Now We BEGIN the Liberal Rebuilding Phase

We are at the peak flowering moment of the conservative movement. Leftward thought and power has ebbed almost out of existence. But we finally begin to see the way forward.

Money has lost much of its usefulness to societal well-being. The current state economic development has seen the partial mastery of money by large corporations. By that I mean that they (the corporations) have learned, by dint of hard work, how to accumulate monetary wealth in such a lop-sided fashion that money is no longer effectively encouraging productivity -- the creation of real wealth. This has become obvious to every one, except perhaps some keepers of statistics. They still calculate that our economy is "growing" most of the time, if weakly.

Corporations should declare victory and go home. But they won't, and their stranglehold on the economic system will only become more burdensome and ridiculous for a while, until the new ways of organizing people power start to take effect. Conservatives' ability to organize people is limited by their non-acceptance or rejection of people. Liberals' biggest strength is the ideology of progressive change, which means accepting change. Accepting change requires being open to new and different things. Being open to newness means it is easier for liberals to accept people who are different from them, even who differ in moral values, as deserving of respect. In their real lives, conservatives are probably just as likely to accept different types individuals as friends, or deserving of kindness, as liberals are, if not more so. But conservatives don't accept people whose opinions differ as groups, with legitimate political concerns. They believe that some groups can legitimately be discriminated against, for some reason or other. For example, Palestinians as a group can be discriminated against, because there have been Palestinian terrorists; gays because there have been gay perverts.

I can't make this argument in such a way that conservatives will accept the idea that their discrimination is wrong. But that doesn't matter. They have always been the minority of the population, and always will be, because their project is distinguishing themselves from others, in some fundamental way. They believe it is by literally making themselves superior, and more deserving than the lazy, the shiftless, the criminals, and miscreants. Their opponents (liberals, progressives), ideologically accept that every person is of equal value, and has equal rights. Those are just the two poles of perspective; everyone chooses one side for inner reasons.

But it doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong; one side is going to rise in prominence in the near future, and the other fall. It is clear which side has been rising for the past 30 years, and equally clear that one side cannot rise forever in this world. We liberals have been astounded and dumbfounded by the relentless rise to power of ever more "conservative" thought. I put that in quotes because when "conservatism" goes to the extremes that it has, it no longer resembles the thought stream that it is named for. Today's "conservatives" want radical change, and they are getting it. Unconsciously, relentlessly pushing for a society in which certain types of people have all political and financial power, they have finally over-reached. The 10% of people who are now permanently unemployed are coming to be clear on that. They 90% who are less wealthy now than they were 10 years ago are coming to be clear on that. It no longer takes a liberally-slanted view to see that the brave new world of the conservatives' dreams will not be a better place for most of us, because that world is almost here. What that new conservative world is about is getting harder and harder to hide.

In my next post, I will talk about how physical organizing of like-minded people in geographical areas is inevitably going to increase, and how it spells doom for the current flavor of "Conservatism."