is any kind of widely disseminated understanding of the real nature and value of human freedom.
It may be that the best we can do is hold the eventual GOP nominee’s feet to the fire and hold our noses as we enter the voting booth in November for what hopefully won’t be the last time.
