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WHEN CONSERVATIVES ARE NOT CONSERVATIVE
09/23/2008
I call myself a political Progressive because I believe in moving forward, in anticipating problems before they happen, in responding to the changing times and finding solutions for new problems, and in taking care of those who get left behind and find it hard to take care of themselves. I believe in government as a potential solution to problems (rather than the "problem" that Ronald Reagan declared it to be) and as the only entity strong enough to curb the destructive greed of capitalism.
However, I'm a very conservative woman in my personal life. In my mind, political Conservatives today believe in completely different things than people like me who are personally conservative.
Let me explain. The non-political meaning of conservative is moderate, cautious and traditional. As a conservative woman, I don't take chances. I plan ahead. I make sure I am not making too big a gamble when I purchase something or make an investment. As a mother, I always made sure – to the extent I could – that my children were safe and supervised. I like to have "all my ducks in a row." I am disciplined and organized and I think things through before I take action.
I dress and act in a traditional manner and I maintain a set of very traditional moral values. I think divorces happen too often and too easily. I don't like the proliferation of pornography on the internet. Adultery appalls me, as does rape, molestation, and incest. I don't like people who lie and cheat. I certainly don't want to vote for people who lie and cheat.
I think spending more than you have is usually not a good thing. I believe we ought to be responsible not only for ourselves but for each other. I believe in strong communities. I wish we could rebuild our small towns and live in small, caring communities once again, but Wal-Mart and millions of jobs shipped overseas ended that dream. I believe mothers who choose to stay home with their children are doing their children and the nation a great service and are to be praised. I think abortion and drugs are terrible things, but I don't approve of criminalizing them, because that creates even bigger problems. I believe in finding common sense solutions to these and other problems that doesn't begin and end with a law.
I've been around a lot of political Conservatives in my life, including most of my family and my husband's family, and most of my current neighbors, and I can say that the one thing I see more than anything is that while many of them are good people, they are unrealistic and believe in fairy tales.
I must say I would like to believe the fairy tales they believe in: that God controls everything; that a free market always self-regulates; that people in business and politics can all be trusted; that global warming is not so bad; and that we can return to a simpler time and a simpler social structure, but I am too much of a realist for that.
Instead, I can only conclude that the policies they believe in are not really conservative, at least not in the generic meaning of conservative. Instead, political Conservatives since Ronald Reagan have been radical gamblers, willing to ignore looming problems on the one hand, and making enormous changes in our economy, foreign policy and even the functioning of our democracy on the other. And in addition to that, political Conservatives seem impervious to reasonable discussion. Once their minds are made up, they are forever closed, and nothing can sway them because their philosophy is like their religion: totally ideological and fear based, completely and utterly impractical and immune to reason. Simply put, I believe political Conservative are not conservative at all. They are radicals who take too many risks with our future.
To understand political Conservatism one must look at the three types of political Conservatives - economic, neoconservative, and theoconservative. The three, which have much overlap, but which focus on slightly different policies, have all come together in the Bush administration. The Republican ticket of McCain/Palin promises to be a continuation of the Conservative Holy Trinity, in an extreme manner that might even go beyond the disastrous Bush administration
ECONOMIC CONSERVATISM
I'll start with economic Conservatives. Ever since the Great Depression, when we first learned what unregulated capitalism could do to a nation and the world, the federal government created regulations to prevent a reoccurrence. But economic Conservatives hate regulated markets and have been trying to unravel the safety mechanisms created by the New Deal for decades. John McCain's economic guru, Phil Gramm, is actually responsible for inserting a deregulation clause into a Budget bill in 1999, a clause that made the current financial meltdown possible.
These radical free market policies and the utter unwillingness to create any stops on greed in the market, have brought us the disasters of the Saving and Loan crisis, Enron, and now the housing market and financial sector meltdowns. A lot of people are losing a lot of money and millions have lost houses and jobs. Now the Free Marketeers want to commit the federal government to up to a trillion dollars in bailouts, and guess who pays? You and me. So the economic Conservatives insisted on free market nonsense and greed, while they now want socialized bailouts. And those who made out like bandits over the past few years get to keep their booty. These people did not behave conservatively. They behaved recklessly.
Economic Conservatives also believe in "trickle down" economics. They hate taxes, especially when the wealthier are taxed at a slightly higher rate than the middle class and the poor. Their rationale is that the wealthy worked hard for their wealth and deserve to keep it, even though many of the wealthy either inherited their wealth or made their money on the backs of other people, all the while using the tax supported infrastructure and politically Conservative lawyers and lobbyists to game the system and make mopre money. Think of all the Wall Street moguls and mortgage brokers who made millions on the bad loans given out to people who did not qualify and didn't know what they were getting into. The moguls get to keep their money with the new government takeover of the financial institutions (which Conservatives always claimed they were against), but the homeowners don't get to keep their houses. Only the wealthy get to be the benefactors of the neo-socialist former Conservative policies. The rich get bailouts, the rest of us get the shaft. That's not being cautious and conservative. That's being immoral and greedy.
Along with this trickle down ideology is the underlying philosophy of "rugged individualism," which is peddled by the likes of the drug addicted, immoral, thrice divorced, radio host Rush Limbaugh every single day. And millions of political Conservatives pride themselves on mindlessly following him, freely abdicating their responsibility to think for themselves. The idea here is that America was built by individuals who took responsibility for themselves and never asked for a handout, and that the continuation of that philosophy is what keeps America financially strong.
In this type of thinking, the rich create jobs and that is all they have to do to get special privileges and tax breaks from the government. The poor, on the other hand, are responsible for their own poverty. They are lazy and not worthy of assistance. So even though many of the poor become poor because of the economic Conservative greed, as noted above, economic Conservatives believe the government ought to bail out the rich and clean up their messes, while ignoring their victims. (And one more point: America was not just built by rugged free individuals; it was also built on the backs of slaves. Just thought some of you political Conservatives might need a little reminder of that.)
NEOCONSERVATIVES
There's a second type of political Conservative, called a "neoconservative." These are the empire builders, the ones who want to create a Pax Americana, who think there was a "peace dividend" with the fall of Communism that allowed America to step in and dominate the world, who want to control the Middle East for its strategic and petroleum interests, and who think war to achieve any of those ends is just grand – including preventative war (a war just because you suspect a country might be dangerous) which has never before been considered moral.
Yes, the people who actually believe this stuff, the members of an organization called "The Project for the New American Century" were dedicated to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein long before the Supreme Court handed the presidency to George W. Bush. Why? For purely ideological reasons as well as a lust for power and money: get Saddam out of the way, create a democracy that will be favorable to the U.S. and set up permanent bases there to intimidate the rest of the region and get our hands on the oil. 9/11 just gave them a good cover to do what they always wanted to do. And John McCain was peddling this idea even before 9/11.
I don't see how anyone who behaves and thinks in a truly conservative manner could think this was a good idea. A personally conservative person is cautious, and would translate that into a foreign policy favoring diplomacy and international solutions rather than reckless warmongering. But no one can deny that today's political Conservatives are reckless warmongers. They have mired us in a five year long war that has cost nearly a trillion dollars and there is no end in sight. They believe in huge arms build-ups, including more nukes, and selling arms to our allies and potential enemies, which mainly benefit them and their friends in the arms industry. This is conservative? No, this is risky and insane, selfish and greedy.
THEO-CONSERVATIVES
The third type of political Conservative is the evangelical Conservative, or theo-Conservative. This is a relatively new kind of politically active religiously motivated person, mostly of the Christian faith, who in the short run wants to regulate sexual behavior with Constitutional amendments, Supreme Court decisions and other types of laws, and in the long run wants America to become an official "Christian nation."
These Conservatives want to destroy the current public school system and replace it with a system of some public schools, but many more private church-run schools, that are both funded by the government through vouchers. In the meantime, they want public schools to be forced to teach religious doctrine, i.e. "creationism," or its newest version "intelligent design." They want prayers said in public schools, the Ten Commandments posted, and teachers free to speak about the Bible and the Christian faith.
They want the Ten Commandments posted in court houses, and they want laws passed that reflect their religious beliefs. All abortions must be banned and gay marriage must be outlawed. Some even want birth control banned.
Now the odd thing about these so called Christian Conservatives is that their version of Christianity is not remotely close to the one I grew up learning about. They see Jesus not as a Prince of Peace, but as a warrior, because of one obscure passage in the New Testament. They see material prosperity as God's reward to the deserving, and poverty as God's punishment for the poor. I don't remember that part in the Gospels, because it isn't there. What is there is Jesus telling his followers to love each other and care for the poor, but this is an inconvenient truth they simply ignore.
They also believe in the power of prayer, not to heal one's heart so much as to smite one's enemies. This was quite clear before the Democratic convention when Christians were exhorted to pray for rain on the day of Obama's big outdoor speech by an executive at James Dobson's "Focus on the Family." (Funny how that worked out for them. The skies over Obama's speech were clear, while a hurricane greeted the opening of the Republican convention, causing them to cancel the first day.)
Their desire to get their hands on the levers of power is shown most dramatically in the rise of Sarah Palin, a Pentecostal whom they have been grooming for a couple of years and whose selection as McCain's running mate is the price McCain (who was unpopular with this group) had to pay them to get their support. It doesn't matter to them that Palin is inexperienced,and totally unqualified for the office because they believe America's leaders are chosen by God and thus cannot fail. (How this squares with their support for Bush and his failed presidency I don't know.)
Chosen by God? I thought people who believed in America also believed in government of, by and for the people, not of, by and for God. I thought real political Conservatives of the old fashioned variety believed in our Constitution. I thought they believed in the words of the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal." Well, if you believe there are some who are chosen by God to lead, then you believe some are more important than others, some more equal than others, which is also what economic Conservatives seem to postulate with respect to wealth. (There is indeed a lot of overlap with these three groups.)
The religious extremists who claim to be politically Conservative do not even fit that definition. Political Conservatives of the old variety believed in small government and radical freedom. These theo-Cons do not believe in either. They believe in church interference in the affairs of government, in the choosing of our leaders by God, and in regulation of the personal sexual behavior of individual citizens.
These people are not small "d" democrats, they are autocrats, theocrats, and dictators. They want to control your life and grow the government, and change the laws to fit their version of biblical law. They do not believe in the Separation of Church and State, nor in religious freedom. They want their religion to dominate everything, and thus overturn the Bill of Rights and subvert the Constitution. In fact, they have supported George W. Bush in his own Constitutional violations: domestic spying, torture, signing statements, refusal to honor subpoenas, waging war for illegitimate reasons. Beyond not being conservative, this borders on treason.
I can't even list all the ways these new theo-Conservatives are neither politically nor personally conservative. Real conservatives are traditional, and want to preserve what is best about the country, as in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These people want to shred them. Real conservatives believe in equality of all, and the freedom to practice all religions. These people do not. If they could ban the practice of Islam, they would. Real conservatives are careful to choose the best leaders and believe government servants and officeholders should be qualified, with the education and experience to know what they are doing. The only qualification important to these theo-Cons is whether or not you have accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior and want to ban abortion and gay marriage. They choose politicians who pass their test of religious dogma, and then insist the person is God's choice, thereby equating themselves with God. Isn't that idolatry? And doesn't it totally violate the Constitutional prohibition of a "religious test" for public office?
And to make it even more obvious that these theo-Cons do not practice real conservatism, they seem to care very little about helping the poor, protecting the middle class, or promoting peace. War is just fine with them, especially if it hastens the rapture, which is a silly belief many have based on the views of an odd preacher from the 1800s and the "Left Behind" books.
THE FAILURES OF CONSERVATISM
William F. Buckley once defined a Conservative as someone "who stands athwart history and says 'stop'." Well, as we are finding out, too late in some instances, we can't tell history to stop. There are problems we face today primarily because political Conservatives refused to heed them: global warming; environmental destruction; dwindling supplies of carbon based fuels; overpopulation; greed and deregulation of banks and financial institutions; and the growth of terrorism.
The response to these crises over the past 28 years, with our government dominated by either political Conservatives, or weak liberals whose policies were infected with the virus of political Conservatism, has been to ignore them. I contend that this type of response is not conservative in the sense that I understand conservative. It is radical.
Economic Conservatism failed in this past week. And neo-Conservatism and its warmongering failed in the rush to war in Iraq, which is one of many reasons why McCain is in trouble. But we still see the machinations of the theo-Conservatives in the elevation of Sarah Palin to a position she is totally unqualified for, according to real conservatives who think we must take the choice of a vice president more seriously than John McCain has.
So I remain a very conservative woman in my personal life, but a woman who will never call herself a political Conservative, because today's self-identified political Conservatives believe in nothing I believe in, are proven hypocrites and liars, do not heed the warning signs of coming dangers, and damage our country whenever they get their hands on it.
Just look at the past eight years and ask yourself if George W. Bush, whose administration combines economic Conservatism, neo-Conservatism, and theo-Conservatism, has made the country better off in any sector. Bush implemented failed and dangerous policies, and failed to act in arenas that demanded action. With John McCain and Sarah Palin this approach would be put on steroids.
In this election season, these policies are finally being exposed as disastrous and catastrophic failures. People who live a conservative lifestyle, like me, could never vote for McCain -Palin. They are too radical and will finish the destruction that George W. Bush started.
We can't take that chance. Not if we are really conservative.
All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com
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