Did I say Obama? My bad. I meant social conservative and Republican governor of Texas, Rick Perry. Gabriel Malor reports that such is Perry’s reverence for the Constitution, he has proposed eight amendments to it so far in his campaign for president. What they have in common is that they would clear the way for social conservatives to impose their will through the coercive powers of government on pretty much every aspect of life and remove the judiciary as an impediment to their unfettered hegemony. Why would you need your liberty preserved by all those checks and balances when there’s an elite group of people that know better and can make you toe the line?
By the way, it’s the totalitarian nature of Perry’s proposals that confuses idealistic liberals and Leftists when conservatives say liberals are the true fascists and that socialism is totalitarianism. Socialism, at least, allows them liberty of religious belief or non-belief. So if their choice between conservatism and liberalism is between two totalisms, it should not be a surprise that they choose liberalism for its genuine liberty of faith in addition to its false promises of security from a nanny state. My own experience as a former liberal is that both of these totalisms are so anxious to keep the political dialog polarized that the genuine alternatives that respect both financial liberty and liberty of conscience — fiscal conservatism and libertarianism — seldom get a chance to make their cases in enough detail to be clearly understood and persuasive.