Staggering

Callimachus from Done With Mirrors has a post up about what it is like trying to get through the black and white, doctrinaire world that many pundits, both in the media and in the self-defined world that is the new media, have created. It's a bit like a stagger if you look only at the person navigating it without taking into account the heaving of the seas of the world.

Much is made this week of conservatives "abandoning" Bush. Some of what is said about it makes sense. Most of it is nonsense.

I'm not a conservative, so I can't speak for them. Who I can speak for are people who are not doctrinaire and locked into eternal opposition to someone or something or some party or some nation. People, in other words, who try to navigate the real world as it happens around them, guided by principles but not ossified by them, aware of ideologies and also of their limitations. Such a person's course of actions is bound to look like a drunken stagger when you only watch the walker, not the pitching deck of the world as it goes on around him.

In some sense, everything is a necessary evil — from abortions to zoos — with equal emphasis on both parts of the clause. Often you accept the bad for the sake of opposing the worse. And your rough measure of "bad" and "worse" is always being re-calibrated, unless you're stupid.

By all means, please read the rest - it is very well written and defines a real problem.

I have been pegged - whether or not I quite fit - into a conservative hole in the pegboard that is the interwebby tube equivalent of reality. Am I conservative in some things? Oh yeah. Very much so. But I think (and I hope longtime readers understand) that I am what I would consider to be classic liberal in other respects. (Not the leftist-defined, nanny-state authoritarianism that is routinely called "liberal" today. The classical 'freedom is good, tyranny is bad' liberalism that this country was founded on.) So I stagger along in the manner Callimachus so adroitly describes.

I have - and still do - support the war in Iraq regardless of whether it was a great idea or not. Because it is the war we have rather than the war we want. It would be simply marvelous if we always had things go our way in the world. It would also be the height of arrogance to think it ever will happen that way. As it is the height of arrogance to ascribe everything that is good or evil in the world to this nation's actions. That is a particularly insidious form of cultural bias that assumes nobody else in the world is free to act without our leave. Or that, conversely, only we in the West can lead the benighted masses out of their darkness (as Al Gore likes to preach). I strongly disagree with the administration over immigration policy and the so-called reform that is being stuffed through Congress. But I am also willing to be flexible rather than doctrinaire - as long as the border is secured first.

In other words, I stagger along.

I support a lot of things for a simple reason: the alternative is worse. Go read what Callimachus wrote.

I'd as soon not sit at that table, either. Ever.