Posted on 06/23/2005 9:51:17 AM PDT by quidnunc
The central theme of Brian Anderson’s "South Park Conservatives" is that a new kind of anti-liberal counterculture is emerging comparable in tone, if not substance, to the 1960s New Left.
Like the nasty and funny TV show from which the label comes, South Park conservatives are characterized by skepticism and irreverence, with a special animosity reserved for the doctrinaire political correctness and limp-wristed liberalism that pervade Hollywood, the media and academe.
South Park conservatives make fun of everything and everyone, but especially those they see as hippies, tree-huggers, feminist dykes and fruity multiculturalists. Conservative on matters of economy and foreign policy but socially liberal, they can probably be best characterized as particularly cheeky libertarians dedicated to lampooning leftist dogmas and shibboleths.
That contemporary liberalism has become so easy to ridicule testifies to both its intellectual sclerosis and the broader shift in the political balance of power in recent decades toward conservatism. As New Republic editor Martin Peretz recently bemoaned, the left is increasingly "bookless" and brain-dead.
But the emergence of a powerful libertarian strain within an increasingly triumphant conservative movement also suggests an almost impossible to avoid future clash between those libertarians and the social conservatives who have provided so many of the foot soldiers and so much of the energy in the rise of the right.
Liberals claim, of course, that the religious right dominates the Republican Party to such an extent as to threaten the separation between church and state upon which the nation’s liberties rests. While such a characterization is almost certainly more a byproduct of liberal hysteria and further evidence of liberalism’s intellectual demise than an accurate description of the Bush administration’s intentions, there is no denying that "South Park" and evangelicalism represent extreme ends of the cultural continuum.
The source of the problem is not just that libertarians often tend to be closer to leftists on questions of abortion, gay rights, drug use, etc., but that they also tend to view social conservatism, with its ecclesiastical foundation, as every bit as doctrinaire, intolerant and generally oppressive to the human spirit as leftism.
For many libertarians, the left wishes to silence freedom of expression and association, confiscate the fruits of our labor and leave our nation defenseless in the face of its ugly enemies. But the right is suspected of seeking to rule from the pulpit in an effort to ban drinking, drugs, fornication and just about anything else that smacks of fun.
As the old cliché suggests, the left seeks to pick our pocket while the religious right tries to look under our beds. Each represents, with its respective orthodoxies and dogma, an assault upon the individual freedom and choice that South Park conservatives value most highly.
Because they have already decided how everyone should live and tend toward absolutism, both religious right and humanist left feel justified in imposing their values on others by force at the expense of individual liberty.
When Republicans last week voted overwhelmingly in the House of Representatives to uphold the federal government’s power to prosecute those who use marijuana for medicinal purposes, they were providing a perfect example of precisely such coercive intolerance. It was the kind of political performance in which the mind was shut down, reason took a vacation and moralistic breastbeating took center stage in the worst holier-than-thou fashion.
Libertarians don’t have a vision of the good society, except to the extent that they wish for everyone to be able to live as they please so long as they respect the right of others to do the same. Rather than dispensing with morality, as often claimed by their critics, they have such great reverence for it that they don’t feel entitled or qualified to determine it for anyone other than themselves.
How strange, then, that a misguided moralism masquerading under the phony rubric of the "war on drugs" could lead Republicans to do such an immoral thing as denying a harmless substance like marijuana to people in pain.
James Dobson undoubtedly approved, but the growing number of conservatives who watch "South Park" almost certainly didn’t.
That's the whole point. The MSM template for stories such as this is that the Republican party will be/is torn asunder.
The R party has been playing for the middle as the Democrat party shrinks. As a strategy, this is more effective than acheiving organic growth by creating more conservatives - libertarian, evanglical or otherwise. That is the business of other social institutions. Only when the middle become less important because of greater dominance will the ideas of the base stand a chance of being implemented.
The SCOTUS needs to be reshaped - commerce power needs to be trimmed back, the penumbra needs to be surgically excised, etc., etc. You won't get judges appointed wit the will to do that until you have a solid 60 Senators. Once you restore reasonable constitutional limits on federal power, federal spending will of necesity decrease.
But hey - Rome wasn't built in a day.
Yes I have! I will not help the alcohol companies profit off of others misery. All the problems associated with alcohol should be thrown on those that profit from it. The drunks should be put at alcohol companies execs doorsteps. Let them deal with the vomit and piss! Let their wives and children be killed by the drunk drivers. Let them not only have the profit let them have the problems too!
The abuse of Freedoms is what some morons are willing to justify!
The libertarian social ideas will lead to a society "built around the stupidest, most immoral, most perverse, most irrational, most illogical, most shortsighted, most sensitive member. "
That is a culture war we're losing.
And the idea that total freedom will somehow lead to winning a culture war is not possible.
. We should be educating people to do things in moderation and within reason, not banning them from doing so
Who is to say what is moderate ?
Just how much LSD is moderate?
How much crank or crack is moderate?
The way to save "America freedoms and rights" is to know that there has to be a balance , a medium ,if you will. Having no drug laws will not help my nation. Having no "speech limiting" laws will not help my nation. Reasonable laws with reasonable application will.
BTW I use to go fishing near Kanora every year. I miss it!
Sorry--I missed your 'template' reference. Now I gotcha.
Republicans are divided over the issue of ______. The party is torn apart over ______, with one side advocating _____ and the other strongly believing ______. The ____ wing is more represented and highly activist, while the _______ wing is demoralized by recent actions in the Republican Congress and seems less likely to vote Republican in the future as a result.
It's like Mad Libs. Only it's short for "Mad Liberals."
Old people sex is gross.
As an "old people" member, I participate in old people sex with my "old people" member wife. I guess that makes us both homosexual by the criteria in this thread.
I hope I can get old just like you!
What about a heterosexual who is has multiple partners and maybe spreading disease to his partners and society as a whole? Should he (or she) be arrested? Cohabitation used to be against the law.
Plenty of heteros have multiple partners too. Going to legislate that?
Fatties don't bother me. I was using your socialist policy of looking out for the good of society.
Yes, that's why they are all going 3rd party next time (repeat as needed). < /sarc>
I am surprised you aren't a Libertarian. They are pro-open borders like yourself.
According to the book The Pink Swastika Hitler was a homo.
Interesting. What are the parameters of "conservative" and "socially liberal" that make them mutually exclusive?
No, however, I don't think that the Government has any business telling people who they should have sex with.. Just as long it is with a consentng adults I don't think that the government should be involved at all.
Well gee, call me the next time there is an adultury pride parade.
That said it is well known fact that homosexual men have many more partners than heterosexual men. There is a reason AIDS showed up first amongst homosexuals.
And who said anything about legislating, it seems you would like to go to the Canadian route and legislate that there cannot be any discussion or criticism of the homosexual lifestyle(deathstyle).
No I am not the one on these boards who is opposed to criticising anyone with R next to their name like some.
I'd like to see some completely independent studies, not ones down by either left or right organizations. That's pretty impossible though. Both liberal and conservative groups skew studies to give themselves the results they want.
LOL BUMP.
Well there is one study that is completly independent and based on facts and that is the vast majority of the AIDS/HIV cases in the US are either homosexual men or IV drug users.
Two behaviors that Libertarians think cause no harm.
Contrary to your snide remark, I am not for open borders.
Lowered rates of HIV in heteros does not mean fewer partners.
Whatever, but every researcher will tell you that homosexual men have a lot more partners than heterosexual men. The homosexual "lifestyle" revels in promiscuity.
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