The next time someone tells you they're a Conservative, ask them to clarify. There's a huge difference between what our college professors told us it meant, and what it means in today's reality. Here's my take on what a Conservative really is.
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"Where Have You Gone, Joe Conservative?"
I can still remember my first political science class. Father Putka made it so easy to understand what it meant to be Liberal or Conservative. "Conservatives don't trust the Federal government as far as they could throw `em, they think the big things should be left up to the states, and they feel people should be free from the government butting into their lives." Pretty straightforward stuff. The kind of simplicity that lead many people to adopt the Conservative philosophy as their own. Its appeal is one reason why Conservative presidential candidates have won five of the last seven elections.
While hot-button issues would come and go, we always knew where true Conservatives stood. States' rights, individual freedoms, the utmost respect for the rule of law, and above all else, a healthy distrust of government--especially when it came to spending our money or snooping around our personal business.
After living through the last five years, I wonder what Father Putka is telling his students these days. Either Conservatives didn't truly believe those things in the first place, or they've decided it's more important to put party loyalty in front of their traditional core beliefs. Either way, the Conservative movement has lost its mojo.
During the early 1980's, Ronald Reagan drew the ire of Liberals when he called for dismantling the Department of Education. As Conservatives would explain at the time, something as important as the education of our children shouldn't be left in the hands of fickle, politically-driven bureaucrats and politicians. States, even individual cities and towns should be able to determine the curriculum that's best for their children. Using this philosophy as their guide, Conservatives were elected to school boards across the nation, determined to "save" our schools.
Fast forward 20 years to 2002 and picture George W. Bush standing arm in arm with Teddy Kennedy as he signed the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act into law. It called for a 27% increase over the 2001 Federal education budget, a 49% increase in Federal funding over the 2000 budget, and a promise of more to come. Just as important, it gave unprecedented control of schools to the Federal government. The Feds were even given the ability to close "failing" schools--a power they never had before. Throw in increased testing, new mandates for teacher qualifications, and the ever-growing burden of data collection and red tape on the schools, and states have been left to wonder what powers--if any--they still have with regard to educating our children.
As sure as death and taxes, traditional Conservatives always used the government-run social programs made popular by FDR, and the "Great Society" programs of LBJ, as prime examples of how Liberals wanted to turn America into a socialist nation. Believing that less government was better; would any real Conservative have voted in favor of President Bush's next major piece of legislation--the new Medicare prescription drug benefit plan for seniors? At a cost of $534 billion over the next seven years, this complicated maze offers seniors over 70 plans to choose from, and has more strings attached than a 20 person kite. Even with the huge amount of money spent on the program, most estimates say the majority of seniors are expected to realize only a small reduction in prescription costs--if there's any reduction at all.
Why would 204 Republican Representatives and 43 Republican Senators agree to a plan like this? Either they're not what they profess to be, they put re-election concerns in front of their traditional values, or they tried to help their friends in the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries. Heck, it might just be a combination of all three. Don't forget, pharmaceutical companies are expected to make as much as $139 billion in profits over the next ten years as a result of this program. Throw in as much as $12 billion for insurance companies, $25 billion for doctors and hospitals, and finally, another $86 billion for businesses needed to carry out the cumbersome program, and you can start to get an idea of why so many so-called Conservatives gave their approval. Remember, one Republican Senator alone, Orrin Hatch, has received almost $800,000 in campaign contributions from the drug industry in recent years. If the latest scandal involving Republican lobbyist Jack "the rip us off" Abramoff has taught us anything, it's that money always trumps everything else with politicians. Lately, Conservatives seem particularly drawn to it.
Marriage regulation is another area where Conservatives have always said states should be left to develop their own standards. For example, some states allow kids as young as 13 years old to marry. Many others extend marriage rights to convicted rapists and murderers. Regardless of how absurd some of these rights may be, it's the law of the land that any marriage recognized in one state, must be recognized in another. Conservatives have never had a problem with this. That is, until Vermont (civil unions) and Massachusetts recently enacted laws extending marriage rights to same-sex couples. Were those couples given special rights? No, they were granted the same rights to marriage as all of us have--even convicted sex offenders.
Some Conservatives have gone as far as calling for a Constitutional amendment to "protect the sanctity of marriage." (If anybody's seen the popular TV show The Bachelor or seen our divorce rate, we already know it's too late for that) In the 217 years since our country's Constitution was adopted, it's only been amended 27 times--mostly to set in stone such bedrock beliefs as the Bill of Rights, the abolition of slavery, and the right to vote for women and blacks. Never has a Constitutional amendment been used for exclusionary means. If some Conservatives have their way, that's all about to change. This abandonment of core beliefs--in this case favoring a drastic Federal solution instead of states' rights--is not just confined to the issue of same-sex marriage.
Perhaps there's no clearer way to illustrate how today's Conservatives feel about changing the rules in the middle of the game as what we all witnessed last spring with the Terri Schiavo debacle. Schiavo, a young married woman suffering from an eating disorder, fell into a coma after having a heart attack. With no change in her condition after five years, Mrs. Schiavo's husband, Michael, decided to carry out his ailing wife's wishes and take her off of the feeding tube. The tube was the only thing keeping the now brain-dead woman "alive." While healthy, she had told her husband that she didn't want to be kept alive by machines in case of an accident.
Instead, Mrs. Schiavo's parents intervened, trying to keep their daughter breathing. While their position is understandable, the courts ruled in favor of the husband--not once, but over and over again throughout the decade-long legal battle that ensued. Judges spanning the political spectrum said that Florida law was crystal-clear. A spouse has final say over end-of-life decisions--period. When Conservatives didn't like the results the courts consistently handed down, they tried to change the rules. Instead of following the diagnosis of four neurologists, a radiologist, and Mrs. Schiavo's attending physician, Florida's legislature signed Terri's Law, a law designed with no other purpose but to ignore the undesirable court rulings. Governor Jeb Bush speedily signed the law. This time it was the Florida Supreme Court siding with Mr. Schiavo. They declared the newly enacted law to be unconstitutional.
What happened next surely had Barry Goldwater, the "Father" of the modern Conservative movement, rolling over in his grave. Instead of accepting the numerous court rulings and the advice of highly-qualified doctors, the United States Congress decided it should be the one to decide what's best for the Schiavo family. It wasn't enough to simply create a hastily-written law; many Conservative leaders actually went to the hospital where Mrs. Schiavo was being cared for. The grandstanding got so bad that President Bush did something he didn't even do when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. That is, he hurried back from vacation, just to sign the "emergency" legislation into law. The whole episode finally ended when a United States District Court ruled that Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube could not be reinserted.
What we learned about Conservatives was mind-blowing. In pandering to their pro-birth-- err, "pro-life" base, true colors came shining through. Senator Bill Frist, the Senate's majority leader, a self described Christian Conservative, and a decorated surgeon himself, concluded that Terri Schiavo wasn't brain dead at all. He based his "diagnosis" on a 15 minute video he watched that showed Mrs. Schiavo involuntarily "smiling." Apparently that was more convincing than believing the scores of doctors that had cared for Mrs. Schiavo. Tom Delay, the House majority leader and a hero to the Conservative movement, even threatened the judges that ruled in the case. Delay said, "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior..." One can only assume that Mr. Delay would have wished judges to ignore state and Federal law in deciding the case. Who better to give advice about ignoring state and Federal laws? Trying not to be outdone, Senator Rick Santorum has even used the Terri Schiavo case in an appeal to raise money for his struggling re-election campaign.
The hysterics didn't end there. Instead of working to sure up end-of-life questions and loopholes that still exist in many states, most Conservatives went on the attack. Conservative political pundits launched an all out assault on Michael Schiavo, accusing him of being an adulterer because he and his girlfriend have two children. Others accused him of attacking his wife because of an unhappy marriage and causing her brain injuries. Still others urged protestors to show Mr. Schiavo what they thought about him. One woman even held a sign with pictures of O.J. Simpson, Scott Pederson, and Michael Schiavo that read, "Three of a kind." All of this hatred and mistruths directed towards a man whose wife's autopsy revealed that her brain was less than half the size of a normally-functioning brain. The autopsy also revealed that Mrs. Schiavo was indeed in a permanent vegetative state and that she had gone blind as a result of her injuries.
While Conservatives have attempted to defend these seemingly hypocritical stances on big government programs, looked for Federal solutions to issues they traditionally favored with states' rights, ignored protection of individual freedoms, and have tried to cover for corrupted politicians carrying the Conservative label, it's becoming increasing hard for even the most ardent Conservative to defend many actions of the current administration.
Take the latest revelation about President Bush ignoring Federal laws while spying on American citizens. But wasn't he doing this to stop terrorism? While we'd all like to believe that's the case, it requires us to break some of our most important Conservative bedrocks in order to believe this explanation. You know the ones about having a healthy distrust of government, believing in individual rights, and especially the one about keeping the government from snooping behind our backs. Even Conservatives cannot explain why the president would need to engage in a secret spying program when all he has to do is ask a judge for the right to do so. The same judges that have ruled in presidents' favor over 99% of the time when they ask for the power to spy on Americans suspected of breaking important laws. Since 9/11, the government has requested this right over 4000 times. Not once have they been denied. In fact, the government can even get warrants up to 72 hours after they engage in wiretapping or other surveillance tactics. So that leaves one question for Conservatives to answer. Why did the president need to be so secretive if he was truly spying on people he believed were a threat to national security?
How would a political science professor describe what it means to be a Conservative these days? Would the old definitions still hold? Would he or she be able to say the things Father Putka used to tell his students? Conservatives need to be asking themselves these same questions.
Something tells me won't. After all, they're too busy running up the highest deficit in the history of the world. They're too busy caving in to the biggest spending president ever--including LBJ. They're too busy trying to put unprecedented powers in the hands of the Federal government. They're too busy looking the other way when our most basic rights have been intruded upon. They're too busy worrying about how they're going to get the money needed for reelection. Come to think of it, Conservatives are so busy being everything they once professed to hate that they can't seem to remember what it is they actually believed in the first place. Maybe Father Putka could help them out.