Massachusetts Daily Collegian

A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

Massachusetts Daily Collegian

A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

Massachusetts Daily Collegian

Conservatism is good for America

MCT

The Conservative Political Action Conference began yesterday. According to Politico, more than 11,000 conservatives are attending. I passed up an offer to go from former Collegian columnist Brad DeFlumeri because of my classes, but even so I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about American conservatism.

On the one hand,  I can’t help but feel that American conservatism is getting up in age and starting to pay more attention to its 401k, planning the mortgage-burning party and hoping it’ll leave its dependents enough money for funeral expenses because it was so excited by the Coolidge administration it never bought life insurance.

As Reason’s Nick Gillespie wrote yesterday, “There’s been a lot of talk recently about conservatism as a ‘three-legged stool,’ a popular Reagan-era analogy positing that the small-government movement includes fiscal cons, social cons and defense cons. If these legs aren’t the same length, runs the implication, you get a wobbly seat.”

Gillespie went on to say that fiscal conservatives have been revealed to be as big spenders as their liberal counterparts, defense conservatives “did nothing well” and “social cons have lost, period.”

The tea party movement was like one more burst of activity just after retirement, but it won’t last for long. A Republican might even win the presidential election in 2012, but conservatism will be dead within 25 years, I’m certain. You see, like the Soviet Union in the late 80s, the movement is lying to itself.

Basically, conservatism today is trying to use cosmetic techniques and wishful thinking to stay young, but one more go on the dance floor could cost it a hip. It refuses to admit its frailty or mortality and its Botox and bad toupee will become even more noticeable as time goes by and the country changes demographically. To be blunt, conservatives are too white and not nearly nerdy enough. That’s one of the reasons xenophobia has started outweighing sense in the debate on immigration policy.

Over the next few years conservatism will enter its grumpy old man stage, yelling at the neighborhood kids to stay off its lawn and wondering why its children (who have grown up and now live in the suburbs of Philadelphia and California’s Orange County, respectively) never call or visit.

And America will have lost one of its greatest assets.

The conservative will to dominate, to force conformity and make people do things that may be abhorrent to them, such as school prayer or jingoistic and even racist and misogynistic American history curriculums, impose restrictions on sexual activity, censor music and literature – all this and more has combined in the American public pool of excess, capitalism, exploitation and imperialism into the most profound outburst of cultural innovation not seen since drugs were legal.

There is no rebellion in an open and tolerant culture – there’s just no need for it. It’s one thing to be an itinerant folk-rock musician singing Iraq War protest songs and recording them with a MacBook to sell on iTunes or post on YouTube and it’s an entirely different thing when at any moment the draft board could send you to Vietnam, or the police could arrest you for “obscenity” for reading Allen Ginsberg poems out loud or using a word referring to waste excreted by humans in a newspaper.

The need to mock and cut authority figures down to size runs deep in the human psyche, but it’s so much more fun when those people are resistant to the idea of change and get tripped up in their own self-righteousness. The end of conservatism harms us young people the most. The generation that came of age in the mid-60s to mid-70s still defines the idea of rebellious youth. Student protests are still measured against the standard of Columbia University, youth activism is measured against Students for a Democratic Society and “Lost” is measured against “Lost in Space.”    

So farewell, American Conservatism and may a flight of angels sing thee to thy rest. Enjoy the afterlife’s verdant fields and coal-filled hills to strip mine, bask in the warm sun of the heavenly country club before retiring to drill for oil and build a heterosexual, Christian and Americans-only city upon a hill. We’ll shroud your body in a good Republican cloth coat and plant an American flag at your tombstone every Memorial Day.

With you gone, I don’t know what will be left to form a counterculture to, but I’m sure we’ll find something. Corporate media will always be here.

And don’t worry; we’ll bury you with your favorite Reagan doll.

Matthew M. Robare is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].

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  • J

    Josh DavidsonFeb 12, 2011 at 6:05 pm

    Matt,

    I’m reading your column while at CPAC. Should have come, you might have been persuaded not to write this column, thus saving yourself from being so publicly wrong and ignorant.

    Reply
  • B

    BenFeb 11, 2011 at 1:36 pm

    Matt, you’re just ridiculous.

    The meme you have expressed is one I’ve heard before. “Conservatism will be dead in 25 years”. Yeah, that’s what they said 25 years ago and 25 years before that. In fact, it was only three years ago when it was pronounced dead. So, we’re supposedly dead already. Our funeral mass has already been said. What happened to that?

    Ask James Carville, the master Democratic tactician. He wrote a book in 2009 called “40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Win the Next Generation.” And then Republicans won a landslide victory in Congress in 2010, taking more seats than ever before. James Carville has egg on his face.

    Conservatives don’t have a “will to dominate” and they aren’t fighting to outlaw sexual practices. Where are you getting this from? I assume you mean homosexuality. No, conservatives aren’t fighting for the criminilization of sodomy, but for the legalization of criticsim of sodomy.

    “… make people do things that may be abhorrent to them, such as school prayer or jingoistic and even racist and misogynistic American history curriculums…”

    Liberals wish to make people do things that may be abhorrent to them. Such as forcing homosexuality on young children in the elementary schools against the stated wishes of their parents. In any case, liberals have a near 95% monopoly on school curriculums and tolerate no discussion. If parents don’t like it, they can shove it. On the rare chance that a conservative might have a the opportunity to correct some of the left-wing revisionism in the history books, to give a broader view that includes certain figures that the left would like to omit, you call this ‘jingoistic’, ‘racist’ and ‘mysoginystic’. You just can’t be satisfied with 95% dominance of education, just the same way you can’t be satisfied with 95% dominance of the news media.

    By the way, if you want to talk about repression, look at this university. The left isn’t rebelling against these authority figures. They are its lapdogs. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education recently published its twelve worst campuses for free speech in America. UMass was number four. And believe me, the power to censor, to gag, to stifle, and to chill, is almost always focused on the right. If official campus censors actually permit a conservative to speak on this campus, the loony left goes crazy, tearing down flyers and shouting down the speaker out of fear that someone might listen to the speaker’s words and find them persuasive. Think of David Horowitz, Don Feder, or Mike Adams. Someone must prevent the spread of conservative ideas on this campus! Quick, do something! Censor that man!

    Basically, all of the fascist hate-mongers who cannot tolerate a single dissenting thought are on the left. At least on this campus they are.

    Oh, and who by the way, is censoring music and literature? That would be your side. Huck Finn.

    Reply
  • P

    PerceiverFeb 11, 2011 at 11:30 am

    This guy is clueless lol.

    Reply