Eliot Sherman: New conservative agenda: Iraq at home

Modern conservatives have been extremely successful at defining themselves by what they are not (i.e. liberal). I have concluded this based on an exhaustive scientific study which consisted of reading several conservative magazines and noting that the word "liberal" appears about seven billion times. I'd like to implement this strategy and turn it around, by offering a perspective on conservatives from the other side of the aisle.

Conservatives are all the rage right now, more popular than reality television and Red Bull. And like it or not, they are making their presence felt.

They have sent the normally steadfast American media scurrying into hiding with cries of "liberal media". On college campuses, they have made professors think twice with accusations of liberal bias in grading. And all over the country, by wrapping themselves in the flag and redefining patriotism as not the virtue of the vicious but the litmus test for how "real" of an American you are, they have effectively stifled dissent on almost all issues.

Liberals, meanwhile, appear content to sit back and get pounded.

Polls consistently reflect that many Americans greet this massive ideological shift to the right with a mixture of reprehension and lukewarm support. Everyone admits the economy is tanking, everyone knows that tax cuts do more to hurt than help the "average" American, but Americans in general seem content to sit back and let it all happen. Granted, some of this is due to a leadership vacuum in the opposition party, and the fact that regardless of whether or not he actually makes the country safer (he doesn't) our President appears to make people feel safer, which is all that really matters. But it still has an eerie, inexorable feel to it, as if this ideological shift is destined to continue until the crack of doom.

Normally I wouldn't get too aggravated about this situation. But there is something very different about these guys. These are definitely not your father's conservatives.

Never before has a starve-the-government mentality been embraced so thoroughly by those in the government. Even Reagan raised taxes in the face of an overwhelming deficit; one gets the feeling that Bush would rather surrender a limb than do the same.

But the difference runs deeper than the tax cut debate and the fact that fiscal sanity, a traditional mainstay of the conservative agenda, appears to have gone the way of the Democrat (much to the resentment of men like Senator Charles Grassley, who seems just as confused as I am). The government is being run by a group of people who have absolutely no use for government, who don't believe in the idea or the reality of public programs.

This is the most essential difference between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives have forgotten that government is liberating, not stifling, and that we formed it in the first place to get out of that state of nature.

In a conservative paradise, everyone is armed. The one dominant religion is not fundamentalist, simply because there is nothing else to oppose it, as much as factions within that religion may quibble. Everyone keeps all of their income because they earned it fair and square. There are no troublesome regulations on the private sector, and pesky environmental activists don't exist.

Sound at all familiar? It should. This conservative paradise exists in the world, and in fact, America made it that way. It's called post-war Iraq.

Iraq has all those things, because there is a complete absence of government. There is also no one to fix the roads, maintain electricity, heal the sick, or regulate the roving gangs of marauders, rapists and thieves. Get the picture?

Never before has the basic sanctity of government been rejected by the government. It would be a mildly amusing metaphysical crisis if it did not represent a clear and present danger to everything this country stands for and has stood for through peace and war, troubled times and economic prosperity.

I keep waiting for America to notice, wake up and throw the bums out. I keep waiting for the Democrats to do something. I keep waiting for a Bush official to say "Fooled you! We were for rich white guys all along!" Whether or not it happens, I'm not fooled. Class warfare? Maybe. You say class warfare like it's a bad thing. I say come get some.

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