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A recent complainant
in Florida Today newspaper (Brevard County, Fla.) whines that
conservatives are suddenly under media attack. "We are being
persecuted and demonized, " says the writer. Oh really? Tell  that to Newt Gingrich, to Bob Dole, to
William Kristol, Orrin Hatch, Phil Gramm, David Brock, Richard Brookhiser,
and their hot-to-trot new yes-men in Congress, those keeping
"promises" on the conservative "Contract With
America," a contract few Americans have yet read but have,
unfortunately, and frighteningly, signed through know-nothing votes.
George Warren, a Southerner born in 1917, has
written a fascinating and enlightened history of America's conservative
movement, one showing that its cohorts, who actually once did suffer
deserved ridicule as "know-nothings," and who then got little
help from capable intellectuals are, once again, up to their old tricks,
this time with the overbearing help of moneyed, opportunistic help. The
old-style conservatives were, as this book shows, only the earlier
incarnations of today's scary power brokers.
Today's conservative movement is presently engaged in
successfully dismantling fair-play principles like the equality of the
sexes, the wrongness of slavery, the need for improved race relations, and
a much-needed wall of separation between church and state powers. Earlier in the century, for example, it was not
legalized abortions that conservatives fought most, but simple birth
control devices. They still oppose condoms. Conservative activists, it
seems, have never wanted women to control their destinies, much less what
happens within the confines of their own bodies. "Let women keep
silence in the churches," they say, quoting St. Paul, who hoped to
leave all important matters to men only.
In 1776 conservatives didn't want to rebel
against the rule of the English. It was Thomas Paine, the author of Common
Sense and of the Age of Reason who wrote to inspire the American
Revolution. Few realize that Paine's Age of Reason, a startling critique
of the Bible, had called furiously for a revolt against established
religious cults. Conservative Christian fundamentalists dug up Paine's
bones in retaliation and now nobody knows where Paine is buried.
Thanks to conservative influences, the author of Common Sense
has been purposely relegated to limbo, unrecognized as a major Founding
Father of this nation. There are few that know it was about meddling
ministers and priests that Thomas Jefferson wrote when he said, "They
imagine that I will use power against their schemes, and they imagine
rightly, for I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against
every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
The Dark Side of Conservatism is a splendid read:
clear, convincing, and educational. Conservatives always look to the past
for our salvation. Those with their eye on the future will want to study
George Warren's "searing indictment" of conservatism so that it
becomes clear how those politicians who now hold the purse strings and
the power are once again getting ready to
dig Democracy's grave.
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