Today’s modern conservatives are emphatic they are right in all things. Their ideology, theology, philosophy, morality, and all other activity is at the highest end of the spectrum of human goodness. All problems in the world are the result of liberals’ moral depravity, and the inability of liberals to come to the same conclusions as conservatives. If this portrayal were accurate, conservatism would be a movement that all rational people of goodwill would want to join. If everything today’s conservative movement says about itself is accurate, then I ask myself, what is stopping me from joining it?
I am certainly what most conservatives would call a liberal. Conservatives would label me a liberal, not because I embrace some radical leftist ideology or philosophy, because I do not, but rather because I disagree with most of their beliefs and conclusions. I have examined their arguments, checked the facts and data that could and should support their positions, and I find them invariably wanting, lacking in any real substance, and generally devoid of truth or intellectual honesty.
If I thought for a second conservatism was the “real deal”, I would become a conservative. When Ronald Reagan was elected to his first term as president, I voted for him. While I have since come to appreciate Jimmy Carter’s strength as a leader, at the time he disappointed me. Reagan offered a vision of renewed American strength and prestige, which in the wake of the Iran hostage crisis felt greatly diminished. He championed what appeared to be new and innovative economic ideas, supporting the “Supply Side Economics” espoused by economist Arthur Laffer. When you cut the taxes of the wealthy, they invest and create jobs, and everyone prospers. We had been weakening ourselves by letting government get too big, and take too much fuel from the great engine of the free market and its inexorable laws, which, according to conservatives, operate on approximately the same plane as gravity and thermodynamics. At the time it sounded pretty good to a much younger, less experienced version of me. Sign me up, Mr. Reagan, I’m on board.