Politics and/or Following Your Heart

The quote has been attributed to, among other, Otto von Bismark (whose last name invariably reminds me of a funny scene from the Simpsons in which Homer thinks the capital of North Dakota is "Hitler"): If you're not a liberal by the time you're twenty, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're thirty, you have no brain.

That, among conservatives at least, is the received wisdom. But the received wisdom has been challenged in this post. And for the record, fellow New Orleans resident Oyster has two very cute pictures of his daughter, a heartless Reagan Republican in training. Cute as a button.

"It's a subtle but fundamental change. A citizen is active and makes judgments; a consumer is passive, and has only to have an opinion."

I'd like to this thought developed a little more, but unfortunately that's about all you get on the difference between a citizen and a consumer, and the distinction is central to the author's claim that conservatives (and more specifically, Reagan Republicans) are primarily motivated by their feelings (and it's implied that liberals are motivated by enlightened reason alone). But without some better definitions, it's hard to evaluate the logic, let alone attack it.

"This change is a basic fault deep in the heart of the Reagan Cultural Revolution. It's usually euphemized as 'individualism', but it's really fetish-individualism, ie desperate. In practice it means a set of extremely rotten values:"

Care to guess what those values might be? First one on the list is "greed," and that reminds me of an observation made by Ace, I think, that during the Reagan economic boom, the liberals bashed our growing economy as indicative of a horrible era of greed. The Clinton boom, on the other hand, was nothing short of miraculous, a godsend, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and so forth. Perhaps "greed" is in the eye of the beholder?

Anyway, I'm too physically and emotionally exhausted for a full-fledged fisking, but I'd like to see some comments, hopefully from Oyster as well, either shoring up or attacking the assertion that Reagan Republicans are improperly motivated. One last snippet:

"The Reagan ethos was/is: Don't think, just feel; believe what you want to believe; there is no price to be paid for anything; if it feels good, do it; you can always have your cake and eat it too - and with extra frosting, if that's what your 'heart' tells you you ought to have."

Update: Follow the link for the comments over at Your Right Hand Thief. The discussion so far has been admirably level-headed. That kind of cross-party dialogue is what I like to see, even if the likelihood of anyone fundamentally changing their minds is probably nil.