One of Mark Steyn's recurring themes is that while a center-right country may elect a liberal government, it may not stay a center-right country very long after having done so. Melanie Phillips today provides a blueprint of how this happens:
promotes only “negative liberties,” or freedom from something rather than positive rights to something. Well, through human-rights legislation Britain has exchanged its historic concept of “negative” liberty — everything is permitted unless it is actively prohibited — for the ‘positive’ European idea that only what is codified is to be permitted.As a result, freedom has shrunk to what ideology permits. Equality legislation has cemented a “victim culture” under which the interests of all groups deemed to be powerless (black people, women, gays ) trump those deemed to be powerful (white people, men, Christians). Since this doctrine holds that the “powerless” can do no wrong while the “powerful” can do no right, injustice is thus institutionalized, and anyone who queries the preferential treatment afforded such groups is vilified as a racist or bigot.
All this constitutes a profoundly illiberal culture in which no dissent is permitted, group is set against group and intimidation is the order of the day. And this also happens to be the culture of ACORN, of the radical groups funded by the Annenberg Challenge and Woods Fund, and the ‘educational’ or criminal justice ideas of William Ayers, endorsed by Barack Obama.
We saw the same dynamic in Canada after more than a decade of Liberal rule there. Countering this will be tricky:
The challenge for conservatives on both sides of the pond is to find a way of conserving the essential values of Western Civilization and defend them against the onslaught being mounted against them both from within and from without — but to do so in a way that is generous and big-hearted rather than narrow and sectarian, and embraces rather than repels.
Thinking tactically, the trick of political coalition-building is to find people who not only agree with you, but are willing to vote that way. Part of that is finding social values that people share broadly, but that seem to be threatened. And usually, broad-shared social values are strong enough that they never seem to be threatened. The left's rush to impose same-sex marriage through litigation may well be such an issue.
Herein lies an example of both the opportunities and risks inherent in a system that allows for citizen initiatives. It allows us to defeat certain bad ideas (Amendment 59, Amendment 58), and to pass certain good ones (California's Proposition 8). But it can also handicap our efforts to form coalitions for broader governance by eliminating the horse-trading that coalitions require.
And thinking more broadly, it's also true that such cultural confidence will necessarily result in a strong national defense and an active support of western civilization abroad. Too many conservatives, in the aftermath of this defeat, will leap to try to offload responsibility for these things to other countries or international organizations. Let's hope that a revival of Reagan-style conservatism doesn't become an excuse for Taft-style isolationism. Cultural confidence should bolster, not undermine, our role in the world.
