BECOMING MORE CONSERVATIVE?
My wife and I were talking yesterday about an article in the paper that reports that college students are more conservative than their parents. The day before, I was discussing with a friend how successful President Bush has been in entrenching conservatism in his administration, and how much national support he seemed to be receiving for it. Both conversations made me wonder if the country was becoming more conservative, or if the country was always this conservative and the climate in the world has simply made such a conservatism less politically incorrect and therefore easier to publicly express.
In both cases, 9/11 is clearly the defining moment. If the first hypothesis were true, 9/11 changed a lot of people’s minds: screw all this openness – bad people are out to get us, so we better change our course, entrench, and take care of ourselves. If the second hypothesis were true, 9/11 cleared the air for people to be OK with their hidden jingoism: I knew this kind of stuff would happen if we weren’t careful, so now let’s be more wary and more strict.
The election of 2000 demonstrated that, at the time, we were split evenly between conservatives horrified by another four years of morally loose Democratic rule and liberals horrified that a Republican presidency would lead to tax cuts for the rich, program cuts for the poor, and a tightening of civil liberties for all. Florida’s shenanigans aside, was that vote a legitimate indicator of how our nation divided itself? Did 9/11 turn liberals into conservatives? Or did conservatives stay at home in 2000, only to come out of the woodwork once 9/11 made their xenophobic tendencies more socially acceptable?
I realize I am grossly generalizing here. Our nation doesn’t consist of two even sides, but of 280 million unique individuals, representing an impossibly complex overlap of agendas, fears, and constituencies. Still, I wonder what to make of the increasing conservatism of our country. People change their mind about things all the time. It is something I, as a proponent of open minds, hope happens. And yet I wonder who’s changed their mind in the past few years, and who’s stayed the same.
My wife and I were talking yesterday about an article in the paper that reports that college students are more conservative than their parents. The day before, I was discussing with a friend how successful President Bush has been in entrenching conservatism in his administration, and how much national support he seemed to be receiving for it. Both conversations made me wonder if the country was becoming more conservative, or if the country was always this conservative and the climate in the world has simply made such a conservatism less politically incorrect and therefore easier to publicly express.
In both cases, 9/11 is clearly the defining moment. If the first hypothesis were true, 9/11 changed a lot of people’s minds: screw all this openness – bad people are out to get us, so we better change our course, entrench, and take care of ourselves. If the second hypothesis were true, 9/11 cleared the air for people to be OK with their hidden jingoism: I knew this kind of stuff would happen if we weren’t careful, so now let’s be more wary and more strict.
The election of 2000 demonstrated that, at the time, we were split evenly between conservatives horrified by another four years of morally loose Democratic rule and liberals horrified that a Republican presidency would lead to tax cuts for the rich, program cuts for the poor, and a tightening of civil liberties for all. Florida’s shenanigans aside, was that vote a legitimate indicator of how our nation divided itself? Did 9/11 turn liberals into conservatives? Or did conservatives stay at home in 2000, only to come out of the woodwork once 9/11 made their xenophobic tendencies more socially acceptable?
I realize I am grossly generalizing here. Our nation doesn’t consist of two even sides, but of 280 million unique individuals, representing an impossibly complex overlap of agendas, fears, and constituencies. Still, I wonder what to make of the increasing conservatism of our country. People change their mind about things all the time. It is something I, as a proponent of open minds, hope happens. And yet I wonder who’s changed their mind in the past few years, and who’s stayed the same.
Comments