The Nuance

Curse you Ronald Wilson Reagan! Curse you for what you did. Your triumphs were spectacular, but at what cost? Oh, the cost!

This week, so-called social conservatives have been happier than Ted Kaczynski in a bomb and packaging store. After all, what could be better than a passive, gun-toting, Christian beauty queen from the most unpopulated state to accompany John McCain's "questionable" loyalties?

While I would not take up much space denouncing capitalism, or the second amendment, I cannot help but wonder if our 40th president knew what black abyss of ideology jacking phoniness would come to be epitomized and characterized by the likes of Jerry Falwell. After this meeting of the minds, the conservative movement became one less associated with fighting for the right to worship as much as battling for the intermingling of religion and government. As I heard the non-theist conservative writer, George Will, analogize: Conservatives value freedom over equality; liberals prefer equality over freedom.

I am not a liberal. I do not hate liberals, nor do I think they are godless, America-hating devils. I disagree with their view on the structure of government. I believe government should be as petite as possible, a person should be allowed to marry whoever they want, all drugs should be legalized (legalized, not decriminalized), and taxes and spending should be much lower. However, I do not believe in something for nothing. The last two may be my most conservative viewpoints of all.

To the majority of those without a memory spanning 30 years into the past, conservatism is synonymous with loving Jesus, hating homosexuals, and dictating society by said biases. It may surprise the young Obama disciples to learn that the basic hallmark of conservative ideology is an emphasis on individual rights. In fact, Democrat one-termer Jimmy Carter won the Evangelical vote on his first try. This is easy to understand as Jimmy was, and still is, a Baptist Sunday School teacher. However, by the second time around, an unholy union had been made.

Before Reagan, the Republican Party was the party of logic and isolationist defense, the Democrats were the party of the people and pandering. As it turns out, handing out welfare, sticking it to big business, and promising a government that will eliminate poverty has a pretty positive effect on the public's perception towards you. In the battle of logic with emotion, emotion will always triumph. Many genius notions came to fruition within the Reagan Administration, such as the professional military, but this robbing and molding of the liberal concept of poignant politics which both won the election changed the face of the Republican Party forever. The story is deeper than what can be transcribed here, but a few dirty tricks were instituted to meet this sentimental end, such as reframing the Southern Baptist manifesto to include that women should be submissive. In no time, the community Carter defined ostracized him, allowing Reagan to make his move.

From Ronnie, the Republican Party was no longer the party of policy, but of emotion, and the Democrats have been stupefied ever since. It is harder to get teary eyed about the impoverished when those nasty secularist leftists are attacking your God. This is all well and good as far as the game of politics goes, but the effects have run deeper than anyone would have expected. Vanished are the principles of privacy as Republicans defend warrantless wire taps: Deceased are the standards of individual rights as right-wingers attempt to add an amendment to the Constitution which is not discriminatory in nature, but limits everyone's rights in favor of nothing less than social engineering: Distant is the attitude of fiscal conservatism as Bush spends billions on a profitless war and doubles the size of government institutions like the Department of Education.

Sarah Palin and her cohorts can call her conservative if they want to. They will because they have the same idea about its definition, that young Democrats do. But not far from the GOP convention, in the other of the twin cities, a Texas doctor with a high-pitched voice, a disdain for the mushy liberalism of the Grand Old Party, and an absolute loathing for government waste is holding his own rally. Representative Ron Paul may be extreme and even unpragmatic in his philosophy, but he has gained a massive amount of support from all walks of life throughout America. Though his presidential campaign was doomed and impractical, there is still the hope he is the poster boy of a new, and yet old, kind of conservatism, birthing from the ashes of the condemned McCain campaign. They may call Palin a conservative now, but perhaps not in ten years.