Somebody, I think it was William James, once referred to the scramble for the good words. And because words go in and out of fashion, the scramble can get pretty tangled and pretty interesting.
People get tired of the liberals, and so everybody wants to be conservative, whatever that means. When they get tired of being conservative, they want to be post-conservative, whatever that means.
Then there is the distinction between words being used to describe, and words being used to rally the partisans. For an example, when we say that Spinoza and Leibniz were both rationalists this is simply descriptive. We don’t mean that they used to put out newsletters together, man the barricades together, or speak at the same rallies. So this means that it could be fair to label someone as a political conservative (as in, moi), but this would only be fair as a description. I make a very poor partisan. When I sort through my mail at the PO, I go stand by the recycling bin so I can immediately file all the urgent correspondence I get from Newt, the Republican Whateveritis Committee, Sean Hannity, William Bennett, and the National Don’t Let Them Destroy America Committee.
Eventually we come up against the meaning of the word itself. When you are a conservative, you need to be in favor of conserving stuff, and all I want to do is replace stuff. But, come to think of it, I do want to conserve something. Freidrich (a name the spelling of which somebody needs to standardize) in Penzance, when he compliments Ruth, says that there are “the remains of a fine woman about her.” And I feel the same way about this fair republic. These are the remains of a fine one.
But let us say that somebody urges me to drop the label conservative because the good guys have lost the scramble for the good words. That word is trashed, they say. Give it up. Okay, I gave it up.
Now let me tell you what I think about politics, and you tell me what I am. The Lordship of Jesus Christ needs to be acknowledged in the Constitution because He is the Lord of all lords. We need to stop executing little children in the womb. We need to repent of all attempts to normalize homosexual deviations, up to and including civil unions and marriage. We need an honest currency system, one that the feds cannot multiply ad libitum. When a man murders another man, he should be given a fair trial and then executed. About 90% of our federal government needs to be dismantled and thrown into the Chesapeake Bay. Private property in the forms of both capital and labor needs to be honored and protected by clear title. When guns are outlawed, only outlaws (and tyrants) will have guns. Did I leave anything out?
Okay. We have removed the word conservative from consideration. What am I?