What most people in media say about Republican Conservatives is stupid and wrong. They don’t know what we believe, what we stand for and why.
In 2005 DNC Chair Howard Dean went on “Meet the Press” and said, “Our moral values, in contradiction to the Republicans’, is we don’t think kids ought to go to bed hungry at night. Our moral values say that people who work hard all their lives ought to be able to retire with dignity.”
That was the first time I heard that Republicans thought kids ought to go to bed hungry at night when we all know that Republicans think they should go to bed hungry in the morning after a night shift in the textile mill because we won’t let them unionize.
I’m told that we’re for defining marriage between a man and a woman because we either hate gays, are afraid of gays or are secretly gay and project our self-loathing on the West Hollywood set. I also understand that we are against abortion because we want the government in women’s wombs, we want to lower taxes because we’re greedy and we defend Israel because we believe it will hurry some apocalypse along that will hasten the return of Jesus who will wipe out the Jews.
If Republican leadership in Washington can’t clearly articulate our platform I doubt that the opposition is going to get it right. Let me offer a few ideas that might help show a method to our manliness; we believe that entities have an essence. That already sounds fancy and horrible, but let me unpack it to make my case.
To conserve implies that something important is being lost that is worth holding on to. It’s also why we aren’t terribly interested in future utopias, new forms we can evolve into, we don’t dream a lot because there can be no hope for the future if the true things of the past are rejected or forgotten. So something must be conserved for there to be conservatism.
What we seek to conserve are not buildings, environments or kingdoms, but the true things the great men of old discovered. Notice, I didn’t say these things were invented, because our values weren’t invented, they were discovered, revealed and learned.
An essence is immaterial, which is already going to piss off most modern leftists because they don’t believe in an objective immaterial truth. An example of an objective immaterial truth would be that “Murder is wrong.” Just about everyone believes that murder is wrong but it cannot be weighed. You can’t see it, taste it, touch it with your wide stance in a bathroom stall, yet we all know it’s there. It’s an essential doctrine of Conservatism.
Where this intersects politics is when the essence of marriage is challenged by the left. If the word “marriage” means anything at all, on what grounds can it be changed? It has an essential meaning but relativists don’t believe anything has an essential meaning, which is why they misuse words like: hate, liberal, tolerance and equality.
When I say that slavery is wrong, I don’t just mean that our culture decided it was wrong, for it would be wrong even if everyone thought it was right. Slavery has an essence. One man cannot own another man and call it “freedom”, though Joe Biden came close by calling paying taxes “patriotic”.
Essentials transcend culture. I’m really tired of hearing the stupid argument that I’m only a Christian because I was born in America, though my parents started out as Christian Scientist (which is neither Christian or Science…it’s like Grape Nuts. No grapes or nuts. It’s also like “liberal Democrat” but that’s a different post) and my other parent was a virulent anti-religionist. Culture obviously plays into the ease of acceptance or rejection of values, which is all the reason more that we must subdue culture to bring its powerful influence in line with the truth.
In “Plato’s Seventh Letter” he describes a thing’s essence as a kind of soul:
Under this one head we must group everything which has its existence, not in words nor in bodily shapes, but in souls-from which it is clear that it is something different from the nature of the circle itself…
Plato argues that a perfect circle has never been made, yet we recognize an attempt at a circle. That’s because a circle is an ideal, we have access to the perfect essence in our mind but it cannot be produced in the materials, yet that ideal exists at least in our minds. And it’s by this ideal that all materials are judged to be a good circle or not.
Republicans conserve the ideal. We believe it has an immovable essence that doesn’t change over time. It’s why our best traits include conserving idealism (belief the ideal), optimism (belief in the optimum), and the essentials.