Charlton Heston died Saturday night. This story from the Associated Press describes his achievements as an actor, most notably in historical epics, and then says this:
The actor assumed the role of leader offscreen as well. He served as president of the Screen Actors Guild and chairman of the American Film Institute and marched in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
With age, he grew more conservative and campaigned for conservative candidates. In June 1998, Heston was elected president of the NRA, for which he had posed for ads holding a rifle.
Note how the change to being considered "more conservative" is reflexively attributed to a change in the man rather than a change in the times.
Many folks on the left seem to be completely clueless that a person can be considered "liberal" at one point in time and "conservative" at another without an iota of change in his own positions, but purely because of the change in the positions those labels are used to represent.
In Mr. Heston's case, there is no inconsistency whatever between marching for racial equality in the 1960s and campaigning for the right to bear arms in the 1990s and 2000s.
A few years ago, Harry Stein wrote a book about the experience of having the ideological ground shift beneath you. The great title is How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace). Stein recounts his years as a confirmed and proud liberal.
But then something odd began to happen--mainly to the country, and incidentally to people like me. As feminism and multiculturalism more and more sought to remake society, attacking much that had served humanity well as narrow or even antique, we concluded we could no longer in good conscience remain on that side. There was both too little respect for the accumulated wisdom of the ages and too much playing havoc with truth and common sense. Indeed, many of us were soon startled to find ourselves tagged conservatives (and often worse) for holding firm to the values of old-fashioned liberalism: a bedrock commitment to fairness and individual liberty.
The left wants to deny that today's conservative is often yesterday's liberal because they want to claim the mantle of the civil rights movement in its heyday and paint their opponents as the heirs of George Wallace, dressed up in nicer clothes but the same old racists underneath. Maintaining this myth is essential to their self-image, but myth is exactly what it is.
In 1963, the liberal position was that a person should be judged by the content of his character and not by the color of his skin. In 2008, the liberal position is often to avoid judging a person at all for intentional violations of the most basic rights of others, but instead to find an excuse under any crackpot theory of psychology that suits the purpose. A person who believed the former in 1963 and rejects the latter today has not become more conservative but only been relabeled by a changing society. The old liberal position saw people as individuals and free moral agents, entitled to the rewards of doing the right thing and responsible for the consequences of doing the wrong thing, regardless of what group they may belong to. That position today is "conservative."
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