I've written previously on how Liberals, Progressives and Democrats insufficiently attack conservatism as the root problem facing America. In thinking some more about this problem, I'm more and more convinced that today's conservatism is anti-American on values, history, founding and the future.
All of the American dream is about opportunity. All of conservatism is about deserving. Those are incompatible notions. The Declaration of Independence tells us of the truths that are self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with the unalienable right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Conservatives tell us that it's not true, that there are certain inequalities that are just too great to overcome, that being born into some neighborhoods is just too much of a burden to be helped unless one has the extraordinary gifts or circumstances to break out. They tell us that there those who are more and less deserving and that is how the breaks fall.
The central message of conservatism is the matter of deserving, an extraordinarily dangerous judgment. What characteristics are deserving? Who decides? What disqualifies from deserving before one gets started in life? What disqualifies once one has made it in life? Those are challenging questions to conservatives. All conservative institutions are set up to decide those questions and they are most often decided on pre-existing conditions.
If you are rich, you are deserving. There are no disqualifying conditions if you are rich. Except maybe ones on which conservatives draw moral lines. If you are gay, if you are a sexual deviant, if you are Muslim, if you are atheist, if you are ... the list peters out. Basically, if you are rich, you are deserving. You should make more money, however you do it, and you should pay less in taxes, however you manage to do that.
If one is poor, one is undeserving. There are no qualifying conditions for deserving other than one's own personal lifting by one's own bootstraps. Help other than by individuals who are deserving and choose to help is undeserved. If one is poor, one deserves to be poor, should make less money, pay more in taxes and hope for no help.
While the US Constitution, on which conservatives claim to rest but instead usurp and misread for their own purposes, guarantees rights to life, liberty and property, to due process of law, to equal rights under the law, to protections from search and seizure, to vote, to religion, conservatives make these matters of deserving.
Conservatives are more than willing to determine who has the right to life, from fertilized embryos to black children walking in the streets (one does and one doesn't). Conservatives will take on the definition of who deserves liberty. Those of the correct beliefs, financial status, race, and sexual orientation have it. Everyone else doesn't. Conservatives will decide who has the right to property, even when the Constitution contains no qualifiers. Without the same qualifying characteristics of beliefs, financial status, race and sexual orientation, one's right to have a car, home, television, phone, and other property is suspect.
Conservatives decide who is deserving of the vote, and are more than willing to take that fundamental right from the underserving.
The fact of determining who is deserving is the anti-American characteristic of conservatism. No where in the Constitution or any of our founding documents is there a distinction on our rights based on qualifications for deserving them. I was about to write, "obey the laws and your rights are guaranteed", but convicted criminals have rights guaranteed under the Constitution, rights on which conservatives would like to take a judgment. If you have committed a crime, if you are suspected to have committed a crime, if you fit the profile of someone who might commit a crime, and you are not rich, evangelical Christian, white and straight, then your rights are undeserved.
Placing the notion of "deserving-ness" at the heart of our social structures has failed America whenever it has been practiced. The most dangerous part is the transitory nature of the definition. What characteristics of what defines who is deserving drifts with the emotions of the empowered populace. This fear of the mob was well-placed in the construction of the Constitution. In protecting our rights, the Constitution also made it possible for the mob to hold sway in positions of power based on the fears of the mob. Members of the mob could get elected, could be rich, could influence policy, could drive laws, and could produce an America the Founders feared. We need to protect the rights of people to believe and do what they will, said the Founders, but Lord help us if the mob uses those rights to seize power.
Conservatives are fond of citing the slippery slope in fear-mongering around threats to their treasured central values. The real slippery slope to fear is the definition of whom and what characteristics are deserving, and of what is deserved. The slope taking the vote from millions wasn't even conceivable twenty years ago, but now is a matter of law in too many places in America. The slope toward enforced poverty for millions is slippery indeed, with restrictions on whom may be able to take advantage of early education, of quality education, to avoid crippling debt in becoming educated, on public means to get to a job, all constraints forming a nation-wide ghetto that ensnares more and more each year.
The slippery slope on who may live and who may die is one on which conservatives are comfortable and the rest of us should not. Conservatives point and scream death panels while denying life-saving health care to millions. If you aren't wealthy enough to live, you don't deserve to live. Whether you are actually guilty of a capital crime or not is of no concern, what matters is the example of taking the life of the life of the convicted. It doesn't matter if your neighborhood is flooded with oil, the street blows up from untended natural gas lines, if your air is unbreathable for the coke dust stored nearby, you don't deserve any better if you are poor enough to live there and not rich enough to move. Who lives, who dies, who votes, who is cared for by a doctor, who has food, who has transportation, who has hope -- these are all questions that conservatives are comfortable deciding as long as the people suffering are not deserving.
This has always been more than just a quirk in political life -- to presume judgment on whom is deserving of basic rights is no more than evil. "Judge not, lest ye be judged", said the Christian's Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount. But today's christianists are judges, juries and executioners on all scope of matters for which they assert their values over everyone else's, including those of the US Constitution.
Fortunately, the trajectory of American history has been toward more liberal definitions of rights, not toward qualified deserving-ness. There have been various deviations toward disqualifications on that trajectory, but the general course has been true. Unfortunately, this current period of conservative ascendency has been protracted and damaging to America and Americans. A skillfully crafted coalition of the religious, the rich, and the powerful have extended this deviation beyond its usual life. But it is a deviation from the American arc of history and anti-American in its aims, methods and values.
We non-conservatives need to call out this evil as effectively as conservatives demonized Liberalism. Conservatism has failed this country financially, institutionally and morally, and it is time for it to recede again into the historical swamps of Depression, graft, empire, oppression, of white robes and hoods, murder-by-cop, poll taxes, intimidation, and all the other betrayals of the American ideal.