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Fusion and Confusion

By Gordon Francis Corbett

    The dictionaries say that a conservative is one who is slow to change his ways, or who will change them only if pressed to do so.  In their second definition, they say that a political conservative is one who likes traditional government.

    In the United States, the Founding Fathers set our tradition when they wrote our Constitution, which requires that our government be small, divided, and limited.  Thomas Jefferson expressed its underlying philosophy in this way:  "That government is best that governs least."

    Alas, that tradition has been replaced by another.

    Many years ago, an unnamed member of Franklin Roosevelt's administration said, with triumphant acerbity, "The American people are conservative, and what they want to conserve is the New Deal."

    This situation reflected fusion and confusion.  The Founders' Constitution was called liberal, because a liberal was one who wanted to limit government so that government could not limit righteous individuals.  For a long time after the States adopted the Constitution, every American citizen knew and respected that definition.  You might say that to be conservative in the one sense was to be liberal in the other.

    Well, in a screwy way, liberalism and conservatism do mean the same today, but with a meaning diametrically opposite to the Founding Fathers' philosophy.

    When the Depression began in October of 1929, our economy began to slide downward.  By the time Franklin Roosevelt became our president over three years later, millions of Americans had lost their jobs, no end to the catastrophe seemed in sight, and people were scared out of their wits.

    Taking advantage of their fear, President Roosevelt pulled off a spectacular theft.  He stole the word "liberal" and reversed its meaning.  Henceforth, a "liberal" was to be a person who wanted to free government, so that, by managing the economy, it could keep the highest possible percentage of the people employed.  This reversed definition became the new tradition;  and, enshrined as the New Deal, it has lasted for seventy years.

    Every president since Franklin Roosevelt has pushed New Deal principles publicly (Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton), extended their power more or less quietly (Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and George H. W. Bush), or tolerated them (Reagan).

    Defined correctly, those presidents' administrations, like Franklin Roosevelt's, were not "liberal," but socialist-fascist.  They either owned the means of production, distribution, and exchange (socialism, as exemplified by T.V.A. and the Department of Transportation's owning the highways), or controlled them (fascism, as exerted by the F.D.A., the F.T.C., and almost every other alphabet soup agency in the Executive Branch).

    So, in the other sense, these post-Depression presidents' tolerating or extending the New Deal made them Definition One political conservatives.

    George W. Bush has proudly joined that tradition.  Not only is he not trying to repeal the New Deal, but he is extending government's grasp of medicine and, in other ways, is violating every one of the Constitution's first ten Amendments except the Third.

    Worse, President Bush is now working with other governments in the Western Hemisphere to create the Free Trade Area of the Americas.  Ostensibly, the F.T.A.A. is to be a bigger version of N.A.F.T.A.  Actually, it is intended to submerge our nation into one all-hemispheric regional government under the United Nations, just as the Common Market eventually became the European Union.

    Therefore, it is also part of the general movement toward what Wendell Wilkie called "One World."

    The F.T.A.A. is liberal, that is to say, socialist-fascist, because its government would control the Western Hemisphere's production, distribution, and exchange.  And, in the same screwy way that makes the New Deal "traditional," the F.T.A.A. and "One World" are also "conservative."  Global government has been our establishment's goal ever since Franklin Roosevelt's advisor Alger Hiss supervised the United Nations' founding conference in 1945, and they have never stopped working to achieve it.

    Regardless, most Americans do not see how anything called "liberal" could also be "conservative."  The reasons, I believe, are that they do not realize that the word's first definition can apply to politics, and that only our more elderly citizens can still remember the views voiced by Barry Goldwater before he ran for president.

    Unfortunately, today, almost nobody prominent wants to confine the Federal Government to its Constitutional boundaries;  and, thanks partly to our "liberally"-inclined public schools, the same is true of our general population.  So, when George W. Bush began calling himself a "compassionate conservative," few, if any, asked him to define that term clearly.

    George W. Bush has stolen "conservative," as Roosevelt earlier stole "liberal";  and, like Roosevelt, he has reversed its meaning.   That is why Bush's "conservatism" equates roughly with FDR-style "liberalism."

    And that fact recalls a thirty-year-old quotation from Pennsylvania's liberal Republican Senator Hugh Scott.  He characterized Richard Nixon's method of pleasing both conservatives and liberals as, "Conservatives get the rhetoric, we get the action."

    Most of our few remaining old-style conservatives and practically all libertarians understand this game, and do not play it.  They focus, not on trends or directions, but on principles.  The classic Congressional example is Texan U. S. Representative Ron Paul.

    Because he fights for Constitutional principles, some people call Representative Paul a conservative;  but Dr. Paul does not adhere only to the principles of freedom that inspired the Founding Fathers to write the Constitution.  He advocates those principles' more refined modern cousins.  Dr. Paul wants to restore and to refine our Constitutionally federalist system until, within its structure and strictures, every person's every right has been made as secure as it can be.

    Could we ask for anything better?
 
 

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