I have long felt in an odd place politically. I am a liberal — even a socialist, although I think the word doesn’t mean much in an American political context. Yet I consider myself deeply conservative in a personal way. I’m not keen on change. I do value (good) tradition. What I’m not is hateful and exclusionary. And when I look backwards, it is not to see some static past, but rather to see the process. I am very interested in taking what has worked in the past and using it today. But I’m not at all interested in fetishizing the past.

But that is one thing about my conservatism: I think the whole process of not seeing the past correctly dishonors it. Here in America, there is far too much facile patriotism. People are patriotic in the same way that football fans cheer for the home team. Listening to most people talk about the country, the furthest they will go is to admit that “mistakes were made” in the past. They are of the mentality of, “My country, right or wrong.” But if you look at the actual Carl Schurz quote, it is, “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” That seems to me to be the most basic kind of conservatism.

Corey Robin wrote a very interesting article about this question earlier this month, We Have the Left and Right All Wrong. Let me note that of course conservatives don’t look back. I’ve written about this a lot in the past: conservative thinkers only have a shelf life of about a generation, because after that, the vileness of their thinking becomes clear. As Robin noted, “In Burke’s case, it was aristocrats over commoners; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it would be masters over slaves, employers over employees, husbands and men over women and wives.”

One question that a lot of us liberals ask is why it is that workers rebelled against the power elite a century and more ago, but that they are largely complacent now. Robin claims it is because workers then had a memory of the way that life was before industrialization. Here’s a shocking bit of data: in 1820, 80% of all workers were self-employed; 120 years later, 80% worked for someone else. And nothing has changed since then. Don’t think that the people working for Uber are really self-employed. They are just employees by another name. Regardless, before industrialization, workers had more control of their lives. Remembering that was critical to liberal organizing at the end of the 19th century.

The greatest success that the power elite have had is in making everyone think that the current economic system we have is the only one possible. And this is how we get the New Democrats and neoliberalism. It is based on the idea that we can only tinker with the existing system. It’s a very dangerous mentality. If you truly think there is no other system, you don’t work on other systems. And you are stuck. As Robin wrote, “Capitalism rests upon repeated acts of forgetting; a robust anti-capitalism asks us to remember.”

When modern conservatives think about the past, it isn’t history or even memory — it is nostalgia. We see this in the Republican presidential debates. There is a constant hearkening back to when America was “strong” and “respected” and above all “authentic.” All of these ideas mean everything and thus nothing. They ultimately work to the benefit of an eternal now. Liberals are the ones who see the past and mine it for what was good and try to develop a better future. We are the ones who value history — we are the true conservatives.

It is looking more and more like Jeremy Corbyn will be elected to head the UK Labour Party. I’ve written about it before in the the context of the screwed up UK media. But the truth is that the media are screwed up only because the Labour Party leadership is so screwed up. Let me explain.

Corbyn is an old fashioned leftist — you know, the kind who actually stands for leftist values. He has never had much power in the party. And the way the Labour Party elects leaders, he normally wouldn’t even be in the running. In order to be on the ballot, a candidate must be nominated by 35 MPs. Well, Corbyn did not get that. But at the last minute, a number of MPs changed their votes, because they wanted him in the election to have a wide variety of opinions.

These same MPs were not planning to support Corbyn in the election. And here is the key thing: they never dreamed that Corbyn would actually win. Now we are seeing lot of coverage claiming that the Labour Party membership has moved to the left. But this is poppycock. What really happened is exactly what’s happened in the Democratic Party: the voters have stayed where they were while the party establishment have gotten more and more conservative.

It’s interesting to compare this to the Republican Party. In that case, the base of the party has gotten more conservative while the party establishment has tried (futilely) to hold it’s already extremely conservative ground. I only mention this so that no one mistakes what’s going on with the two liberal parties with what continues to happen with the Republicans. It isn’t the same — at all.

I suspect that the Labour Party voters were happy enough with the establishment as long as it won elections. But if not, what is the point? “Not as bad as the Tories” really isn’t much of a rallying cry. And let’s be honest, that’s all that Labour has offer these ten years or so. But I don’t expect to the Labour Party establishment to accept this. As it is, they are now talking about how Corbyn’s support is the result of Tories sneaking into the party to destroy it. The establishment just doesn’t get it.

It’s even worse than this. Simon Wren-Lewis has reported that many of the top people in the Labour Party have refused to serve under Corbyn if he is elected. But that’s nonsense. “If, following a Corbyn win, the party united around him in exchange for Corbyn parking some of his less popular policy positions, Labour could once again become an effective opposition. If instead his leadership is accompanied by constant public division within the party, there is a danger that this will overshadow everything else.” But I suspect there will just be more infighting, because what the party has become is too divorced from what its voters actually believe in.

Of course, it is far worse in the United States. At least there, the parties aren’t crazy. Here, we have hugely popular ideas — like raising the minimum wage — that are only starting to get traction in one party and are completely off the table in the other. But the whole thing makes me wonder about democracy in the world. Does the will of the people matter anymore? Or will the political parties always gather around the desires of the power elite? I’m afraid it is the latter.