Conservatives & Liberals: Action & Inaction

The wrongdoer in politics is often the entity that has left something undone, not always the one that has done something. The liberals commit a wrong by doing something, while the conservatives commit a wrong by leaving something undone. Thus the liberals are the people of political action, while the conservatives are the people of political inaction. This gives the liberals an advantage in the politics. But the conservatives were not always the people of political inaction—they became a passive force after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, when they became convinced that with the destruction the Soviet regime, they had already played their world historical role, and that from now on there would not be any challenge to their worldview. The conservatives didn’t realize that the challenge would come from the liberals who, in the post-Soviet world, would find new ways of keeping leftism alive.