Conservatism

Paul Krugman:

Rather than admit that pollution is a problem the government has to solve — even as the consequences of acid rain became ever more alarming, not to mention as America's failure to act provoked a near-crisis in relations with Canada, which was suffering the effects of U.S.-generated sulfur dioxide — the Reaganites insisted that there was no problem at all. They denied the evidence, questioned the science, called for more research and did nothing. Sound familiar?

And that, surely, is the line the Democrats should be pushing in this election: Republicans have become the party of denial. If a problem can't be solved with deregulation and tax cuts, they pretend it doesn't exist. [...]

The health care situation, in case you haven't noticed, is going from bad to worse. [...]

The Democrats have been offering real plans in response; they're not perfect, but they are serious.

The GOP, by contrast — and this goes as much for McCain as for the Bush administration — hasn't even tried to address concerns about coverage. Instead, it has all been about costs, which Republicans insist (wrongly) can be dramatically reduced by a policy of, you guessed it, deregulation and tax cuts.

Back in 2006, I remarked "it's about time liberals start taking aim at conservatism itself" and not just individual conservatives like George Bush, Bill O'Reilly, and Ann Coulter. It looks like others had similar thoughts, because there's a bumper crop of anti-conservative books available now.

• The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, Greg Anrig
• Conservatives Without Conscience, John Dean
• Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics, Glenn Greenwald
• Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy, Jeffrey Feldman
• God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, Sarah Posner
• The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics, Jonathan Chait

Here's an excerpt from Glenn Greenwald's new book Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics in which Glenn explains how conservative boasting about "toughness" and "self-reliance" is a way for them to avoid looking at their own inadequacies (antiwar.org):

[Rush] Limbaugh is a physically weak individual, wallowing in a life of depraved hedonism, who has never displayed a single act of physical courage. He avoided combat in Vietnam by claiming that an anal boil rendered him unfit for service (and, once he became famous as an über-warrior, said nothing when a Limbaugh biographer falsely claimed it was due to a football injury). Thus, he takes pleasure in observing acts of American cruelty and barbarism. He finds "levity" in it and cheers it on. It makes him feel powerful and strong, feelings he — understandably — is unable to obtain from his own life and actions.

While the civilized world has recoiled in horror at the excesses and war-hungriness of the United States over the last six years, the only real complaint from our right-wing war cheerleaders about the commander in chief is that he has not given them enough torture, secret prisons, wars of aggression, barbaric slaughter, and liberty infringement. Their hunger for those things is literally insatiable, because they need fresh pretexts for feeling strong. And nothing provides those feelings of strength better than revering a tough-guy male leader and mocking liberal males as weaklings and losers. [...]

It's rather ironic (and almost certainly not coincidental)

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Glenn Greenwald's new book Great American Hypocrites: Toppling The Big Myths of Republican Politics looks like a doozy. This excerpt is from a recent interview about the book (AltWeeklies.com):

RLN: You begin your analysis with the example of John Wayne as a prototype of the hypocritical would-be hero of the right. What specifically drew you to him, and why does he stand out?

GG: To this day, John Wayne is the prototype of the uber-patriotic, uber-masculine, uber-courageous Moral Republican Warrior. His imagery is the template that pioneered the brand and that the Right uses to this day to build up their political leaders. [...]

Yet John Wayne was one of America's biggest and most repugnant frauds — in exactly the way that modern Right-wing leaders are. At a time when virtually nobody avoided combat, Wayne did exactly that, using the most dishonorable means imaginable, throughout all of World War II. Because the most successful male actors, including older ones, went to fight, he was able to stay in Hollywood and become extremely rich playing war heroes. He spent the rest of his life glorifying every American war and accusing war opponents of being cowards, Communists and traitors. He crusaded for traditional American morality, attacking others whom he perceived to deviate, while he engaged in compulsive womanizing and adultery, repeatedly breaking up his own family, and wallowing in pill addictions.

Before there was Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, George Bush, Bill Kristol, David Vitter and even John McCain — there was John Wayne. One finds key parts of Wayne in each of them. To this day, he's the role model for how the Right conducts itself and the methods they use to swindle the American public.

E.J. Dionne explains how William F. Buckley tried to fuse the two different strains of conservatism:

Buckley dumped isolationism, not so hard since many former isolationists were happy with an aggressive American foreign policy as long as the enemy was Soviet communism. More difficult was resolving the contradiction between anti-government libertarians — their primary love was individual freedom — and the traditionalists who believed in government's role as a promoter of virtue and community.

One of National Review's primary tasks was dealing with this doctrinal conundrum. Frank Meyer, Buckley's friend and magazine colleague, came up with what is known as "fusionism." It was an attempt to fuse the two forms of conservatism into one.

Libertarians needed to learn that the freedom they revered was insecure absent the cultivation of personal virtue and a moral order hospitable to liberty. Traditionalists were not to confuse the legitimate authority of tradition with the illegitimate power of big government. The United States was fundamentally a conservative society, the theory went, so our country was a place in which liberty was conducive to a reverence for tradition.

Fusionism, brilliant though it was, never fully cohered. Contemporary conservatism always threatens to fly apart, as it seems to be doing now. Conservatism's goals are a combustible mix: an expansive and expensive foreign policy, low taxes, support for government intervention in the personal sphere (to promote a conservative vision of virtue) but not in the economic sphere. For some of us, the mix makes little sense.

I never thought I'd link approvingly to an article by right-wing clown Jonah Goldberg, but I guess there's a first time for everything (Washington Post):

Conservatism, quite simply, is a mess these days. Conservative attitudes are changing. Or, more accurately, the attitudes of people who call themselves conservatives are changing.

The most cited data to prove this point come from the Pew Political Typology survey. By 2005, it had found that so many self-described conservatives were in favor of government activism that they had to come up with a name for them. "Running-dog liberals" apparently seemed too pejorative, so the survey went with "pro-government conservatives," a term that might have caused Ronald Reagan to spontaneously combust. This group makes up just under 10 percent of registered voters and something like a third of the Republican coalition. Ninety-four percent of pro-government conservatives favored raising the minimum wage, as did 79 percent of self-described social conservatives. Eight out of 10 pro-government conservatives believe that the government should do more to help the poor and slightly more than that distrust big corporations.

Regarding Mike Huckabee, Goldberg adds:

He would even use his power as president to push for a national ban on public smoking. "I'm one of the few Republicans," Huckabee insists, "who talk very clearly about the environment, health care, infrastructure, energy independence. I don't cede any of those to the Democrats."

So about a third of Republicans think we shouldn't drown government in the bathtub. It's past time for national Dems to start unapologetically making the case that our government can be a force for good.

From one of my favorite authors, Steven Pinker, writing in the New York Times Magazine:

When anthropologists like Richard Shweder and Alan Fiske survey moral concerns across the globe, they find that a few themes keep popping up from amid the diversity. People everywhere, at least in some circumstances and with certain other folks in mind, think it's bad to harm others and good to help them. They have a sense of fairness: that one should reciprocate favors, reward benefactors and punish cheaters. They value loyalty to a group, sharing and solidarity among its members and conformity to its norms. They believe that it is right to defer to legitimate authorities and to respect people with high status. And they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality.

The exact number of themes depends on whether you're a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five — harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense. Not only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture. [...]

All this brings us to a theory of how the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time.

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Glenden Brown at OneUtah:

Conservative politics – look no further than the Bush administration – are about creating a sort of free-floating chaos, deliberately undermining the mechanisms of society, deliberately attacking not only the actual consensus but the mechanisms by which consensus can be reached. Rush Limbaugh and his legion of imitators from Bill O'Reilly on down the food chain to the lowest of local columnists, trade in anger – and endless free-flowing sludge of resentment, anger and divisiveness. David Brock calls it the plen-t-plaint – there's always something to complain about, some new misdeed to upset the masses. These complaints serve to keep the masses angry, stirred up, on the lookout for traitors in their midst, to divide them from their neighbors. While that is happening in one area of conservative politics, conservative politicians are actively working to undermine the political processes by which consensus is reached.

Consider that the current crop of Republican Senators has more filibusters going right now than any other group of senators in history by an order of magnitude – on issues that have popular support. George W. Bush and his unitary executive theory is all about undermining historical checks and balances in power. The net effect of all these activities is an undermining of the processes of governing. Solutions become almost impossible to reach since a portion of the population is foaming-at-the-mouth angry.

As far as wealth goes, both say "We're for it!" But the rising income inequality - the disproportionate share of our national fortunes which is going to a tiny fraction of our population - has become a major issue in the 2008 presidential campaign. Conservatives and progressives have different views of whether the accumulation of great wealth in the hands of so few is a problem, given that working and middle-class folks' salaries have declined in real value. "2 Candidates, 2 Fortunes, 2 Distinct Views of Wealth"contrasts John Edwards' and Mitt Romney's views:

...Mr. Edwards and Mr. Romney are basing their candidacies in large measure on the very different lessons each has taken from his own success.

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