"Conservative" is a genre!

All my labeling problems just disappeared in a burst of literary theory. Conservative, liberal, progressive, libertarian: these are just genres.

"Just genres?" you ask. "What does that even mean?"

Well, a genre is a more or less complete set of signals to guide interpretation. If we know the genre, we know how to interpret the story. To be sure, philosophers and critics have spent entire centuries trying to locate and enforce essential aspects of genres, with their famous attempts to lay down the rules for the best kind of tragedy. But the greatest authors were always playing with the codes they inherited, and genres always escaped their quarantines.

If biological evolution is an intricate branching tree, generic evolution is a tree that branches and rejoins itself. So too with political philosophies. There are no rules against any syntheses, though many crossings will have little to no survival value. The narrower the genre--reformist conservative, New Deal Democrat, anarcho-syndicalist, Objectivist--the greater its explanatory power. The word "conservative," free of any modifiers, is as broad a label as "tragic," and is helpful in the same degree.

Conservatism, broadly construed, is dedicated to a certain kind of story about our political life, just as the liberalism is dedicated to its own story. To say "I am a conservative" or "I am a liberal" is to endorse a story. And the mainstream of the conservative movement, right now, is advancing a certain interpretation of that story.

So what do you do when the genre turns ugly? You don't stay silent; you tell a better story. You take the various codes and tropes, and you learn how to make them compelling again*.

You reclaim the word** by reclaiming the genre.

Is there a breaking point? After some thought, I'm not sure how much it matters. At some point, you just have to tell your better story, and let other people worry about the name.

(Caveat: Genre certainly isn't everything. The Republican Party is a definite human institution, with membership and hierarchy and order and power. You reclaim a political party, or an institution of government, through the old messy work of politics, which involves both persuasion and compromise. And policies are policies; we can try to agree on some common empirical ground when we argue about them. With this weird crisis behind me, let's get back to it.)

(Question: Does this turn Scott Payne's "very complicated and intricate coin" into the two masks of drama?)

*Like Die Hard did for action movies after the ultra-muscular '80s. See also: Christopher Nolan's reclamation of the Batman series after the Schumacher debacles.

**Yes. That's my paragraph on the Daily Dish. Surreal.