Aging and Conservatism?
It’s winter already in Boston, and today as I walked along Newbury Street the first snowflakes of the year fell onto the still-warm ground. There was something beautiful, but so sad, about it: the Hub shutting down psychologically for winter. I continued my wandering eastward, and somewhere around the Public Garden I first heard it, a faint booming of a megaphone. Once I got the Common, I recognized was it was, a crowd of a thousand or so people protesting the Iraq War. As someone who thinks the invasion of Iraq was misguided, and that the Bush Administration’s management of the occupation was ruinous, I was happy to join in. If anything, I felt kind of sheepish that I hadn’t heard about the rally in advance.
Still, as I sat there and listened to a parade of speakers, I felt depressed. For one thing, the speakers were of a decidedly anti-capitalist bent, and as I have come to believe in capitalism (with limits) as the best way to structure most economic sectors, I felt out of place. I also felt frustrated, as I knew that a few such comments could potentially tar the whole event as a “Communist” demonstration in the mainstream media.
There was another, deeper issue. At one point I felt a sense of solidarity with the gruffy activists, with their piercings and dyed hair and beards. But now I feel some frustration with these somewhat aimless lefty protests, for they often seem directed not at winning any particular political goal, but with demonstrating the purity of their convictions. And so I want to get stuff done, help achieve some progressive political victories, which makes me identify with political leaders. My time at Harvard, I’m afraid to say, has done much to encourage this identification, this belief that political change comes primarily from those in suits, those in position of at least moderate power.
This transformation toward moderateness probably happens to everyone as they get older. What I worry about is that this trend, combined with my intense business in my career, has made me what I’ve always detested: an upper-class, bleeding-heart liberal who politically does nothing but pontificates a lot.
