Heart is to blame for the liberal, optimistic young; elders wiser, pessimistic

Inside most of us, I think, and sometimes not too deep inside, is a little firebrand… Inside most of us, I think, and sometimes not too deep inside, is a little firebrand revolutionary who’d love to grab ultimate power and set everything ‘right’ to his or her political ideals.

I sure would, if the right opportunity arose. What an exciting, ego-filling idea revolution can be, especially when it’s only on paper! On paper, or in the imagination, the Konrad Revolution can avoid all the messy demands of reality that have tarnished countless revolutions in the past. On paper I can always stick to clean, utopian thinking where everything falls into place nicely.

This “armchair revolutionary” streak is particularly true for many college campuses, where, as the stereotype goes, liberal ideals dominate the populace.

But loony-left, Che-Guevara-shirt-donning college kids are still young, as an older and more conservative generation may conjecture, so they’ve yet to see enough bad stuff to wither away their liberal idealism. They just need another 10 to 15 years of maturing to stomp that peace-and-love garbage out of them. So seems to be the case more often than not with people as they get older. But how inevitable is this shift, I wonder?

Of course there are also old people who want to change the world, and the cause is not always leftist. Take for instance, the “regime changes” that the Bush administration would like to implement in quite a few countries, like Venezuela, Syria or Iran. Since the United States still has its arm snared in the bloody bag of fishhooks that is the Iraq War, the likelihood of the war-hawks garnering enough support or manpower for another regime change is virtually nil. But fanciful notions of “democratizing” rival regimes live on.

The whole case for regime change/democratization/revolution always hinges upon the assumption that the inevitable upheaval of revolution would be relatively painless and that the resulting regime will be a decided improvement. It all sounds great on paper, but it rarely ever works out that perfectly.

Take the consequences of the Soviet Union’s collapse, for example. Most Americans would probably say that the USSR’s downfall was a turn for the better. And for America it certainly was, as it left us as the sole world superpower. But how did it turn out for the former Soviets themselves? The Baltic countries and a handful of the former Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe do seem better off by and large. But most post-Soviet nations still have to endure corrupt, oligarchic governments and hamstrung economies which aren’t much better than the old Soviet yoke, if not worse. During the Yeltsin years Russia’s GDP was halved, life expectancy fell and many more Russians fell below the poverty line. Many older Russians felt that things were better back when Gorby was in charge, a sentiment that almost brought Russia’s Communist Party to victory in the ’96 presidential election.

With so many revolutions in hindsight, is it possible yet to evaluate whether it is generally better to stay the course and endure a lousy government, or to risk taking a swing at Revolution Roulette in the hope that maybe, just maybe the new regime won’t be just as lame or worse than the last? While this is ultimately a case-by-case matter, arguments like this boil down to an essential difference between liberals and conservatives, at least in an archetypal sense that liberals desire change and that conservatives prefer the status quo.

The debate is reflected even better in the rifts between younger and older generations. The famous Winston Churchill quote that some conservatives like to cite comes to mind: “If you’re not a liberal at age 20, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by age 30, you have no brain.” I never believed in that quote, but there’s certainly a little truth in it simply in how it reflects the usual trend for an average person’s political views to gradually slide rightwards as he ripens with age. The implication of Churchill’s adage is that having more experiences with the stark reality of life (especially in the realm of politics) hardens one’s character and whittles away at lofty idealisms once held dearly.

Glancing at the political landscape across the globe today, there are a fair number of cases that a left-libertarian mind like mine can nitpick at and say something to the effect of “if they could just change that sucky government system, they’d be better off.” Much easier said than done.

Take Saudi Arabia, for instance, with its sprawling, stipend-sucking royal family (with over 20,000 members strong) that established the power of the radical Islamist al-Wahhabi sect in the Middle East. On paper, the abolition of an absolute monarchy like that sounds pretty good. But what is there to replace it? The Saudi monarchy itself is struggling not to get toppled by a seething undercurrent of fundamentalist Islam in that country. If the chaos in Iraq is any indication, creating a power vacuum in Saudi Arabia would let loose a hellstorm of radical Islamist insurgency and a furious civil war would be practically inevitable. Too often, the reality of politics is choosing the lesser of two evils.

In all likelihood, of course, I will never be in a position to actually control the sort of events that I’ve been ruminating over. But still, when I think about it, it feels somewhat paralyzing to realize that bringing about sweeping governmental change is often just as fraught with problems as leaving things be. I don’t mean to say that it’s inevitably pointless to consider such notions, but it appears to me that unless the regime-changing idea is something fully developed, it’s probably best kept confined to the armchair.

Get out of that chair and e-mail Konrad at klk27@pitt.edu if you still have some heart.