Thursday Morning Guest Rant

Symbols have a way of remaining in place even when the reality of the world makes them irrelevant. There is perhaps no better everyday example of this than the lights on your dashboard. The symbol for fuel is an icon of a gas pump in a style that barely exists anymore and that many young drivers have perhaps never seen. The symbol for oil is a style of oil can that fairly few people have probably ever used. It doesn't matter that they're anachronisms because the symbol became independent.

Like those symbols, a word can become an anachronism whose contextual meaning drifts far from the actual definition. It can drift so far that it actually comes to describe its opposite. This has happened with one of the most common and generally understood political definitions. There is one word - and a dirty word in many venues - that is so unfit for its original purpose that it now describes a thing that is the perfect opposite of its definition. That word is "conservative."

Politically, "conservative" usually means supporting and defending the institutions. Let's look at a definition of this sense, as provided by Webster:

tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions

marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners

If you think of yourself as a conservative - and most on this forum do - does this definition fit? Is your preference to preserve and maintain an out-of-control prosecutorial and judicial system? Is your preference to maintain an academic complex that indoctrinates children into critical theory? Is your preference to maintain a structure of unaccountable power? It probably it isn't. The word doesn't apply. None of it makes any sense. If anything, "radical" is probably now a better word than "conservative."

If you want to find a conservative today - that is, a literal conservative that follows the actual definition - you will not find one on the "right" but you will be hip-deep in them on the "left." The Millennials are, in truth, the most uniformly conservative generation currently living - just don't tell them that. They'll be insulted and they will reject it out of hand, as will most people who call themselves "conservative." The literal definition of the word no longer matters.

This inversion has happened, I think, as a result of revolution. The revolution is finished and the subversion is more or less complete. The former renegades are now in charge, and their philosophy dominates all things in public life. As a result they became the conservatives. They now have something to conserve, and look to maintain the political, social and business systems they control. In a prior era, those who today are called "conservatives" would have been called "counterrevolutionaries" or "regressives" or "reactionaries." Because our revolution was more or less silent and took a very long time, the contextual definition of the original words had time for their accepted and understood meanings to change to match conditions.

Ain't language neat?

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

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