Conservatism is at heart a humble philosophy. It engages with reality, not seeking to remake it. It holds that certain things are eternally true. Give Government your money and it will not spend it with as much restraint and care as you do. Or for that matter Charlie Sheen does on a four day bender in Bangkok.
Conservatives view humanity as flawed, sinful, and rather nasty. Tradition, social norms and institutions make civilization possible. Remove these and a man's inner Charlie Sheen is let out. Before long he's doing blow for breakfast and trying to pork his wife's sister's daughter's fifteen year old baby sitter.
Opposing this is Progressivism - the political drive to make the world a better place. At best this is laudable but laughable. Like trying to teach your dog to use a flush toilet so he won't leave steaming turds on the front lawn. Reality intervenes. His little paws cant reach the button. But at worst it employs the violent authority of the state. Like achieving the same result by grabbing your dog and staple-gunning his arse shut. The arrogant approach of progressives, attempting to reorganize society in accord with their own suspect utopic visions (see welfare, effect of) seems currently to be reaching new levels of absurdity. Perhaps frustrated by the triumph of market economics, they have turned inwards. They've gone intimate. Sexy even.
The struggle of the now for the young liberal is not globalism, inequality or peace. It's men who would rather be ladies. And of course naturally (or not) vice versa. Witness the house magazine of the young liberally inclined kiwi, the Spinoff. A piece on the struggles of trans people is a weekly if not daily feature. The burning issue of which bathroom they be allowed to use is given full serious discussion. I'm not a transphobe. Anyone who claims libertarian tendencies can't be. It's your life and they're your cock and balls. Chop 'em off it you wish. I would advise a trip to a shrink first, that's all. You'd want to be sure. But ultimately if you really feel you'd be better off as the other gender then my only response would be 'you go girl!"But we are talking 0.3 percent of the population (U.S figures) here. Is where they take a dump really the civil rights issue of our times?
The weight given seems to be out of all proportion. I think its because it chimes with what is at the heart of the progressive project - the reordering of nature. Take the having of children outside the traditional man woman paradigm. The family unit seems to have worked pretty well for most in the West for thousands of years. OK, so sometimes women threw plates and got suspiciously timed 'headaches' and men got boozed up, fell asleep on the couch and forgot to clean out the guttering, but hey, life wasn't meant to be perfect. Unless of course you're left wing. Then you think it should be. So they rip up that natural directive and invent their own. Women can have children without a husband. Hey they can even have them without a man. Or much of him. Just add sperm.
The Spinoff have also been celebrating this form of recklessness in recent weeks, with a four part series about a woman trying to find a sperm donor via the hook up app tinder. Classy. This is needless to say a tragic denial of the role of fathers in children's lives not to mention unbelievably selfish in putting the desire for a child above the welfare of the child (according to the Texas Department of Corrections, 85% of all youths in prison come from fatherless homes – 20 times the average). But consequences be damned if they don't conform to how progressives think the universe should work. Instinct, biology, custom and social mores count for nothing. Politics (the right kind of course) counts for everything.
Welcome to the Age of Arrogance.