Pretty Hate Machine

Yesterday I made a somewhat offhanded and seemingly irrelevant comment in response to Jason Arvak’s complaints around our treatment of the relationship between mainstream conservatism and the birther movement (I’m after E.D.’s earnest efforts shouting “hallelujah”). The impetus for the comment; however, is anything but offhanded and, by my lights, is certainly not irrelevant, generally speaking.

You see, the reason why it drives me nuts that the League so often gets called a “conservative site” is that I’m convinced that unless your pissing off both sides of the circus, you’re probably doing something wrong. Granted, when people refer to the League as conservative, they usually mean it in terms of a heterodox, dissident conservative persuasion, which, if you look at some of our contributors, is fairly accurate. But there remains a sentiment that insofar as you’re a dissident, you tend to subscribe to one team or another despite your self-chosen “black sheep” status.

And in all honesty, I don’t.

This is in no small part because I feel like both teams are really just dogmatic kissing cousins. My primary critique of defined ideologies is an unwarranted sense that they have it “all figured out”. And when we talk about dissident wings of those ideologies, the underlying belief seems to be that “we’ve mostly got it figured out, but just need to tweak here and there,” even insofar as tweaking involves calling modern day conservatism “rotten” and “a mess” as, say, E.D. has. To the extent that ideologies feel they have it all, or even mostly, figured out, it concerns me that their adherents are thereby excused from all further serious explorations and that even the most staunch of political pundits and analysts make ready use of that recess.

My desire, then, to be derided from both the left and the right (insofar as those are useful orientations any longer) is more concretely a desire to keep my own prostrations in honest check by really digging into issues with a critical eye and hopefully occasionally breaking new ground that challenges sacred cows on both sides. In so doing, I can’t help but see that exercise as necessarily threatening the status quos of all parties involved, thereby prompting the flow of invective. The damnation from all angles let’s me know that there is at least a chance that I’m looking at an issue from something approaching a fresh, if not original, perspective located in varying degrees outside the established echo chambers.

In other words, if everyone is happy, I get nervous.

So you see, I was really actually quite on point, at least as regards my own agenda.

Tagged as: critical analysis, dissidence, dogma, ideologies, originality