Introduction
My name is Matt Finch, and I am the Democratic Party's Precinct Chair for Precinct 4111 in Sugar Land Texas, Fort Bend County.

I am a graduate of Harvard College, class of 1989, cum laude general studies, majoring in Government. I have a law degree from Georgetown University.

I consider myself a conservative democrat, although the rising tide of the American Radical Right has, for the time being, reduced most such fine distinctions into virtual irrelevancy.

The conservative ideology, if it may be so termed, follows governmental theories that rose to prominence during the Enlightenment and which drove both the American Revolution and the subsequent drafting and ratification of the Constitution of the United States. This philosophy holds that government is a necessary evil, to which we submit in the interest of protecting our own liberty, lives and property from other people who might enslave us, kill us, or steal from us.

A conservative seeks to restrict the role of government in our lives - to keep its financial burden to a minimum, and to prevent government from dictating how we behave and think. The traditional conservative sees the primary purpose of government as protective, not progressive. Government is not an appropriate tool for social change, nor should it prevent social change -- government's role is to protect the rights of people as they are, not as they should be.

Two schools of right wing ideology have risen to power in recent decades, and these schools of thought are quite alien to traditional conservatism, squeezing conservative republicans into the center and completely alienating many conservatives from the newly radicalized republican party.

The first of these groups is the neoconservative right. This philosophy takes as its primary objective the power and survival of the United States as a nation. In many of its incarnations, neoconservatism is little more than an expression of social darwinism - might makes right. Neoconservatives tend to favor whatever works best for the prosperity and geopolitical power of the United States, without regard for the civil rights of citizens and with no regard for the interests of foreigners. The biggest distinction between Neoconservatives and traditional conservatives, though, is that Neoconservatives are not against a large and centralized Federal government.

The second faction in the new Right is the Religious Right - dedicated to using government as a moral force that promotes and embraces Christianity.

These two factions of the new Radical Right are quite at odds with traditional conservatism, for neither faction has any interest in preserving or protecting the rights of certain groups of citizens of the United States.

This outline of what is happening in the Republican party (and within the ranks of traditional conservatives, not necessarily the same as the Republican party) will serve as the context for later blog entries here, explaining why traditional conservatives should at this point be aligned with the Democratic party rather than with the Republicans.

I will describe why I, as a traditional conservative, am a Democrat -- a centrist Democrat, but a Democrat nonetheless. And in the current political context, with the rise of the Radical Right, I am passionately dedicated to the cause of the Democratic party.

I welcome comments.