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Why the Right Fears Transforming America

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by

mwkruse
in

National Review: Why the Right Fears Transforming America  

The giveaway regarding presidential candidate Barack Obama’s plans for America was his repeated use of the words “fundamentally transform.”

Some of us instinctively reacted negatively — in fact, with horror — at the thought of fundamentally transforming America.

The “us” are conservatives.

One unbridgeable divide between Left and Right is how each views alternatives to present-day America.

Those on the Left imagine an ideal society that has never existed, and therefore seek to “fundamentally transform” America. When liberals imagine an America fundamentally transformed, they envision it becoming a nearly utopian society in which there is no greed, no racism, no sexism, no inequality, no poverty, and ultimately no unhappiness.

Conservatives, on the other hand, look around at other societies and look at history and are certain that if America were fundamentally transformed, it would become just like those other societies. America would become a society of far less liberty, of ethically and morally inferior citizens, and of much more unhappiness. Moreover, cruelty would increase exponentially around the world.

Conservatives believe that America is an aberration in human history; that, with all the problems that a society made up of flawed human beings will inevitably have, America has been and remains a uniquely decent society. Therefore, conservatives worry that fundamentally transforming America — making America less exceptional — will mean that America gets much worse.

Liberals, on the other hand, worry over the opposite possibility — that America will remain more or less as it is. …

I think he captures the essence of the conservative mindset well.

Comments

4 responses to “Why the Right Fears Transforming America”

  1. David Brush Avatar
    David Brush

    I think he captures the projected mindset of most conservatives well.
    I say projected as the fear that we would slip into some sort of second class european secularist nation isn’t one primarily of moral concern for those conservatives that hold the true power. Rather they ‘project’ onto the middle class this fear mainly because it keeps them in a financially advantageous place.
    Show me a true conservative ready to put their money where there mouth is on moral issues. It’s a carrot in front of the evangelical nose and it works almost every time.

    Reply
  2. Michael W. Kruse Avatar
    Michael W. Kruse

    I don’t doubt that conservative proclivities are exploited for political power. But it is equally true that those with true power on the left paint pictures of a dystopia sinking ever deeper into evil, needing radical overhaul.
    I think the reality is that there are good things “baked” into the social order that are there due to God’s grace. So on the one hand their should be caution about wholesale reordering of society. Yet we know that there is evil, individual and systemic, in the world. It to gets baked into the mix. We are to be seeking the greatest shalom for the world and that creates. So on the other hand we can never be complacent with what is.
    I think that is the paradox we live in.

    Reply
  3. vanskaamper Avatar
    vanskaamper

    I think that’s a straw man and a caricature…on multiple levels.
    If you read Thomas Sowell’s Conflict of Visions, he does a good job of elaborating on the fundamental differences in starting assumptions of left and right.
    If you believe that humanity is perfectable, then you have a different set of goals and strategies than if you start from the premise that human beings are inherently and incorrigibly flawed, and that any system that depends on human perfection is doomed to fail from the beginning.
    Government monopolies intended to deliver a utopian social order are just as corrupt as private ones…because they’re both populated by corruptible human beings who pursue their self interests first.
    Therefore, for conservatives, there’s an inherent fear of centralized authority and planning with the coercive force of the gun behind it whose mission is to control enough of our choices to make a society conform to the latest fashionable collectivist, statist vision.
    Instead, you work within the inherent limitations of human beings, you order society in such a way as to make it so that by pursuing self-interest (perhaps the single most reliable human trait, historically speaking), the wider society benefits. And you leave charity to private organizations (churches and private associations) which wind up doing a better job than faceless government bureaucracies.
    Conflict of Visions and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom would both be useful in at least understanding the conservative mindset rather than caricaturing it as a group of robber barons just trying to protect their stash.

    Reply
  4. David Avatar
    David

    Thanks Michael for some good commen sense on this issue. Not exactely sure what the current administration means or many liberals mean when they say they want to fundamentally change America. So far it sounds like Marxism & many times with the people that Obama has around him and put in various positions in Govt it looks like they lean in that direction.
    So if this is what Obama means well yes the conservitives are a bit uneasy and we’ll see what happens in Nov and with the next Presidential election.

    Reply

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