Once in a while a conservative gets lost and wanders in here…

…and he thumbs past the posts about chickens and dogs and firewood until he gets to something political, and he reads that, and maybe he sees me ragging on conservatives. And seeing that I am not a conservative, he concludes that I am a progressive. A strange sort of progressive who likes guns, maybe, but still a progressive and so I disgust him.

I imagine that at that point nine out of ten of these good, right-thinking citizens stomp off and go cleanse their minds with a WND column. Sometimes one pauses long enough to write me an indignant comment, which is how I know they’re there.

I claim to be amused by this. The truth is that it makes me sad. Most of the conservative individuals I actually know in the flesh, I get along with just fine. Progressives, not so much. I haven’t bought the progressive line since I was maybe seventeen, which is the emotional level on which progressive talkers argue. But I self-identified as a conservative for quite some time. Until it slowly sank in that caring about the health and welfare of the republican party is not the same thing as caring about freedom.

This all came to mind while I read “The Threat We Face,” by professional ex-communist David Horowitz. I bought his book way back when. He doesn’t seem to have changed a bit since sometime in the seventies, so I guess he should get points for consistency. But I digress. Horowitz’ theme, as always, is the dangerous evils of progressivism.

To sum this up: Progressives see themselves as an army of the saints, and their opponents as the party of Satan; and that will justify almost anything you can get away with.

That Horowitz has spent thousands of words doing exactly the same thing at this point is an irony that escapes him. Horowitz was never good at irony. But he’s a master of waving bloody shirts.

…I know that Hillary Clinton’s right hand, Huma Abedin, the former deputy secretary of state, and chief foreign policy adviser on Muslim Affairs is a Muslim Brotherhood operative. Huma Abedin’s late father was a Muslim Brotherhood leader, and her mother and brother still are. For 12 years until the moment she was hired by Hillary, Huma Abedin worked for Abdullah Omar Naseef, one of the top three funders of Osama Bin Laden…

That paragraph comes early in the article and he really could have stopped right there, because that’s the point he proceeds to beat home with many, many words. Hillary Clinton=Progressives=terrorists=evil because 9/11. Amen.

I don’t necessarily disagree with any of that. People like Hillary Clinton make me wish there was a hell, and I know nothing about those other people. Maybe Horowitz is telling the truth about them. How would I know?

His argument is insidious because it’s simple and easy to follow – like the progressive argument. Our opponents are evil. Therefore we are good, because we oppose them. We favor the war, for it is a war on terrorism and who would argue that terrorism is not evil? Our opponents undermine the war effort, therefore they favor terrorism. And so you can see that they are evil. Vote for our guys, for they are good.

But one of the hallmarks of a demagogue who would be king is a propensity for stirring up fear of an outside enemy. The conservatives have a beaut.

[Radical Islam’s] desire to rid the world of Christians and Jews or to bring all infidels under the heel of totalitarian Islamic law.

It is our patriotic duty to forget all else in the fervor of our fear and hatred of such people. But I’m not afraid of some fanatics on the other side of the world who haven’t had a good day since the thirteenth century. I’ve traveled in Islam. I’ve smoked and eaten with a good many devout Muslims, and most of them are peaceable people who wish as firmly as we do that their fanatics would go away.

Of course these days they see America’s going away as the first step toward that, but again I digress.

This is getting long so I’ll cut to the chase. I don’t argue with progressives because anyone who buys the progressive line is either a child or has the mind of a child and at my age children bore me. But most of the conservatives I have known believe they want the same things I want. They think they can get there through politics and patriotism, they think the nation-state and its government can be “reformed,” and I think they’re wrong. But our goals aren’t that different. As long as I’m not smoking weed or dodging taxes or something evil like that most conservatives would leave me alone to go to hell in my own way, and no progressive would ever do that. So I have a lot more in common with conservatives than with progressives. So I’ll argue with a conservative. That, in a single paragraph, is my whole view on progressives and conservatives – simplistic as it may be.

I don’t care about Horowitz v. Clinton, Obama v. Hannity, existential good v. evil as expressed through politics. I care about freedom. My freedom to own myself, to peaceably do what I will, and my daughter’s and her daughter’s. Progressives won’t have that, and so I am against them.

Which doesn’t let conservatives off the hook. Because which would you say has proven the greatest threat to my freedom over the past twelve years? Terrorism? Or the war on terrorism?