America's two principal party affiliations currently displace the truths of actions taken, expectations sought, the seeming drift of rhetorical wind and both national and international social, political, and economic currents. ‘Republican’ and ‘Democrat’ mean next to nothing to me, respectful nomenclature and little more. Those words obfuscate, betray the gray matter that stores their images from once upon a time. The same goes in my book for the singular identifications of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative.’
With clarity of expression past weasel words, the substantive terms capitalist, socialist, and communist speak to me. Capitalism: messy business based on productivity and merit of thought and action; prospering achievers, producers, and winners; promoting the individual; the American Way. Socialists: communists without guns. Communists: socialists with guns. The latter two home-in on persistence of the weakest of social weaves for the sake of the select, the elite; punishing achievers, producers, winners; demoting the individual; trashing the American Way, trashing America.
Personally, I take comfort in notions of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ – graduations of principals and discipline– addressed to ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism.’ These associations render appearances. Thereby, in my world, there are liberal and conservative socialists and capitalists who lord it over us. I look across to a horde of socialists, most are liberal, most are Democrats, and some are Republicans. Oh sure, there are the other corners of lesser populations, the least being that of endangered, conservative capitalists. All but a few trash America.
In this schema, Ron Paul may rank as a capitalist conservative. McCain is somewhere in-between capitalist liberal and socialist conservative - depends on whether he's in one of those 'let's get together' moods with the enemies of capitalism. Bush II, in the end, grasped for socialist conservative. BO pegs the needle on socialist liberal.
The course of human life – individually and collectively - is curbed by its own excesses, to which excesses some are impelled and others propelled: the Icarus syndrome; the insufficiently attentive to what had better be done to persist if not prevail and prosper; under-prepared; the aberrant and the perverse.
It may be that the ineluctable path of human social development is a wandering away from individual freedom and toward collectives, behavioral cloning. Freedom, unchallenged by violence against it, in only a few generations weakens in its own swill of contentment. Mix heady, steady concoctions of wretched education for the young and mendacious media for all and that swill swings a boot to the Framers’ necks, sings a siren song of leaving it all up to someone else, whose malice and madness cannot be overestimated. Government and Country are mistaken as the same. But the process is pendulate – it has to be: freedom, whether individual or federated, is hard to give up. Days and ways of reckoning have been, can be.
