Editor’s note: This commentary is by Mark Skelding, of St. Albans, a retired educator who most recently was a faculty member for Southern New Hampshire University’s Graduate Program in Education. He previously worked at Food Works/Two Rivers Center for Sustainability.
[C]onservatives are known as the party of fiscal responsibility and frugality. But they’re not just about spending less, saving more, reducing our budget deficit, and managing the federal budget responsibly. What they want to “conserve” extends broader and deeper and is more personal to them than that.
“Conserve” is in quotation marks because it’s not really conservation that underlies what the right is all about. It’s preservation. To conserve means to limit the use of something so that it will last, to use wisely and sparingly, or to set aside and protect something for prosperity. To preserve means to keep as is, to save something in its original or present form, to essentially embalm.
Fighting to protect family and Christian values isn’t an attempt to conserve them, it’s an effort to preserve them.
Attempting to regain and maintain a white majority in America by way of ethnic travel bans, bigoted immigration laws, and border walls is an act of preservation, not conservation.
Legislating against and verbally and physically assaulting members of the LGBT community isn’t an attempt to conserve heterosexuality and a particular definition of marriage, it’s an effort to institutionalize them.
Steadfast support of free market capitalism combined with hatred of anything that smacks of socialism is an attempt to preserve one particular economic system at the expense of others.
Fighting against government overreach and intrusion into our personal lives isn’t fighting to conserve a healthy balance between personal sovereignty and social responsibility. It’s about preserving individual sovereignty, period.
Cutting support for government assistance programs under the guise of reducing the federal budget and ending government perpetuation of laziness and voluntary unemployment isn’t an act of conservation. The right supports this because they believe a lower deficit will help preserve our standing in the global economy and doing away with public assistance programs helps preserve the image of capitalism. Having hundreds of thousands of citizens on government support because they can’t find work and are living in poverty exposes the fact that the “promise” of capitalism is a myth. Given that their platform is built on their faith in free market economics, the right certainly can’t have that.
And here’s a recent example that really helps distinguish preservation from conservation. Committing to vote yes on a tax reform bill you haven’t read, and is in fact still being written and amended, just so you can “get a win,” be able to tell your constituents you got something done, and hopefully not get voted out of office is the epitome of being a preservationist.
All of this raises a question worth reflecting on and a point worth arguing. When you boil these examples down isn’t the bottom line in all of them self-preservation of some kind, whether it’s one’s personal security, power, wealth, status, identity or world view?
Worth arguing is the fact that preservation is antithetical to how the universe works. Nothing is static. Everything is in a perpetual state of evolution, and extinction and transformation are natural processes. Change happens. It always has, and will, and to not embrace it is, well … SAD.
