Here in America, John Adams wanted Thomas Jefferson--following John Locke's lead--to list the Declaration's unalienable rights as --Life, Liberty, and Property--" rather than --Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness--" as the more liberal and democratic Jefferson wrote.
It is in this example that we most clearly see the divide delineated between the conservative frame of mind and that of the liberal. For the conservative, it is the thing--property--that is most important. For the liberal, it is the concept--pursuing one's happiness, whatever that might be--that takes precedence.
Conservatives have shown themselves to be the enemy of new thoughts and ideas as far back as history gives us any concrete knowledge. In America, the First Amendment's Freedoms of speech, the press, right of peaceful assembly, or petitioning the government for redress of grievances, are rights that conservatives approve of only for themselves, especially if the wealthy find the "natural order"--where they are in control--threatened by the less deserving (in their minds), lower economic classes. Conservatives also prefer the establishment of some religion or religions by the state, as an effective and inexpensive means to control these lower classes. If this fails, the conservatives know they must fall back to the time honored-and costly-practice of "bread and circuses," to keep the unhappy majority of citizens in their place.
The Second and Third Amendments are foremost about the protection of property rights: the Second implicitly, against "all enemies foreign or domestic," including our government; the Third explicitly, against a government in time of war. The Fourth and Fifth are of interest only as far as they protect property. The rest are a threat to the conservative position of dominance by the wealthy.
The remedy implicit in the Second Amendment is pre-Thoreau, pre-Emerson, pre-Hungarian Revolution of 1866-7, pre-Gandhi, pre-Martin Luther King, Jr., and pre-Nelson Mandela. It is also pre-tank, pre-machine gun, pre-jet fighter, and pre-electronic battlefield. It assumes a citizen force that could be trained up to be the equal of the professional armies of Europe within a short period of time, as had happened during the American Revolution. In the era of modern technology, such a hope is in vain. The modern equivalent of the shirt-tail militia of Lexington and Concord, will never match the modern war machine in terms of training, organization, or equipment. The best one can hope for--if the situation deteriorates into a violent insurrection--is asymmetric warfare of the type we have seen in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
I hope I never see that day. The sole effective method for constructively changing a government left to the people of any non-Third World nation is civil disobedience and passive resistance. When the oligarchs dominate, the first thing they do is ensure their control of law enforcement, in order to attempt to control the masses by force. The oligarchs have still found no remedy for a non-violent, populist movement against them by the people themselves. As Gandhi said: first they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and finally, you win.
The conservatives still believe that all power comes from the very physical barrel of a gun, i.e., the threat of force. As I stated in my February 28, 2009 OpEdNews article, "The Tao of Government," this observation by Trotsky is wrong. Real power comes from the minds of those who believe in that power's existence. Tomorrow, if everyone in the United States believed me to be king, I would be king: all that is required is the formalities of changing the Constitution and subordinate laws to recognize that fact. This is why conservatives do not understand the power of non-violence: it is completely contradictory to their Weltanschauung.
The physical, the concrete, is all that a conservative truly understands. If he is religious, heaven and hell must be physical planes of existence outside of our own. An individual's value is measured solely by their wealth or their accomplishments, not by their intrinsic worth as human beings. The flag is the nation--to burn it is to burn the nation. Love is measured in gifts and how one provides for those you love. Love--whether of your country or of your family--is a thing, not an intangible state of being like enlightenment or grace. To disparage the thing, to even hint at its possible imperfection, automatically means to the conservative mind that you do not love it. This requirement twists and turns the conservative's morality and subconscious into an indigestible knot of anxiety and depression.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
