Steyn: Conservativism Defined

By and large, on the occasion of John Paul II's death, the MSM was anything but objective, calling him divisive and disappointing. Columnist Mark Steyn has set a high standard over the years, but his refutation in Wednesday's Telegraph (UK) tops them all:

[T]he Guardian thought Karol Wojtyla was "a doctrinaire, authoritarian pontiff". That "doctrinaire" at least suggests the inflexible authoritarian derived his inflexibility from some ancient operating manual - he was dogmatic about his dogma - unlike the New York Times and the Washington Post, which came close to implying that John Paul II had taken against abortion and gay marriage off the top of his head, principally to irk "liberal Catholics". The assumption is always that there's some middle ground that a less "doctrinaire" pope might have staked out: he might have supported abortion in the first trimester, say, or reciprocal partner benefits for gays in committed relationships.

The root of the Pope's thinking - that there are eternal truths no one can change even if one wanted to - is completely incomprehensible to the progressivist mindset. There are no absolute truths, everything's in play, and by "consensus" all we're really arguing is the rate of concession to the inevitable: abortion's here to stay, gay marriage will be here any day now, in a year or two it'll be something else - it's all gonna happen anyway, man, so why be the last squaresville daddy-o on the block? . . .

Der Spiegel this week published a selection from the creepy suck-up letters Gerhard Schröder wrote to the East German totalitarian leaders when he was a West German pol on the make in the 1980s. As he wrote to Honecker's deputy, Egon Krenz: "I will certainly need the endurance you have wished me in this busy election year. But you will certainly also need great strength and good health for your People's Chamber election." The only difference being that, on one side of the border, the election result was not in doubt.

When a free man enjoying the blessings of a free society promotes an equivalence between real democracy and a sham, he's colluding in the great lie being perpetrated by the prison state. Too many Western politicians of a generation ago - Schmidt, Trudeau, Mitterrand - failed to see what John Paul saw so clearly. It requires tremendous will to cling to the splendour of truth when the default mode of the era is to blur and evade. . .

[I]f you look at the New York Times's list of complaints against the Pope - "Among liberal Catholics, he was criticised for his strong opposition to abortion, homosexuality and contraception" - they all boil down to what he called sex as self-assertion.

Thoughtful atheists ought to be able to recognise that, whatever one's tastes in these areas, the Pope was on to something - that abortion et al, in separating the "two meanings" of sex and leaving us free to indulge in one while ignoring the other, have severed us almost entirely and possibly irreparably from traditional impulses, such as societal survival. John Paul II championed the "splendour of truth" not because he was rigid and inflexible, but because he understood the alternative was a dead end in every sense.

If his beloved Europe survives in any form, it will one day acknowledge that.

Exactly. The left shuns morality like the plague, says liberal Marc Cooper in the Atlantic:

I've heard liberals, in their post-election malaise, obsess just as much over who they don't want in their ranks, culturally speaking, as over who they'd like to recruit. After some polls suggested that Bush won in November because a large percentage of Americans voted their "moral values," I was involved in discussions with dozens of panicked progressives who openly feared that someone, somewhere in the Democratic Party, might actually try to accommodate these lunatics. (Liberals ritualistically identify "gays, guns, and God" as the basis of right-wing wedge politics, but are reluctant to ask themselves how much of their own politics is based on a similar formula, if not the same one exactly.)

Conservatives, by contrast have married two seemingly incompatible concepts:

1. Some truths are eternal; and



2. As James Taranto said today--"Developing a political majority is a matter of addition, not subtraction, and the GOP's openness to a variety of viewpoints is a strength, not a weakness."

Either alone would fall short; together, they're unbeatable.

(via Best of the Web)