In defense of conservatism

Since the election, since the madness of it all, this city has been changing, the landscape tangibly evolving, everything, always in transit. Just yesterday, I had a friend tell me her boss was going to work for the new administration, and she along with it. Where I work, the atmosphere is less excitable, more in stasis than other parts of this city — but the sense of shapes shifting, people leaving, coming and going, is never more present than it is now. It is a good time to be young, to be liberal, to believe in the possibility of change actually happening.

But not to be conservative.

Make no mistake — it was eight years in coming, and the change is something I am embracing. But though I’ve been staunchly liberal my entire life, perhaps as a fault of being brought up in a country that relied too much on its government for answers, I am finding there are things I understand, things I even agree with, with what the Grand Old Party is saying. Why the auto bailout would be a mistake, the problem with the new plan for universal healthcare, and even the idea that the traditional model of a liberal-arts college education now borders on irrelevant — yes, I get it.

I have never had a true affinity to conservatism, being born and raised a liberal. My only insight comes by happenstance. I never thought I’d end up working for a conservative think tank, where it is disconcerting to be socially liberal and tree-hugging. But at the risk of sounding like I’ve crossed the line (which I haven’t, really), I see the merits to conservative thinking. Yes, even today, and especially today, in an age where conservative thought seems to have lost its relevance to the world. Edmund Burke believed that the failure of the French Revolution rested on its proponents’ staunch resistance to any opposition to the thought of liberté! égalité! fraternité! So it is that I’m understanding — perhaps for the first time — the importance of conservatism, amidst the euphoria over liberalism that’s engulfed Washington over the past month.

Conservatism is in a state of flux, thrown into a sudden existential crisis that perhaps has been long in coming. That doesn’t mean it will wither away. It will change, that is certain, and will see more criticism than ever before, but most important of all, it will not cease to remain the voice of the opposition. And all for the better. America will always need its conservatives to keep its liberals in check. Without one or the other, democracy fails.

But political ideology aside, there is no doubt it is a wonder to be here. To be present, in this time and in this place, to witness what is perhaps the greatest affirmation that anything is possible in Barack Obama’s victory — that is a gift.

Peggy Noonan, who is arguably the most eloquent political writer I’ve come across and who wrote the words that made Ronald Reagan the “great communicator,” sums it all up in the best possible way:

What a thing this is going to be to see. What luck to observe it.

- Peggy Noonan

[Cross-posted]

Filed under: conservatism

Why study the Internet?

It is difficult to articulate what fascinates me so much about the Internet and politics, the Internet and democracy.   But allow me to dream for a minute.  For months now, I’ve been itching to put together a project or write something — anything — on everything from the initial discussion to the unprecedented election of Obama as president and the role that the Internet had to play in it, even if everyone’s written about it already.

By now, it is a given, uncontested, soberly accepted fact that the key to Obama’s success was not just the message, but the medium.  Marshall McLuhan might have spoken convincingly about light bulbs and television in arguing that “the medium is the message,” but never has this been more clear than in the case of the Internet and Barack Obama.  ”Al Gore may have ‘invented’ the Internet (as his critics occasionally charged) but there is no question that Barack Obama is the first successful presidential nominee to fully exploit the medium’s potential,” reports O’Reilly.

To try to account for the roots of the Obama victory online and see just how far-reaching his message was would entail a massive study into archived Internet matter.  And in the ever-evolving space that is the online commons, who knows how different the world wide web will be when you emerge from the annals of pre-Obama campaign fodder?  By now, we know who won and grasp the significance of the collective efforts that it took to make it happen.

But here’s where it matters — in 2010, the Philippines will elect its next president.  And in this critical election, you have the whole host of characters meeting again and more than just the distant possibility of the country taking more than just a few steps backwards.  But in 2010, there is that chance to make things right.

Where all of this matters, is if the Philippines manages to go the same route — and there’s no reason it shouldn’t, with how technologically savvy and irrepressibly imitative of success we are as a people — then we might actually be able to pull off what just happened here.

I’ve been studying the Internet for different reasons over the past few years.  The first research paper I ever wrote, I did on how the Internet was being used for education, back in the days of Geocities and Yahoo.  But it is the thought of the 2010 elections back home that feeds this interest today.

Filed under: Politics, philippines