The Last Gasp of Conservatism
Conservatives tell a tale that America was a conservative nation from the moment it was born. It was born in revolution so not a very conservative move, although George Washington was starved for uniforms, troops, comfortable quarters for troops in winter, and sometimes even literally starved for food. Professed rebels did not fund the war as if they were committed to it. The Continental Congress sent supplies intermittently and borrowed from France, Spain, and the Netherlands. While these facts do mesh with conservative ideas about thrift in government spending, the realities of the Revolutionary Army were often brutal if we can believe Ron Chernow’s biography, George Washington: A Life. The true story of the Revolutionary War was perhaps the first failure of conservatism if you look at our founding from a different perspective.
Conservative ideas have held sway in America despite consistent failures of these ideologies, particularly in the arena of economics, but also in an overly zealous pursuit of stringent moral rules that even conservatives have trouble obeying. Scandals arise for conservatives as frequently or perhaps even more so than for liberals or the non-aligned. Their high expectations might have made moral life even more difficult as they became more powerful.
Conservatives revere tradition and then they fight to maintain traditions that Americans no longer find appropriate. They want an America frozen like a bug in amber, not a living organically evolving America. As we have seen in the past decade, they will sell out freedom to pretend that they can legislate the traditional values even though they no longer pertain to many American lives. They see people doubting formal religion, they see churches that aren’t showy enough losing members, and so they combine with Evangelicals and Catholics who are still attracting worshippers to create power groups and devise strategies designed to keep America a Christian nation although our documents call for separation of church and state.
Some of the strategies of the conservatives who see their ideology as losing hold over many Americans devise a strategy to stay in power by gutting the Voting Rights Act and opening the door to types of election meddling that America has not experienced in the 50 years since the end of Jim Crow, earned through the pitched battles of the Civil Rights movement. While conservatives claim that they are not racist the votes in play are mostly black and minority votes. Extreme gerrymandering, limiting ways to vote especially in a pandemic, closing polling places, purging voter rolls, limiting early voting opportunities were all tactics in their opening salvos. And when these tactics were not enough, they decided to mess with vote counting and elections to Boards of Elections and Secretary of State positions to make sure that Republicans held sway over vote counting and certification. Americans no longer completely trust that we still have free and fair elections.
And although conservatives say their policies are not racist the facts on the ground look very different. Certain police officers seem to stop black folks, mostly men, for minor traffic offenses and these possible misdemeanors end in the death of another black person by gunshot or by a knee on a neck or a ketamine injection or a rough ride in a police van or ambulance. America now has a large class of educated and savvy African Americans who see and understand what is happening and occupy positions in courts, government, law, business and are more than equipped to call out what they see. They understand how redlining real estate to kept black folks concentrated in segregated neighborhoods which eventually became islands of poverty, crime to overcome poverty, food deserts, and overburdened public schools denied enough resources to treat young people whose poverty, deprivation, and lack of opportunities put them at risk.
Savvy African American citizens are looking for ways to reverse this built-in inequality and conservatives are opposing all of it. Conservatives fight by playing on a growing feeling of injustice among white people nudged along by right-wing media. Conservatives argue that the programs of The Great Society didn’t work while they kept making it harder for those using the programs of the Great Society to leap through the ever-narrowing hoops. They saw that white Americans resented Affirmative Action and they are rabid to do away with it, so that became a happy coincidence also catered to on right-wing media. Currently conservatives are campaigning against encouraging young people to go to college claiming that training programs get them into the job force faster and offer higher pay. Paying for these programs is not on offer from conservatives and they are blocking such financial support from liberals. Motives are not as simple as conservatives state. College graduates tend to have more liberal views and that is anathema to conservatives. They even claim that liberals are doing this on purpose to thwart conservatism.
Because conservatives cite “wokeness” as souring them against colleges which they feel secretly exist to turn out ’liberals,” a new crop of conservative Christian colleges are placing tempting ads on media, especially TV. While “woke” students may be trying to enforce cultural rules that are in flux and not always well-defined and that can be frustrating to colleges, with greater tolerance and care this trend my stabilize and become less strident.
If you are a conservative who wants a Christian America that looks a lot like America did before Civil Rights, Voting Rights and Women’s Rights, then you want a majority white American. A black football player kneels as the national anthem is played and while this seems like a respectful way to plead with your country for equality conservatives blow it up into an awful act of disrespect. The athlete loses his job. The Justice System packs our jails with low-level offenders, sets a bail they know the possible offenders cannot pay and then takes their sweet time arraigning them. When some states try to reform bail procedures conservatives attest that no one will be safe. It doesn’t help that crime rates rise post-pandemic. Bail reform laws are already under review as are attempts to reform the police – the entire Black Lives Matter movement is on the verge of being cancelled while conservatives decry “cancel culture” for attacking conservatism. Conservative “law and order” regimes worked by breaking the rules of our justice system and packing jails with black souls. Conservatives want private prisons that offer new sets of problems, and private schools which tend to be segregated. We have had years of conservative “law and order” policies and although they may work to lower crime for a time, they turn our inner cities into traps for a kind of “catch and release” culture and into a type of open-air prison that cycles of poverty make it almost impossible to escape without those programs that provide potential exit ramps. Again, conservatives may say this is not racism, but if it feels like racism for all intents, it is racism.
Economics, the ridiculous notion that trickle down (supply side) economics has ever worked without frequent infusions of cash from stimulus endeavors is a myth that Americans have bought into for too long. Americans like to appease rich folks hoping that they will return the favor, or perhaps because they intend someday to be rich and want to make sure the laws favor them. Deregulation is the other great love of conservatives. Leave business alone, they say, no rules, no taxes, no oversight, and the nation will thrive. All evidence suggests that business will never regulate itself. Profits will always trump people. We see this so clearly right now after the massive tax cuts of 2017 when nothing trickled down, those profits just trickled right on into a billionaire’s pockets. Wealth gets more concentrated each day among a very few. Put a pandemic in the mix and a depression is on the horizon. Most Americans know that trickle down doesn’t work. Why are we still using economics from the 1930’s.
It's easy to see when you go over conservative policies, why wealthy people and “makers” will want to belong to any party that speaks the conservative language. Many Americans grew their wealth from fossil fuel industries which explains their opposition to “net zero” goals or other adjustments to slow climate change. They no longer say aloud that they don’t believe climate change is real. Now they argue that we don’t have the alternative energy sources we need and there is some truth in that. But if our best engineers invest all their talents in preserving “old energy,” we are unlikely to ever find the alternative energies we need and climate around the globe will change, often for the worst – rising seas, melting ice caps, hot spots, extinct plants and animals, crop changes. How much climate discomfort can humans withstand? Some believe that hoarding money will allow them to evade the bad spots, but with what we now see about supply chains that money alone can’t fix, there should be a new awareness that stockpiling money may not save them either.
It’s possible to argue that if most wealthy people are conservatives, then conservatives who claim to hate globalization caused globalization by moving our factories and businesses abroad. Then conservatives blame globalization on liberals. Obviously economic globalism is acceptable but political globalization (climate change, immigration) is not acceptable. Even when Trump lifted off his America First nonsense conservatives only backed the politics of America First which argued against immigration and climate measures, not the economics of globalization which profited them immensely. The pandemic has done more to make us rethink global economics than all the empty factories and shafted American workers ever did. Democrats have been trying to make our economy more inclusive and worker-centered, but obstruction has not allowed much to happen.
If conservatives win America will become a stagnant place. The ideology’s last gasp would spell an America that operates like a hamster on a wheel that goes nowhere. Ideas don’t protect themselves from obsolescence, only people with a vested interest in those ideas make that happen.
There are conservatives who have separated themselves from the Republican Party of Trump, but not from the ideology of conservatism. They are suggesting that they keep America on a moral pathway, and they keep America solvent, but they imply that there is no morality without Christianity or even belief in a greater power. If you look at the various administrations and compare how deficits rise and fall facts show that Democrats do better than Republicans. We seem to have a spiritual dimension as human beings and can exercise human morality even in the absence of religion, although not in the absence of spiritual thinking and writing. We need to break our addiction to conservatism, end the dying hegemony of the Republican party. We can have two parties by splitting the Democrats into a centrist party and a progressive party.
To stay alive conservatives have had to deliver to America a fascist charismatic with a fervid cult of followers and no clue about why America chose to be a democracy/republic. Fascism comes to America, something we believed could never happen here. Joseph McCarthy was a harbinger, Richard Nixon was a harbinger, Ronald Reagan brought Hollywood to the White House. He may have been a star, but only in B movies. Trump brought TV to America, but reality TV is not exactly the best bit of that media either. What will America choose? Will it be a fair and free choice? Will being in existential danger of decline take conservatives further and further away from democratic ideals and what will that America look like. A last gasp can often inspire a group to claw its way to the top to the detriment of an entire once proud society.
Nerd Notes
Conservatism has reigned supreme over a large segment of Americans since our nation was founded depending, of course, on how you define conservatism. Clinton Rossiter writing in 1955 contrasts the conservatism of Hamilton with that of John Adams. “Prudence, realism, discretion in speech, moderation in act, concern for the national interest—these were the principles he ascribes to Hamilton.
“Virtue, loyalty, reverence, moderation, traditionalism—these qualities were made real in the person of Honest John Adams. He was, moreover, a conscious political thinker, and his beliefs—in the corruptibility of men, the persistence of inequality, the need for aristocracy, the potential tyranny of the majority, the beauties of balanced government, and the sanctity of private property—have proved at least as relevant to the American experience as those of his early and late friend Thomas Jefferson. If we add to this tough-minded political theory Adams’ Puritan sense of sin, his reverence for history and its teachings, his veneration of “the little platoons” of New England’s way of life, his intense constitutionalism and spotless patriotism, and his supreme devotion to public duty, we must grant him the first rank among American conservatives.”
I don’t want to get down in the weeds about thinkers beloved by conservatives like Edmund Burke or John Locke or Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek. A little taste of each will suffice.
Edmund Burke – “Humans are not rational entities. We are both imperfect and imperfectible. Any attempt to create a system based on perfectibility of man is thereby contrary to our innate character.”
John Locke – “He argued in support of individual property rights as natural rights. and that the fruits of one’s labor are one’s own because one worked for it. Furthermore, the laborer must also hold a natural property right in the resource itself because exclusive ownership was immediately necessary for production.” (Wikipedia)
Milton Friedman – The Friedman doctrine also called shareholder theory or stockholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics – it holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase profits. He’s the most modern. (1976)
Friedrich Hayek - “Hayek, whose personal fear of inflation that had ravaged his homeland of Austria after the First World War was the well-spring of his thoughts, argued that while a Keynesian stimulus may well put some people to work, in the medium to long term the market would become so distorted that when the stimulus was removed employers would be left making goods that were no longer needed.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/keynes-hayek-nicholas-wapshott/
“The Conservatives’ actions are not merely Hayekian in the economic sense, but in the political sense, too, for when Hayek found his Austrian economic ideas ignored in the 1930s, he changed tack. In his 1944 masterwork The Road to Serfdom he argued that the burgeoning state sector that Keynesianism inevitably brought about tended to trammel individual rights.”
This article’s author Nicholas Wapshott is British, but he does comment about American politics.
In America, an identical argument is going on. In early 2009, Obama started spending an $800 billion Keynesian stimulus he had inherited from George W. Bush’s Treasury team. Although a great deal of cash was wasted and ended up benefiting businesses outside of America, the stimulus halted the precipitous economic decline that threatened to drag the country into a Great Recession. However, by the midterm elections of 2010, Obama’s attempts to add more stimulus money to the still flagging economy was halted by Tea Party members of Congress, who were inspired by Hayek’s ideas and were suffering from borrowers’ remorse. The November election marks a fork in the road: whether to continue trying to pursue Keynesian remedies; or whether to follow the British example and start quickly paying down public debt.
So, the ideas that Keynes and Hayek engaged in 81 years ago persist to this day.”
Conservatives especially, bound by elitist traditions from their upper-class education in prep schools and Ivy League colleges, love to throw these names out in conversation but most name-dropping is intended to separate us into our respective classes and intimidate the less informed. Modern Republicans have learned to speak to the masses and have gone to the opposite extremes, treating Americans who don’t have expensive educations like experiments in neuroscience.
They have found very effective ways to infect citizens who will not necessarily profit from conservatism into a base with all the passion of football fans. Therefore, we find people we graduated from high school with trolling us if we think businesses need regulating. They tout policies like state’s rights and agree that the powers of the federal government have evolved over time to usurp some of the powers that states felt were theirs, that rich people earned their money and they should get to keep it, that government programs give money to everyone except the people who deserve it most, that immigration will destroy America and turn it into something unrecognizable, and that immigrants are the people who are actually getting the money that citizens should have. Why provide more evidence for things we have heard a thousand times, but the evidence is out there if any American cares to look for it.
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