Today's Oxymoron

"Reasonable Conservative"

Keeping in mind the immortal words of Ferris Bueler - "Isms, in my opinion, are not good".

This bit from Andrew Bacevich at The American Conservative is actually pretty close to what I've held to be true for a good long time.

Conservatives take human relationships seriously and know that they require nurturing. In community lies our best hope of enjoying a meaningful earthly existence. But community does not emerge spontaneously. Conservatives understand that the most basic community, the little platoon of family, is under unrelenting assault, from both left and right. Emphasizing autonomy, the forces of modernity are intent on supplanting the family with the hyper-empowered—if also alienated—individual, who exists to gratify appetite and ambition. With its insatiable hunger for profit, the market is intent on transforming the family into a cluster of consumers who just happen to live under the same roof. One more thing: conservatives don’t confuse intimacy with sex.

--and--

The key to success will be to pick the right fights against the right enemies, while forging smart tactical alliances. (By tactical, I do not mean cynical.) Conservatives need to discriminate between the issues that matter and those that don’t, the contests that can be won and those that can’t. And they need to recognize that the political left includes people of goodwill whose views on some (by no means all) matters coincide with our own.

So forget about dismantling the welfare state. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and, yes, Obamacare are here to stay. Forget about outlawing abortion or prohibiting gay marriage. Conservatives may judge the fruits produced by the sexual revolution poisonous, but the revolution itself is irreversible.

Of course, I have to diverge from some of his points (eg: his take on "Original Sin" is actually pretty good, but I've come to view it from the opposite perspective), and some of his agenda items leave something to be desired.

The thing that gets me is that here's a guy trying to make some sense of his own thinking, and to extricate himself (and his fellows) from having been lumped in with the screaming wingnuts of the GOP.  Hope springs eternal.