Sorry for the lack of posting, but I've been trying to find something to say that doesn't seem unduly repetitive or obvious. It seems to me that in assessing the current political environment, it is difficult not to keep returning to the same themes over and over -- that is hard not to continually recapitulate that 1) the Democrats lack balls; 2) the Republicans lack brains; and 3) the electorate needs to wake the fuck up and pay attention to what is actually happening here. It's theme two that interests me here, particularly in light of the unveiling today of the "Mount Vernon Statement" by conservative "thinkers."
I am struck by the unbelievably banal nature of the statement, its utter vacuity -- it reads a bit like a high school text book extolling the wisdom of the founding fathers. There is the all important attempt -- from a right wing point of view -- to link the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution, since the former document references the "Creator" whereas the document that actually sets forth our system of government is decidedly and embarrassingly silent on the subject of god. The overarching concept seems to be one of "Constitutional conservatism," a term that is resolutely devoid of substance.
Then there is the awkward, contradictory, and decidedly uninspirational rhetoric of the statement:
Some insist that America must change, cast off the old and put on the new. But where would this lead -- forward or backward, up or down? Isn't this idea of change an empty promise or even a dangerous deception?
So change is bad, we must embrace the virtuous status quo at the risk on not knowing up from down, yin from yang, or our collective asses from a hole in the ground. But wait, evidently we do need change, urgently, even:
The change we urgently need, a change consistent with the American ideal, is not movement away from but toward our founding principles. At this important time, we need a restatement of Constitutional conservatism grounded in the priceless principle of ordered liberty articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
So this left me thinking, which aspects of ordered liberty are our conservative brethren suggesting we move toward? The right of the President to unilaterally declare war? Or to indefinitely detain an American citizen without charge or trial? The right to torture? To engage in warrantless wiretapping? To engage in preemptive warfare against nations that have neither attacked nor threatened us?
But then it occurred to me that a return to founding principles would be completely congenial to our right wing visionaries -- a return to a world in which the franchise is reserved to white, propertied males, where slavery is not only permitted but enshrined in the Constitution, where there is no federal income tax, no right to elect senators by popular vote, no equal protection clause, and no pesky women or blacks to spoil our perfect polity. And suddenly it all made sense.
(Compare the flat, superficial tone of the Mount Vernon Statement to the Port Huron Statement, the classic Sixties Manifesto by the Students for a Democratic Society. Also, the phrase "movement toward our founding principles" just kept reminding me of Ian Kershaw's description of the governing principle of the Third Reich as "working toward the Fuhrer.")
