Conservatopia?

A couple weeks ago, I was asked what a socialist society would look like, and that got me thinking. What would a conservative society look like?

History has given us a plethora of examples of different types of societies. If you want to see communism and its rigid outlawing of private property, look to Russia 1920s, Vietnam 1980s or China’s Great Leap Forward. Pay special attention to the vast armies, secret police, slave labor camps and mass murders.

If you want to see the impoverished, stagnant societies that are created by hard core socialism, look no further than Cuba today or East Germany 1988. Just don’t try to buy bread, use the decaying infrastructure, or speak out against the secret police.

If you want to see social democracy in action, just look at bankrupt England circa 1970s, with its militant labor strife, high unemployment, deflating currency, nationalized industries, decaying infrastructure and a sad, defeated people. Of course, you could look to modern England, Japan or Sweden for the softer version, where nationalization is foresworn (except in critical industries like health care) in favor of heavy, heavy regulation and the acceptance of high unemployment and a burgeoning underclass. Slow but sure collapse is still collapse, but at least you have longer to kid yourself that it ain’t coming.

We’ve seen cleptocracies (Russia, Kenya), theocracies (Iran, Afghanistan), cultocracies (North Korea), and failed states (Somalia).

If you want to see modern liberalism implemented look to modern England, where criminals are treated as victims, minorities are guaranteed equal results, regional hatreds are stoked, religion has been neutered (except for militant Islam), taxes are heavy but spending is heavier, competition nearly forbidden, and a privileged few make sure that no one in the middle class can excel very far beyond the burgeoning underclass of binge drinking, drug addicted, knife wielding thieves. Oh baby sign me up!

But where in the world has conservatism every been tried? Indeed, what time period could we point to as our conservatopia?

Many people cite the 1950s, but that really doesn’t work. The 1950s was a time of heavy taxation, increased regulation, large scale social engineering by the government, and a destruction of individual rights to fight the red menace.

We could argue for the second term of Ronald Reagan. He gave us a strong defense, strong foreign policy, lower taxes, and decreased regulation. Yet, he made only a dent in decades of socialist creep, and despite his best efforts to adjust the Supreme Court, it remained firmly liberal in all of its rulings.

Perhaps the time that was most like our conservatopia occurred between the Republican revolution of 1994 and the election of George W. Bush. That was a time marked by lowered taxes, lowered regulation, fiscal responsibility, increased government accountability, expanded free trade, a reduction in the welfare roles, and a series of reforms to privatize or eliminate government functions. But it was also a time of lowered morality and weak foreign policy.

So what about this. . . the American West of the 1880s. The American West seems to be the one time period when each of the competing conservative groups co-existed. You had libertarians, mixing with capitalists, mixing with religious settlers, all co-existing in a time period of limited government interference with people's lives. The one thing missing was rule of law, but you had a sort of "social sanction" working as a substitute. Not to mention that rule of law was slowly being established by the law and order crowd.

Moreover, unlike the periods mentioned above, this group was free to live according to their own beliefs without having to combat an entrenched modern liberalism. There was no IRS, there were no limits on freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion. Thus, the religious settlers were not told they had to avoid the public square. The capitalists were not regulated and controlled and told who to hire. The libertarians were not told that the state could crawl up their backsides with a flashlight in the name of public safety.

Perhaps that is the period we should point to when people ask, what would a conservative society look like? Perhaps that was our conservatopia? Maybe that’s why westerns remain so fixed in our imaginations today?

What do you think?