{"id":415,"date":"2003-10-22T15:59:20","date_gmt":"2003-10-22T19:59:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/benadida\/2003\/10\/22\/conservative-politics-and-radicalism"},"modified":"2003-10-22T15:59:20","modified_gmt":"2003-10-22T19:59:20","slug":"conservative-politics-and-radicalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/2003\/10\/22\/conservative-politics-and-radicalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Conservative Politics and Radicalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Aaron has an optimistic piece about political marketing<\/a>. He thinks most people are liberals, and if only liberals changed their political image, they’d win elections. I wish I could agree. I wish a simple Madison Avenue rebranding campaign could make Democrats more palatable. <\/p>\n

We’re entering an era of increased conservatism by some and dangerous radicalism by others, religious or otherwise. Sure, there’s the obvious: Muslim radicals calling for war against Infidels. But we have our own fair share in this country. We have judges who display the Ten Commandments<\/a> in their courthouse and defy federal judgments, and dozens of people who hold vigils to support that position. We have Congress members who want to keep religious references intimately tied to our government (let’s see what the Supreme Court eventually says…<\/a>). We have high-ranked military generals talking about a “war against Satan”<\/a>. We have a majority of Senators criminalizing a perfectly legitimate medical procedure and overruling the opinions of doctors<\/a> in a thinly veiled anti-abortion campaign that uses bogus medical terms to further a conservative agenda.<\/p>\n

No, it’s clear, not everyone’s a liberal. In our lasting climate of post-9\/11 fear, people are getting more conservative, and the already-conservative are getting more radical.<\/p>\n

It is everyone’s responsibility to fight this radicalization of our society. Judeo-Christian radicalism is just as bad as Muslim fundamentalism. Politics should remain agnostic in order to treat people of all religions fairly and equally. Finally, and most importantly, it behooves the moderates of each movement to not only distance themselves from their radical members, but to actively fight them.<\/p>\n

It’s going to take more than a makeup job to fix this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aaron has an optimistic piece about political marketing. He thinks most people are liberals, and if only liberals changed their political image, they’d win elections. I wish I could agree. I wish a simple Madison Avenue rebranding campaign could make Democrats more palatable. We’re entering an era of increased conservatism by some and dangerous radicalism […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/93"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}