Tuesday, November 06, 2012

My somewhat misanthropic endorsement of Romney

Maybe it's my age and the number of campaigns that I have seen in my lifetime, but the political cant has really gotten to me during this election. On one side you have MSNBC, where Obama can do no wrong and Romney is the child of the Devil. On the other side you have Fox News, where Romney can do no wrong and Obama is holding seances in the White House.

I say this not to try to take the fashionable moderate pose, which I find intensely tiresome. I'll admit watching Fox News more than MSNBC (which I hardly ever watch at all) because it shares a few more of my political predispositions. But I have gotten to the point where I simply cannot abide Sean Hannity, who gets more and more shrill as the election approaches. If I can't find another decent political show at that time, there is always another episode of Bonanza on the Western channel.

I have resorted, during this election season, to CNN, where I can enjoy good, honest, old-fashioned liberal bias. At least they're liberals who really think they're being objective.

I think what bothers me the most about the overreactions by conservatives is that politics for some of them has clearly become a religion. We expect this of liberals, who are largely secular, and so have need of a replacement religion. Politics, if it is suitably utopian—as modern secular liberalism is—suits this role nicely. They have "immanentized the eschaton," as Eric Vogelin once put it (in other words, grounded their essentially religious aspirations in the here and now). But real conservatism can never do this, even though people who call themselves conservatives (e.g., Hannity) do it on a daily basis.

I know that if Romney loses, I'm going to have numerous friends and acquaintances who put their heart and soul into trying to get the guy elected coming to me for counseling and advice. My counsel (and advice) to them can be stated in the following general formula:

"Get a life."

And I know with equal certainty that if Romney wins, they will be bouncing off the walls and will call me to make sure I know what they will then know about what has just happened: That what we have just seen is the arrival of the Blessed Hope Himself in all His glory. My advice to them will be similar to that I would have given them under the opposite conditions, and is best expressed in another similarly crafted expression:

"Get a life."

Conservatives should take their cues from people like Micheal Oakeshott, who saw the conservative disposition as primarily an attitude about life—one that eschews the casting of the temporal and transient as something ultimate and eternal. This is particularly true of Christian conservatives.

"To be conservative," said Oakeshott, "is to be disposed to think and behave in certain manners; it is to prefer certain kinds of conduct and certain conditions of human circumstances to others; it is to be disposed to make certain kinds of choices":
... To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. [Emphasis mine]
In the current election, I think that being a conservative requires one to prefer Romney, and to choose him as president--not because he is going to bring about the Millennial Kingdom, but because he's better (or at least not as bad) as the other guy.

I will thoroughly enjoy watching the election returns tonight. But, after the question about who will actually win, the question I am asking myself today is which I would rather see: Rachel Maddow wringing her hands over an Obama loss, or Sean Hannity having a nervous breakdown over a Romney loss.

It is hard to judge between the two.



4 comments:

Erin Avery said...

God is applicable to all of life: politics are a part of life. Therefore, our commitment to Him must involve--yes--politics--and we need to pursue our political goals with the same gusto we pursue other of God's initiatives. It therefore often looks like conservatives are trading religion for politics, when the reality is most often expressing Christianity in the political forum. As Christians we must work for political goals. The problem here is that Americans (particularly Evangelically influenced Christians) largely do not believe that God is sovereign: that He created our nation for His glory and can guarantee it will not fail. No one wants to work for Him politically, when they think America is not a Christian nation, or that America is not a theocracy. Instead, Evangelical Protestants have preached the end-time heresy which has all but robbed them of any reason to confront their society with the will of Christ in any political matter. As a result, they (Evangelicals, not all of us) have lost their savor and hidden their light under baskets. All nations are theocracies: most of them stand in rebellion against God's overlordship of their nations, and Evangelicals in America have long joined that unrighteous throng. America lost against a communist who will now severely punish all who disagreed with him. We didn't lose because he was stronger than us, nor because we were weaker than he or his party was. We lost because we chose to not confront the nation with the truth we know about God and what He wants for this country. But nothing we can do or fail to do can destroy God, his Universe, this planet, or this country He has established. And He is not destroying it either--he set America up for many of His own good purposes. But those who refuse to be salt and light to the nation, regardless of how hard that is, these will be punished and removed from the equation--for now it will be much, much harder and more dangerous to witness for Him. It wasn't that people made a religion out of their politics that lost us this election: it was that political expressions of our faith were largely ignored, as well the huge confrontation conservative Christians needed to have with the Republican In Name Only GOP. The GOP has, since Reagan, secularized its leadership and consistently chooses big government over individual freedom because it has rejected the Christian religion of most of its members. In short, it begins and ends in man, not God, and an in-your-face move no Christian, conservative Republican can ever forget, viciously promoted a fanatical cult leader over TEA party conservatives like Palin, Bachmann, or Santorum. It is time for conservative Christians to express their faith politically now for the creation of a new party: one that will remain true to our belief in the true God and His interests for us which involves: personal responsibility, personal freedom, limited government, respect for human life and God-given rights as expressed in the Declaration and Constitution He inspired. By this we will be able to receive, not achieve, His blessing for us, our families and our descendants, until the very end of the present Age of Grace.

Anonymous said...

Erin, did it ever occur to you that yesterday might have been God's exact plan?

Singring said...

' The problem here is that Americans (particularly Evangelically influenced Christians) largely do not believe that God is sovereign: that He created our nation for His glory and can guarantee it will not fail.'

and

' Instead, Evangelical Protestants have preached the end-time heresy which has all but robbed them of any reason to confront their society with the will of Christ in any political matter.'

and then you say

'...one that will remain true to our belief in the true God and His interests for us which involves: personal responsibility, personal freedom,...'

So God is sovereign and wants us to carry out his will to form a theocracy according to his plan, yet he also wants us to take personal responsibility and have personal freedom?!?

Has the complete contradiction between these statements never occurred to you, Erin?

Anonymous said...

Sometimes misanthropy makes so much sense.