Identity Issues
[Frederica Mathewes-Green  02/21 06:27 PM]

Wow, you guys talk a lot. When I left early this morning, this page was a bright, shining empty slate; I come home in the afternoon, and we've got almost 14 feet of provocative, earnest, complicated argument.

It seems somehow fitting that my morning task was to see a screening of Thank You For Smoking, a film based on Christopher Buckley's clever novel about a wordspinning tobacco lobbyist. He's on the side of Big Business and Freedom, so I guess he must be the conservative. His opponent is a Vermont do-gooder in Birkenstocks with socks, so he must be the liberal. Hmmm. Where do I fit in?

As Rod says, "modern conservatism, in the main, pays lip service to virtue, but is really more wrapped up with economics and libertarian concerns." One reason, of course, is that it's simply easier to wrangle economics than virtue; its hard to think of anything politics can do that would effectively foster virtue. The Nanny State is not just annoying, but disappointing; if you need a Nanny, it's a sign parents aren't doing their job.

And, while it's good to cheer for and encourage the authority of parents (to stick, for a moment, with that one aspect of the CC manifesto), is it really necessary for those who do so to call ourselves a movement? I think Caleb makes a good point about the dangers of over-articulation. We are tempted to take a good, simple thing and forge it into a self-conscious brand, which can thereby complicate it and weight it down. It is better to simply do right, accountable to authentic inner convictions of faith and virtue, than to put on a cumbrous, self-conscious identity as members of a societal subdivision.

Still, I'll support the launch of a Crunchy Con movement. The reason is that we are coping with an environment that is already trying to force us into identity camps. Every news event is scrutinized for slant, or else for partisan usefulness. Children's movies are read for the faintest evidence of liberalism or conservatism. It's like being eternally stuck in the high school cafeteria. We may think we're dealing dispassionately and objectively with ideas, but at a deeper level we're constantly dealing with something much more primitive: peer pressure.

So that's why the question raised by viewing of almost any movie or TV show is, "Where do I fit in?" I don't seem to fit so many elements of the conservative caricature; yet too many liberal tenets (for example, abortion legality) are far more gravely wrong.

All Rod had to do was hoist a flag suggesting a new category, and he roused a horde of "me-too"ers, people frustrated by the existing binary choices. It's interesting that most of them wanted to tell him their stories, as if they felt consistently misrepresented and yearned to set the record straight. Although the establishment of a self-conscious Crunchy Con identity raises negatives that are worth pondering, on the other hand, the reason folks are embracing it so eagerly is because they already feel forced into other identies, ones that don't fit. If that wasn't the case, if there was a greater sense of truly private life, and breathing room for unique identity, things might be otherwise. But at present, the outpouring of gratitude suggests that this is indeed a community of individuals who have been consistently frustrated by existing Procrustean choices, and were just waiting to be called together.