horse of george

"... she remarked, with an acidic smile, on how republican I'd become, clearly meaning it as an insult, oddly tinged with an animosity that suggested she felt for some reason betrayed... I assured her that me speaking to facts unadulterated by idealist fantasy was in no way meant to offend or otherwise indicate a state of being hopelessly corrupted by evil... I told her that I found any partisan appeal to or affirmation of a particular ideological brand to seem uncomfortably simplistic and distasteful to a skeptic like myself and what's more also a wee bit antithetical to democracy's fundamentally moderating and consensual nature ... I declared that if asked I might be tempted to call myself a libertarian but felt even that was to say too much and admitted to being merely something of a conservative, an approximate conservative, if you will, and that even my devotion to that mild asseveration was somewhat conditional... the condition of course being the idea of American exceptionalism, an expression that sounds too definitively grand for my tastes, but still, the completely reputable notion that America remains, as it was during the rise of fascism, the rise of Soviet styled communism and now the rise of a Chinese styled Leninist, capitalist, vaguely fascistic hybrid, the vital, necessary power in the world... I asserted that great, epochal powers like America could and should not be governed from the left, the middle possibly, but the left no... that such great powers demand realism of their leaders and can only be weakened if not destroyed by an enslavement to the idle fantasies evinced by liberalism in its modern, emotionalist incarnation... I explained that since the considerations that keep a great power great and powerful all tend to fall within the purview of conservatives and conservative thinkers, that I therefore must logically render myself a conservative too... I contended that lesser entities, the post war states of Europe for instance, could possibly afford or delude themselves into thinking they could afford the luxury of enervation that is the natural consequence of a soft socialist dalliance, but that the last defender of the Western tradition can never abide such an indulgence, and the dramatic rightward turn of the erstwhile socialistic sentimentalist currently afoot in the White House is probably, if we agree to grant the diminished demagogue the benefit of a doubt, ample testament to that harsh reality... in short I assured the affronted creature, leaning forward and deftly placing my hand on the small of her slender back, that despite her hatred for me I would still insist on saving her soul if given the chance, but not necessarily because she herself was worth saving..."