Everything You Own In A Box To The Left

The old conventional thinking was that as you get older, the more you acquire, the more entrenched you get in the system as it is, the more conservative you become. I think the idea is that one would develop an investment in social and economic conventions, changes to which would represent a threat to stability and public (and, by far enough extension, personal) safety. It would literally become in your best interest to conserve/preserve/serve the status quo to ensure the maximum payoff for whatever it was in the waywardness of your ill-spent youth you'd consciously sold off in exchange for a bit of security. Ostensibly, it would have been squishy, superficial indulgences like "inclusivity" and "economic justice" and "women are also people." You know, the kind of flights of fancy you set aside when you finally grow up and become a man, or a very specific type of woman.

I'm about half way through my 50th year here and I have to say, I'm surprised to say I do find myself drifting politically, just kind of in the other direction. There was a time not that long ago, say for example right around 2020, when my voting considerations led me to someone like Joe Biden, a candidate about whom I had little enthusiasm personally but for whom I would have sold my human soul to guarantee an electoral victory. Even then I found him too middling, too hawkish, too pro-business, basically a New Deal/Great Society type whose primary approach to any problem was to see how many hands he could shake. A senatorial dealmaker, almost the platonic ideal for a vice president, but a cold pat of butter on room-temperature bread in prospect as a president: maybe ultimately what you want, but a lot of work to get it there. The very compelling thing about him was (and maybe still is) that he's not a blood-and-soil violence-as-a-purifying-social-force fascist, as his opposite number was in that and future elections. Whatever my motivations might have been, the outcome of a Biden election was an inherently conservative thing to want, a regular political America not being actively undermined or warped into a rump/parody of itself by a human bullhorn amplifying a vanishing but calcified minority, increasing in intensity as it continually shrank.

All the GOP dupes and dopes currently running like to say the word "conservative," but that's not what any of them are, in either the classical or the American political sense. Conservatism as an idea is protecting a thing as it is, colored and flavored by a hearkening back to an idealized something that never was. One learns to tolerate the nostalgia as the refuge of aging people increasingly afraid of the looming specter of death, but at a certain point, the spice has become the dish. The fantasy past became the goal instead of the rationalization. It's become a mantra, a mindset, a threat to make things not more of how they are, but more of how someone somewhere (at the Heritage Foundation probably) has decided it used to be, but even that has been thrown out. The rhetoric of "make American great again" has abandoned all pretense at appealing to anything historically demonstrable in favor of "these libs are murdering children, we should probably shoot them just in case that's right." What a political society looks like after that purge has happened is an afterthought. It's a "conservatism" defined by an intense activism for radical change, an open heralding of a post-American polity; that sounds alarmist, but Jan. 6, 2021, already saw them literally attacking the most constitutional of constitutional acts. It's a utopian fantasy without an actual aim past the satisfaction of the fever dream of just being able to shoot the people whose points you can't reliably refute. It starts with a fictional history where Pilgrim Fathers had buckles on their hats and throve in nominal parity with their pals, the indigenous American Indians, who were gently and benevolently holding on to all the lands to the west of Plymouth until we European-types were good and ready to go and take it off their hands, by mutual acclaim probably, for the sake of god and capital. In the middle bit of history since then, there was a misunderstanding about DEFINITELY NOT JUST SLAVERY in the 1860s and then, arriving now-ish... I don't know, "marshal law" any day now (since the first Obama administration), as they so often put it, and they'll have no choice but to heroically rise up. Then those of us who just don't want to have to watch CNN as much as we did 2016-2020 all get lined up against the handball wall at what used to be an elementary school, then they can just wing it from there.

In some ways, I understand the frustration, I guess. You fuck up one aspect of your agenda and suddenly your political position doesn't become all that electorally viable anymore, like the silly joke idea I said before about women being people. Women, it turns out, are way better at math then we thought as it turns out they make up about half the people, and even a higher percentage than that of voters, especially when motivated. The status quo now seems to be: Republicans are more likely to answer the phone when pollsters call, but Democrats vote. As the GOP cedes not only the center, but the center right, sure, I'm compelled farther left as a result to the point where I'm going to be an anarcho-syndicalist by about 2030, but I'll still probably vote for President Chelsea Clinton if it means my main concern can be continual political disappointment rather than a fire at the Reichstag.