2012 might go down in the history books as a politically turbulent year on the order of 1968. Powerful forces are conspiring to divide people into haves and have nots, the oppressors and the oppressed, and the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Or, put in more modern terms, the 1% and the 99%.

Nevermind that people aren't categorized so simply without overlooking some pertinent details. Mitt Romney is deemed to be in the evil 1%, but Bill Clinton, who made $75 million since leaving office, is somehow not in that category.

The mismatches aren't just with powerful national political leaders. It's happening locally to, on the community organizing level. Oh, I just love community organizers! The Social Justice Fund sponsored a summit on Friday to discuss why eastern Ventura County residents earn more on average than western Ventura County residents.

The average household in Thousand Oaks and Moorpark earns almost twice as much as the average household in Santa Paula, Oxnard, or Fillmore.

That, according to the executive director of the leftist group Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE), is "cause" to demand more sharing from east county residents.

Morales then paraphrased part of Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. "Privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily."

Ooh, do you hear that, T.O. and Moorpark residents? "Sharing" isn't going to be voluntary!

The full MLK quote goes like this:

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

The unjust, immoral, and oppressive people that King referred to were often just that.

But for CAUSE's director to imply that Moorpark and Thousand Oaks residents are unjust, immoral and oppressive--well, that's just a little extreme.

To CAUSE and the Social Justice Fund, east county residents are not the statistical 1%, they are the rhetorical 1%--the oppressors, the haves, and the bourgeoisie in Ventura County are the AVERAGE households in Thousand Oaks and Moorpark. According to CAUSE's director, "Our county is really bifurcated" because Moorpark households average $101,962 and Santa Paula households average $51,233.

Let's not fool ourselves into thinking that CAUSE and the Social Justice Fund can be safely ignored as fringe, radical leftist groups. County supervisors Kathy Long and Linda Parks attended the summit, as well as a Ventura city councilman.  

Political turmoil in 2012 and the years ahead are going to be remembered. A clash of irreconcilable ideologies is coming--the drumbeats of conflict can be heard just over the horizon. We're living in historic times.

On Monday, Fox News asked Press Secretary Jay Carney if the rumors are true that a Saul Alinksy portrait is hanging in the Obama White House. Carney's answer is revealing:

"Look," Carney said. "The President's background as a community organizer is well documented in his own books. His experience in that field contributed to who he is today. But his experiences abroad also included alot of other areas in his life. So I'll just leave it at that."

That means "yes," in politicalese. It's only a minor issue in the Presidential campaign--Newt Gingrich frequently says Obama is an acolyte of Saul Alinksy, a revolutionary communist community organizer and strategist. But it's a big deal in that it is another hint on who this president is and what he believes.

Rules for Radicals is an amoral work that is Machiavellian in tone--in fact, Alinksy describes it as the reverse of The Prince, in that it aims to take power away from those who've consolidated it with realpolitik means.  Whichever term is used--Machiavellian, realpolitik, realistic, pragmatic, or practical--it's all the same in that anything that doesn't produce an advantage, such as ideology or morality, is discarded in favor of effectiveness.

What makes Rules for Radicals unique is that it's the Bible for radical leftists. Power brokers read The Prince, or The Art of War. Revolutionary leftists read Rules for Radicals.

By itself, an Alinsky portrait hanging in the White House is not damning, even if Alinsky was a self-admitted communist. But taken with other tidbits we know about Obama's life we see a clear pattern. We see his relationship with his radical left-wing mother, radical grandparents, radical mentor, radical pastor, as well as his radical actions, from starting his career in the house of a radical domestic terrorist to appointing radicals in his administration, such as Van Jones.

The man is a radical. It's amazing that three years into his administration the mainstream media still won't report on that aspect of his presidency, even as he prepares to run for reelection. We still don't know who this man is. I'm not asking the media to come out and say he's a communist. But it at least it should be pointed out that the formative figures and events of his life led to beliefs that are not shared by 90% of Americans.

Something the left and right political wings of the country can unite on is opposition to SOPA and PIPA. To my newfound liberal friends I'd like to say, what took you so long?

Did you just realize that government regulation always leads to excess and always leads to lost liberties?

As you know, SOPA and PIPA ostensibly would "protect" us from online piracy by permitting the government to force companies like Google and PayPal to stop servicing offending companies.  Some members of both political wings realize that this sets the stage for further government intrusion into online freedom, and so Google (huge Obama supporters by the way), Craigs List, Wikipedia, and other websites held an online protest this week to draw attention to the dangerous bills.

Where the liberals are wrong is that they assume it's only SOPA and PIPA that are the problem. SOPA and PIPA are merely the latest examples of government encroachment of into our freedoms, which has been happening for the better part of a century. And it's been happening because of liberals!

SOPA and PIPA follow the same formula for every other government abuse.

1.       There is a legitimate problem.

2.       Well meaning people unite with scheming politicians to solve problem.

3.       They empower the government to fix the problem.

4.       Government fails wildly at it and causes more problems.

5.       Government says that if it only had more power, it could solve these additional problems.

6.       More power is granted.

7.       Repeat steps 4-6 until the government runs everything.

It happened with gun control. Criminals are shooting people to death. Let's make everyone register before they can have gun. Done. Criminals are still shooting people to death. Let's put limits on what types of guns people can buy and how often. Done. Criminals are still shooting people to death. Let's ban ammo. After repeating that cycle a dozen times, only the criminals have guns, since the government took the freedom away from law-abiding citizens to own them.

It happened with energy regulation, to the point where the federal government is now telling you what light bulbs you have to buy.

It happens in just about everything the government sticks its snout in. It will happen with the Internet.  Nice to have you aboard to fight the good fight, liberals. I just wish you showed up sooner.

This is what happens when non-businessmen run the country.

Progressives, including President Obama, are fond of the Buffett Rule, which roughly states that wealthy people should not pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries.

Mitt Romney said Tuesday that he pays an effective federal tax rate of 15 percent.

White House Spokesman Jay Carney responded, "This only illuminates what (Obama) believes is an issue, which is that everybody who's working hard ought to pay their fair share. That includes millionaires who might be paying an effective tax rate of 15 percent when folks making $50,000 or $75,000 or $100,000 a year are paying much more."

That's true, many households making $75,000 pay more than a 15 percent tax rate. But this is misleading. Here's why.

Romney, and other people whose primary income comes from investments, pay that 15 percent rate. "Working" people can pay more than that on income from their wages.

There's a huge difference between money earned from investments and money earned from wages.

Risk.

Someone getting a salary or hourly wage is virtually guaranteed to see that money but an investor's investment can disappear overnight. If there isn't an incentive to risk that money, i.e. if he's taxed at the full rate if he's lucky enough to see a profit, he will make fewer investments.

That means fewer dollars going into struggling businesses, or expanding businesses, or startup businesses, and that's the last thing our economy needs.

But people in the Obama Administration, who have a strained relationship with the private sector, either don't understand that or understand it and are placing politics ahead of the economy. Either way, they do damage to the country.

People suck, a liberal friend once told me.

We don't agree on much, but we agree on that. In fact, I think that's the genesis of all political problems. Anyone who cares about public policy starts with the premise that people suck--after all, if people didn't suck we wouldn't have all these problems, would we?

James Madison said it slightly more eloquently when he said, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary."

Our disagreements immediately begin once we start discussing what do we do now that we've established men aren't angels.

Should government outlaw the "wrong" choices people make, like some of the more repressive regimes in Iran or North Korea? Should it just allow people to sort it out themselves, as a libertarian would have it do? Should it "nudge" us into doing what's right by making it easy to do what's good and difficult to choose what's bad?

This is a fundamental question, and how you answer it greatly impacts where you fall on the political spectrum.

The archetypical person on the right might say that government should not limit choices, but punish bad choices after-the-fact, and only those choices that directly harm another, such as stealing or murder. A religious conservative might pare back choices a bit by prohibiting gay marriage. A mainstream Republican will empower the government with a robust military to expand its influence overseas, while a Ron Paul libertarian will scale it back and withdraw inside our own borders. Should you fail in this society, there may be at best a basic public safety net but a widespread private charity system that can provide targeted assistance so long as the recipients don't abuse it too much. In general, you can choose success or failure with your actions. Government is a necessary evil that merely protects us from criminals and enemies abroad. The people inside it are greedy, so we pit them against each other to ensure that no one group gets too much power.

On the other side of the political spectrum are liberals, progressives, socialists, and communists. To one degree or another, they believe that government is not a necessary evil, but a great tool to be used to achieve social justice. The United States, they believe, has a long and sordid history of abusing one group of non-white male peoples after another, and it's not fair those groups have been repressed for so long. The problem especially lies with the typical uneducated American, who is systematically manipulated by the evil one percent of rich capitalists into voting for them and buying their products. Enlightened people, like teachers, bureaucrats, scientists, psychologists, lawyers, writers, and artists have evolved to understand what is necessary for the common good. Those that haven't evolved need to have their choices either removed, as a Stalinist would say, corrected with better information, a mainstream Democrat might say, or engineered by a choice architect, as President Obama's Regulatory Czar Cass Sunstein would say.

The problem, as the Matrix's Neo comes to understand, is choice.

If you give people the freedom to choose, they will inevitably choose poorly sometimes if not most of the time, leading to problems for the individual and the group.

So what do we do? What is the solution, if there even is one?

The first step is to describe the dilemma, which is what few do but what is attempted here. It's pointless to argue about small issues like tax rates and DADT without knowing where we really differ. We won't ever agree. It's as if we're cooking together and arguing over what ingredients to use before deciding what dish to make, or even what meal we're eating. That's a waste of time.

In this essay, we can--continuing with the cooking analogy--agree on the problem. We're hungry and we want to eat something. Or, if you'd rather, we agree that people suck. Now what.

Do we limit their choices in the hopes that people's plights will improve or do we give them the freedom to choose with the caveat that they must live with their choices? That's what it boils down to. That's where the debate needs to be.

He's perhaps the most boring candidate in the 2012 GOP Primary race. He doesn't have Mitt Romney's polish, Rick Perry's swagger, Newt Gingrich's wit, or Ron Paul's flair.

But Rick Santorum does have sweater vests.

The former senator calmly criss-crossed Iowa to talk to voters about hot button fiscal and social issues and ended up in a virtual tie with Romney despite not spending any money and lulling many Iowans to sleep. How can you get whipped up into a political frenzy by a guy that looks like Mister Rogers?

And, wherever he goes, sweater sales increase.  They've become a sort of conservative uniform for the candidate, much like the black turtleneck and jeans look belonged to Steve Jobs.

There's a "Fear Rick's Vest" Twitter feed.  A YouTube video proclaims, "Sleeves Slow Me Down." Santorum's political director said, Chuck-Norris like, that his candidate "is such a fiscal conservative he doesn't buy sleeves."

But for all the positive attention Santorum's sweaters have garnered online, the Internet is a double-edged sword.

Gay-rights activists hijacked Santorum's name and used it to describe an unsavory biological byproduct of their lifestyle, after the presidential candidate implied homosexuality was form of deviant sexual behavior. By turning his name into a noun to describe the thing, which cannot be discussed in polite company, they were able to associate the presidential candidate with the thing on Google's search results. Santorum unsuccessfully petitioned Google to remove it.

It seems like a rather mean-spirited thing to do to a guy that popularized the "go-to outerwear for kindhearted dads everywhere," just because he had an opinion they didn't like. But, the Internet giveth and it taketh away.

Instead of contributing to the twists and turns of the primary race, in which Mitt Romney narrowly took Iowa, I want to discuss something else. The primary, by the way, is for me like watching a murder mystery movie with a predictable plot, where attention is cast on each character briefly in a lame attempt to throw you off the scent before it's finally revealed that it was the guy from the beginning all along. In other words, Mitt Romney is probably going to win this thing all along.

Rather, let's discuss what it means to be a conservative. I am called a conservative. I refer to myself as a conservative. We are understood to be people who are for lower taxes, small government, religion, capitalism, the Constitution and so on. However, we're sometimes lumped in with European conservatives who are for monarchy or aristocracy, which is quite the opposite. Our detractors also charge that we are racists an against progress.

The problem with the definition is that it's a term of relativity--being a conservative means there is something you wish to preserve. In Europe, it may be you wish to preserve a big centralized government. Here in the United States, it can mean you want to preserve In God We Trust or marriage between a man and a woman.

For me, I'd like to change more things than I preserve. There are few things any more I like about our government--it's too big and too bloated, and too corrupt. We've had more socialism than capitalism for decades. Our culture, if you can call it that, is abysmal. I want to conserve that? Young people that can barely read and old people that act like children? I'll take the family-oriented Asian or Hispanic cultures over the splintered and fractious modern American family, thank you very much.

If I could snap my fingers and change what I wanted, almost everything would be different.  Yet anyone looking at my resume would see me as the staunchest of conservatives.

Do I want to go back to 1950? Not in all things. Were I born then, I probably wouldn't be a conservative. I'd support civil rights for all, and if I were born in the 19^th century I'd be an abolitionist. If I were born in the 18^th century, I'd be a liberal. All three positions were radical for their time, but because I was born at the end of the 20^th century I'm a conservative, even though there is almost nothing I would conserve!

So, surely I wouldn't take the time to write all this unless I had a better label for myself, right? Well, maybe. The ingredients of my political philosophy that hold true no matter what century I was born in is three-parts liberty and one-part order, cooked slowly. I'm not for upending things radically. If I were elected president today, I would not immediately abolish all government programs, as some candidates promise. I would roll them back slowly, just as they advanced slowly toward oppression. I'd say I was a libertarian, except libertarians often are for radical change and are not as measured as I would like to be. I'm a republican, but that gets too confused with big-R Republican Party politics, which I'm not a huge fan of. I'm a capitalist, but not for big corporations. I prefer capitalism because it permits us to rise and fail on our own merits. I'm religious, but it's more of an individual thing for me and not something I readily share with groups, let alone let it dictate public policy. I'm pro-life, but not for religious reason.  I'm a inderepublitarianapilist? That's too clumsy--is there something simpler that ties it all together?

Perhaps I'm an individualist. I oppose higher taxes because it confiscates money from the individual and gives to the group. I support the Constitution because it protects the rights of the individual against the government. I support Christianity because it promotes personal salvation. I support republicanism because it gives voice to the individual while protecting him from the heat of the mob. I support laissez-faire capitalism because it lets individuals prosper if they work hard and are able. I support private charity because it permits the individual to help exactly the people that need the most help. I am pro-life to protect unborn individuals. Maybe it's time to promote individualism instead of the vague, misleading, and ultimately inappropriate label of conservatism.