• Biffah Bacon says: April 30, 2013 at 7:15 pm

      This may turn your head upside down but real conservatives would be progressive right now; the "conservative" movement is actually reactionary, authoritarian, and opposed to the freedoms outlined in the constitution, itself a progressive document.
      America goes through cycles of corruption and reform in our religious, political, and economic lives. Markets, banks, and the wealthy have attained outlandish powers in the past, only to crash in panics, banking scandals, and personal and professional misfeasance or failure. Our founding fathers were anti-religious in the sense that the Catholic-Anglican Protestant conflicts of Europe were part of the founding of the colonies, a dumping ground for religious outcasts that resulted in conflict and later the Great Awakening.
      We are in a crisis right now. The conservative move would be to use what has worked repeatedly in the past under Progressives. Root out corruption. Provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity yada yada yada.
      The reactionary move is to consolidate everything under a king or an oligarch and reject democratic government (Michigan), multiculturalism (Buchanan), Gitmo gulags, open society and secularism, go back to gold backed money (Beck, Pauls), maybe establish a national church (Southern Baptist vs mall church vs Catholics).
      I don't think we will get to a happier medium without some painful convulsions.