A Daniel De Groot Golden Oldie
From Thu Jan 01, 2009. Original HERE.
As a starting point for defining conservatism, and nailing down what the real atomic core of conservatism is, I started by asking: What do conservatives think it is? How do they answer this question?
It turns out, they don't really know. Their efforts to define it are worth studying though, partly because the answers they provide are revealing, but also because their own failure to find an answer satisfactory even just to themselves points to the need for outsiders to step in and provide the answers conservatives can't or won't face.
As a starting point for defining conservatism, and nailing down what the real atomic core of conservatism is, I started by asking: What do conservatives think it is? How do they answer this question?
It turns out, they don't really know. Their efforts to define it are worth studying though, partly because the answers they provide are revealing, but also because their own failure to find an answer satisfactory even just to themselves points to the need for outsiders to step in and provide the answers conservatives can't or won't face.
Generally, when I do a diary, I want to have something to say. Something to make you think. I want it to be worthwhile even if you disagree with me-or even, especially if you disagree with me. But lately things have been going so fast, it's genuinely hard to digest things fast enogh to post about them before something else even more timely and thought-provoking comes along. And so the backlog grows.
Well, it stops here! Err... would you believe it slows down briefly to gawk at a roadside attraction? Well, never mind. Here's an emergency catch-up potpouri, designed, if nothing more, to relieve some feelings of guilt I'm dealing with none too successfully. First up, John Dean's observations on Sarah Palin's lack of qualifications from a Constitutional perspective. Oh, she's not forbidden to be President, Dean says, but...
As part of my longer series, "Breaking the Rules" is intended to address the question of how liberals and Democrats can break the rules of "politics as usual" without beceoming "just like the Republicans."
Part 1 provided a first example: the model of a strike against the Supreme Court as a possible response to the Court's lawless ruling in Bush v. Gore. This was obviously a rather far-fetched example from a practical point of view, but it had the benefit of conceptual clarity, and close relationship with the classsic historical example of Thoreau's civil disobedience in going to jail, rather than paying taxes to support the Mexican-American War.
In this part I consider a much more realistic example: the use of impeachment proceedings to expose Bush Administration lawlessness and the moral bankruptcy of movement conservatism, but without the intention to remove him from office.
Using the impeachment process in this way is intended to accomplish a primary goal of impeachment--reigning in a lawless executive branch and re-establishing the system of checks and balances on which our democracy depends. It foregoes the means of removal for pragmatic reasons only: first, a Senate so politicized would never vote for impeachment, and second, the time needed for impeachment to run its course would leave the action largely moot.
By abjuring the purely political goal of removing the President (and, of course, Vice-President) from power, impeachment on these terms could also restore the proper solemnity and purpose to the mechanism of impeachment, which the conservatives have so thoroughly debased with their power-mad attempt to drive Clinton from office.
Such a strategy would be an utterly exemplary act of level 4 thinking in action. It would address a total breakdown in how level 3 roles and relationships are supposed to work, restore the functionality and reaffirm the underlying purpose while establishing a guiding autonomous framework of principle apart from those roles and relationships, capable of critiquing and revising them when they go off track.
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