
The liberal line on conservatism is that it's heartless and lacks emotion, but anyone who's read the life of Russell Kirk, one of the founding paleoconservatives, knows that he was the opposite of heartless and emotionless. He once let a beggar live in his house for an extended period of time - how many liberal giants have? Conservatism might sometimes actually be the product of TOO much heart and emotion because of its intense suspicion of change. Why the suspicion? Can you say "French Revolution"? Or Communism? Experience has shown that throwing out the old verities is often the recipe for more pain and suffering.
What liberalism has but conservatism lacks is a moving, emotional story. With liberalism you can write wonderful stories about how this injustice was righted or that person was saved from poverty by a welfare check. But with conservatism, it's harder to write an emotional story about the person who wouldn't have been able to feed his family but for, say, the economic climate fostered by a government not screwing things up. Suffering avoided by conservative governance is not a story; suffering ameliorated by government is a story.
Concerning the conservation of human life, it's becoming more difficult for liberals to play the emotion card, that being strictly of the pain of the mother. Whereas before the child in the womb was mute and invisible, we can now see the child via ultrasounds and improved technology. Suddenly the reluctant mother's pain and inconvenience at bearing a child is not the only reality. We still can't write a moving account of what would've been for a child who was killed in the womb, but we can at least show a picture of what they looked like at the time of their death.
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