Month: November 2008

And Powell Wept

As identity politics died. I wish more conservatives had been able to see this before the result. Or had said it before the result. We all win, in this moment. I wrote this a few days ago:

Let’s keep our heads. But let’s not numb our hearts. Somewhere in a Burkean idyll, countless Americans who lived before us, the souls of so many black folk and white folk across the centuries, are watching. What would Washington have said? How could Lincoln believe it? How amazed would Martin Luther King Jr be? We are indeed on the verge of something that seems even more incredible the closer it gets, something more than a mere election.

This is America, after all. It is a place that has seen great cruelty and hardship in its time. But it is also a place that yearns to believe naively in mornings rather than evenings, that cherishes dawns over dusks, that is not embarrassed by its own sense of destiny. In this unlikely miscegenated figure of Barack Obama, we will for a brief moment perhaps see a nation reimagined and a world of possibilities open up. For a brief moment at least.

We Will Win

Kevin Drum gives his take on prop 8:

In one sense, this might have been inevitable: this is precisely the margin I projected six months ago based on basic demographic trends. What’s more, the voting trends are exactly what you’d expect: strong No votes in the liberal coastal counties, especially in the north, and Yes votes in the conservative inland counties. On the other hand, it was only two points. I really, really wonder if we could have beaten it if Barack Obama had been willing to step up and take a bit of a risk on behalf of defeating it. Especially toward the end, when it was unlikely to hurt him in the national race. If he had cut an ad to run over the final weekend, would it have made the difference? Maybe.

…The good news, I guess, is that the same demographic trends that doomed gay marriage this year also guarantee its eventual victory. We’ll try this again in five or ten years and win easily.

I think the experience of actual gay married couples in California will make the difference. This takes time. There are bigots on the other side, for sure. But also cautious people. We need to reassure them. That’s what the reality of inter-racial married couples did for miscegenation laws. That’s what our lives and experiences will do for the final barrier. Take heart and know hope. And I promise that’s the last time I’ll use that phrase. We all know it now.

Conservatisms

Poulos tries to draw contrasts:

Cultural conservatism, after all, needs to end up meaning something other than theological conservatism; otherwise those two concepts collapse. Theological conservatism, of course, will likely, if not always, inform a cultural conservatism.

But mere Christianity is likely, in some key respects, to inform and undergird and ensure cultural conservatism. Similarly, cultural conservatism and social conservatism cannot mean the same thing. I have argued for a while that social conservatives seek to take cultural conservative convictions and commitments and transform the practices they produce into law by way of politics. Over the past several decades, the main strategy for doing this has been a vehement resort to national Washington politics — in the executive, in the legislative, and in the judiciary. There is no way around the fact that Washington matters; conservatives make a big mistake to write off national politics and federal governance as too profane or shameful or impure, especially now, especially in the voluptuous catharsis of guilt. But other conservatives err by the same token in believing that panic and despair can be sealed off, as if by tourniquet, by "getting the movement right" ideologically and nationally. Because that notion itself is incoherent unless it can separate out theological, cultural, social, and political conservatism, and Republicanism, and understand in which spheres they operate more and less robustly.