Ask Auntie Pinko
March 7, 2002

Dear Auntie Pinko

Pat Buchanan has a new book out, something about the death of the west, and on his subsequent media appearances he explained that our American way of life is being destroyed by Mexicans and Islamic immigrants. Is Pat just nuts or does he really have a valid point? What is the American way of life he refers to and why do immigrants and multiculturalism threaten him so?

Max,
Flagstaff, AZ

Dear Max,

"Conservative" comes from the root "conserve." Conservatives have a valuable role in human society and in our culture-to ensure that we conserve that which functions well and produces desirable results. The positive side of this role is the testing they provide for the changes or innovations in an evolving society. They force us to prove that a change will produce a greater good than the status quo.

And just as thoughtful liberals acknowledge the value of the conservatives' role in our society, thoughtful conservatives are fully aware that change is both inevitable and necessary if we are to continue to survive and evolve in a world that is changing and evolving. But they are equally well aware of the price that change exacts, and they want to weigh that price carefully against the cost of not changing.

It is the perceptions of those prices, and the values we assign to them, that are at the root of most disagreements between liberals and conservatives.

If you look at the pace of change throughout human history, Max, it becomes very clear that after many centuries of a steadily oscillating cycle of change and reaction and continued change, the last two centuries have seen an exponential increase in the pace of change. It should not surprise us, therefore, that conservatives are reacting in proportion to the speed and amplitude of the changes our society is undergoing.

Auntie Pinko has, on occasion, felt as though the control of something vitally important was being wrested from me by people or circumstances too complex for me to fully comprehend and too powerful for me to significantly affect. It's not a pleasant feeling, not a pleasant feeling at all.

I sometimes think that feeling is at the root of the more extreme and irrational forms that conservatism seems to be taking in contemporary America. Between the fear and the overwhelming urge to control, conservatives have lost sight of the reality that neither conservatives nor liberals can actually "control" the course and pace of human events. The most we can do is influence it.

So to answer you, Max, I would speculate that Mr. Buchanan is one of those so focused on the fear of, and the obsession to control, the frenetic course of modern history that he has forgotten that influence can only happen in an environment of constructively dynamic tension. He's obviously not alone in that!

Immigrants, and multiculturalism, represent a change from Mr. Buchanan's concept of the status quo. For more enlightenment, I would suggest you pull up your favorite search engine and enter the term "Father Coughlin." Mr. Buchanan is not a new phenomenon in our body politic.

And thank you for asking Auntie Pinko!