Conservatives talk about adhering to principle, being the stewards of values, protecting traditional relationships between genders, families, congregations, and between individuals and the state. For all this talk, the real fundamental principle to which cons have come to represent is lack of accountability. It's a natural progression, actually, from rugged individualism to avoiding accountability. The individual can always claim that "I did my part, it's just all those other people who have fouled things up". That the nation and the world are in states cons find unacceptable and getting worse can't have anything to do with conservative policy, rather it's all due to the degrading influence of liberalism.
Conservatism has been the motive force behind most policy and politics since before the Reagan era. It has brought about low growth economies, unregulated bubbles that burst and wipe out ordinary people while vested interests are unaffected, letting carbon dioxide emissions run away with our climate, driving wages for wage earners down while stimulating extraordinary wealth growth for the already wealthy and letting loose perversities in behavior that celebrate mass shootings, penalizing the poor, demonizing the different, and all the while denying responsibility.
This is the conservative legacy: abdicating accountability.
The pious who preach personal responsibility themselves find blaming the victim more convenient than actually taking accountability and improving the state of being. The blazingly crass abdication of accountability has eroded societal norms such as simple consideration, grace, polite behavior, and charity. A society with so much to give gives a pass to the takers.
Putting conservatives in power may have seemed a good idea for many at the time, to take back what some saw as being taken from us, to put values first, to allow prayer and piety a place in what many saw as the fraying fibers of modern civil behavior. Well, that Tory notion of civil society has taken its predictable course into discrimination between who is deserving of a civil society and those who are not, with the inevitable attendant consequence of eroding civility.
If we distinguish on moral grounds between partisan groups, as conservatives have done, there is no room for civility with the other. Dehumanizing the other leads to an ability to subject the other to unlimited degradation with no accountability whatsoever.
I recently visited a museum display of the tools of torture in San Diego. The display cited the studies that explored people's capacity for torture, capacity that was displayed at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, at the Dark Sites, and is displayed in the cons' capacity to degrade fellow Americans and fellow humans in very real ways. These behaviors are all of a whole, to separate segments of society, to dehumanize them and refuse accountability for society's fate that comes from the intentional discrimination between as and THEM.
What is properly viewed as evil from the objective view of human morality is viewed as proper consequences from the twisted view of the self-designated virtuous. Power does corrupt, and the power acceded to conservatives and wielded by them for four decades has corrupted the underpinnings of simple accountability that are irreplaceable in maintaining a civil society.
I can think of no evil greater in those inflicted on America and the world by conservatism than the erosion of personal accountability. Blaming the poor for being poor, blaming homosexuals for forcing a policy of justice, blaming the government for ills produced by elected officials sworn to degrade the government, worshiping businesses whose only motive is profits for owners and unimaginable compensation for executives at the expense of everyone else, bowing to a free market that is only free for the privileged, those are the values of the unaccountable.
I wish to be free to take advantage in any way possible without infringement, says the unaccountable conservative. The fundamental value of conservatism has become only to be left alone to say and do anything without consequence.
Held to account, the conservative screeches, "Unfair! Persecution! Nazis! Communists! Stalin! Socialists!", rather than, "You're right, I do have a responsibility here. With great power comes great responsibility and I accept being held to account for my actions.". Held to a standard of what is simply polite behavior, the conservative squeals, "PC! Political correctness! Feminazis! Black Panthers! Persecution of Christians! Reverse discrimination! War on Christmas!". It is simple self-indulgence, refuting a responsibility for one's behavior, the behavior of the three-year old.
Restore accountability.
This is how I would love to see Democrats run in 2014.
Restore accountability. Take back America from the unaccountable.
Defeat conservatives at the polls everywhere and give America and the world a new chance.