Four more years

Back in the 80s, someone elegantly defined for me just exactly what a Yuppie was - not someone who liked expensive mustard, or who had a "Baby on Board" sign on their car, or who embraced any of the accoutrement that people used to characterize Yuppie likes and behavior. No, my friend said, a Yuppie was someone who liked those things and wanted to be at party with 40 other people who liked the same exact things.

A very useful way to look at people. With that in mind, some opining about Conservatives. As  I see it, Conservatives you can talk to fall into three broad categories. (I'll not concern myself with the fourth category, the "there-are-Red- Chinee-massing-at-the-Mexican-border-I-tells-ya" Conservatives. Yet.)

First, there are the congenitals, people whose basic personality type suits them for the political philosophy, the straight-laced social mores, the entertainment and institutions, and so forth. People like Rich Lowery and Jay Nordlinger of National Review. Fuddy-duddies, I guess you'd have to call them, who embraced their fuddy-duddiness and achieved a kind of wisdom, seemingly never tempted by allure of the left.

Second, there are the common sensicals, the call the spade a spaders to whom that quality comes naturally. You have people for whom that quality manifests itself as a fulcrum guiding their intellectual understanding and exploration of the world - think Victor Davis Hanson, V.S. Naipaul, or Thomas Sowell. Some are artists - think Clive James or James Taranto (who is an artist, a comic genius). Others are people from all walks of life who have the ability to see the world as it is because they had to in order to get along. People who really get Naipaul's first line to A Bend in the River: "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." People like my friend Xiji, who immigrated from China and who voted in her first election this year. When Mitt Romeny's comments about the 47 percent of Americans who wouldn't vote for him essentially because they were no-accounts, the Left exploded with outrage and most people on the Right either thought it was an unfortunate thing to at least say publicly or perhaps even to espouse privately (count me among the latter).  Xiji, on the other hand, said that was when Romney began to interest her.

I wish I had come to Conservative side through common sense. Instead, I fall into the third category, the wised up. Wised up are folks include David Horowitz (the paradigm) and David Mamet (the recent poster boy). When I first started doing cryptic crossword puzzles, I was instructed that the easiest way to figure out an anagram was to scramble the letters of a word and put it back together. For most of the wised up, I imagine conversions came after things that we had internalized or long looked at without questioning were somehow rearranged. Moreover, some tempermental proclivity or acquired cast of mind receptive to a conservative outlook guided the re-organization of facts and attitudes in question. For me, while I had long been attuned to the cynicism and perniciousness of the Left's social agenda, 9/11 turned me decisively Conservative - though perhaps I was trending that was by casting my first vote for a Republican to vote against Hillary Clinton for Senate in 2000 (but then, I voted for Gore, which seems inconceivable, not to mention embarassing, to me today). It was the explosion worldwide of anti-Semitism and anit-Westernism from the Left that changed me.

I had a traditional Jewish upbringing that shaped my values. Most of my friends are Jewish. Facebook has allowed me to connect with (or at least glimpse) many people from my past and get some sense of their directions in life, and I have to say, almost all the people exposed to the kind of Jewish upbringing I had identify as Conservatives. Most of the friends who didn't identify as Liberals. There are some exceptions, but not many.

I was dismayed by the recent election. I thought Romney had a much better chance of pulling it out, and I think I missed the boat so badly is the result of spending too much time in the echo chamber of wised up conservatives. What most of us wised up Conservatives didn't get about ourselves is the extent we have internalized the good things about Liberalism, such as they exist, and incorporated them into our personal definitions of Conservatism. We've made our peace with the fringe "Red Chinee at the Mexican border" type, who to us do not seem representative of our thinking. But to the uncoverted they seem part of our continuum of thought, much the way Barack Obama and Peggy Joseph seem opposite ends of one line of thinking.

The echo chamber did many of us in. One guy who was seeing it all clearly was Bret Stephens, whose article in WSJ Online "Earth to GOP" should be required reading for the wised up. He cites an earlier prediction that the GOP would lose:

 "It doesn't matter that Americans are generally eager to send Mr. Obama packing," I wrote. "All they need is to be reasonably sure that the alternative won't be another fiasco. But they can't be reasonably sure, so it's going to be four more years of the disappointment you already know.

His main point is that the social issues doomed the GOP. Since the wised up people I'd been reading are (like myself) pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, balanced about immigration, etc., etc. - yet align with Conservatives on Islamic fundamentalism, the economy, the welfare state, Obamacare, Federalism, etc. etc. We don't see any contradictions because we've made, like I said, a certain kind of peace with the people on our side who disagree with us on these matters. My criteria on social issues is whether someone can come to a position contrary to mine honestly. For example, I can imagine a good person with good intentions make a sincere argument against gay marriage. I can accept it and not feel threatened by it.

What we found out last week is that some people can't. That plus the 47 percent was enough to give us four more years of what we'd been getting.