David McElroy

Every conservative I know seems to be counting on Mitt Romney to be the great hero to save them from ObamaCare. Romney is playing up the role, of course, trying to fire up conservative Republicans to turn out in November to help him him. But if you’re honestly counting on Romney as your health care savior, what makes you think you’ll get anything better?

After the Supreme Court saved the new health care boondoggle last week, Romney immediately went into a full press against it. Note in the picture what he’s saying he wants to do: “Repeal and replace ObamaCare.” Does that mean he’s going to give us something more similar to the RomneyCare plan from Massachusetts, which is even worse than ObamaCare?

Republicans who support Romney will tell you that there were differences between the two plans, but they’re straining pretty hard to find substantive ones. (This list of things that supposedly makes Romney’s plan less offensive than Obama’s plan leads with the length of the bills in number of pages, as though that’s the issue.)

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What started long ago as a celebration of independence from the rule of a foreign power has become something very different today. The Fourth of July was once a day when Americans celebrated their independence and their way of life. In too many cases, it’s ended up becoming a worship of state and a celebration of militarism.

As a result, I don’t enjoy as much about the Fourth of July as some people do. I look at the nationalistic elements that have crept in and become dominant for so many people — and I cringe. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to love what it originally stood for. And it doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be a part of an extended family celebrating our homes and our lives.

I wrote Tuesday about how people have come to associate words such as “conservative” and “liberal” with political positions. I’m not that kind of conservative and haven’t been for more than 20 years. But I’m a traditionalist in many ways. I’m an odd mix. I love many things about the modern world, but I feel a tug to a past that I’ve never experienced. In the truest sense of the word, I’m a conservative in those ways. There’s much about the values and lifestyle of our past that I want to conserve, and I’m extremely conservative in my own lifestyle.

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The most conservative person I know is essentially an anarchist. She doesn’t like change. Despite being quite young, she’s uncomfortable with technology and wishes she never had to upgrade computers or pretty much any gadget. She got a manual typewriter last year and she plays LPs on something old folks used to call a “record player.”

But she doesn’t belong to a Republican women’s club. And she’s not voting for Mitt Romney in November. She doesn’t believe in voting, because she’s an anarcho-capitalist. How can a conservative be an anarchist?

We’ve come to associate words such as “liberal” and “conservative” with politics, but there’s a more general meaning that I wish we could go back to. In the political sense, the words have become useless. Today’s conservatives aren’t conserving anything. Today’s liberals want nothing like what liberals of the classical era wanted. So why do we keep using such useless labels?

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