I was scouting about Facebook, and chanced upon a link to an interesting article, entitled How Liberalism Violates All 10 Commandments. It was a fun read; witty and strangely urbane for a writer who seemed to be targeting a “flyover” readership. He mentions a friend, whom he calls “Moses”, who contacted him with this seminal spark of a concept, and it spread like wildfire through the meticulously church-groomed self-righteous judging section of his cerebral cortex. Reading the polemic, it struck me as rather arbitrary, almost to the point where you could do a succession of word processing find/replace operations—swapping references to “liberals” and “conservatives”; and “liberalism” and “conservatism”—and be not terribly surprised to find that the end product could hold about as much water. To his credit, it does appear the author was rather naturally struck by a momentary fit of circumspection—the bane of pandering polemic writers—in which he pondered whether it was ever truly fitting to throw a first stone of this nature. But, thankfully for those of us who thirst for that satisfying clunking sound of stone against skull, this fit quickly passed, and he got on to the job at hand. Well, two can play at that game, so… stand aside.
The first question, it seems, is whether one can so flippantly attribute a piece of philosophical terminology—like “liberal” or “conservative”—to a class of actual people, and evade looking like a Marxist. And then, having pulled that Houdini, isn’t it degraded to think that your categorization grants you some kind of license to tar those people as beyond a redemptive pale? The answer is simple, for those who have faith: With God, all things are possible. So let’s proceed. Intro The important thing, of course, is how modern conservatism—under its sundry guises, such as libertarianism, “free markets” (in rhetoric only), knee-jerk demonization of “the other”, corporations-as-people, deregulatory fever, demonization of the economically marginalized, fear of sex, and its crowning achievement, the endless war economy—cleverly conceals sin within a shell of pop-philosophical rationalizations which achieve the highest expression of Lucifer’s arrogant rebellion against God, to wit: To make that which is plainly wrong appear right; nay, even holy and therefore above criticism. In sum, conservatism is folly. It represents man’s futile attempt to implement an unnatural order which is then prophylactically conceited to be “Natural Law”. It’s the unholy brainchild of God’s very first enemy, given by that enemy to God’s favored creation, us, with the sole purpose of destroying that creation. After all, it’s not Lucifer’s wish to liberate us—that would be a liberal thing to do! Rather, he would, if he could (and may yet!), “conserve” us in a status quo that swathes a seething, self-destructive hypocrisy in a soft, soporific swaddling of conservative nostrums: “We desire nothing more than the spread of democracy (so we have to bomb the hell out of these people)”; “If we spend tax monies on services, it will only foster a culture of dependency (we therefore have to shovel those monies down a rathole)”; “Money (though ultimately a state-imposed construct, requiring a Byzantine system for its maintenance) should be regarded as a dependable measure of human value”; and the list goes on. Volumes could be penned on the myriad ways in which the central tenets of conservatism violate each of the Ten Commandments. The following is a brief analysis: The Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17): 1. Thou Shalt Have No Gods Before Me. Conservatism self-righteously places Mammon and Moloch far, far “before” Jehovah. Most conservative evangelicals have long internalized a value which considers the feeding of the bodies of its youngest and strongest into the maw of a bloody war demon as not only standard operating procedure, but even an expression of Christian “sacrifice”. It really comes down to which way you want to take the idea of Christ’s sacrifice: Are we supposed to follow His lead and eschew earthly power (the liberal ideal), or does Christ, having done this for us already, relieve us of having to make that sacrifice ourselves? Christ didn’t resist his murder at the hands of the state. Does this now leave Christian conservatives free to operate a bloated, state-run military-industrial complex war machine that murders innocents abroad with righteous impunity? Conservatism, time and again, trumpets its bold answer to that question: Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes! So Moloch, aided by his bankrolling buddy, Mammon, wins again—when conservatism has free rein. 2. Thou Shalt Not Make Graven Images. We’re talking major idolatry here. Conservatism is always jumping from idol to idol; lest one of them grows stale, whereupon the jig would be up. Conservatism never fails to seize upon any opportunities to create convenient, resonant talismans that serve to calm the fitful sleep of its benighted victims. The panorama of this idolatry is breathtaking in its scope and penetration. Here’s a starter list: Worship of the American Flag; Mount Rushmore; Naming things after hyperbolically idolized Presidents; the idolizing of military hardware; the idolizing of military “solutions”; an o’er-weening suspicion of even minute deviations from tradition, such as the giving of “fist bumps”; and the crowning achievement of conservative idolatry, the reduction of Christianity to an affirmation of in-group membership. This reduces the Christ who taught about loving the strangers among us to a Christ who is presumed to bless the willful failure to address the needs of those very strangers—or, indeed, the willful maiming and killing of those strangers. Consider also the depths to which self-styled “conservatives” may sink in their zeal to reduce the many-splendored pageant of God’s will to a hollow, dun-colored graven image: Some conservative writers have been known to use high theological language as a kind of blunt instrument for the degraded purpose of bludgeoning disfavored ideologies—even where, arguably, those “ideologies” are really only a kind of manufactured shadow with which they sadly think they’re engaged in “honorable” pugilism. Talk about blasphemy! It doesn't get any lower than that. Another profound idolatry that afflicts untrammeled conservatism is embodied in the myriad symbolic, arbitrary, and oftentimes jarringly counter-intuitive criteria that presume to attend “fitness for public service”, such as: Whiteness; masculinity; eschewing of conceptual thinking and attendant ability to articulate (favoring the guy with whom “you can sit and have a beer” over “the egghead”); wealth; military service; a manufactured superhuman backstory; a semaphoric, shibboleth-drenched piety; and rigid compliance with an inflexible “family man” fantasy image. 3. Thou Shalt Not Take the Lord’s Name in Vain. The good liberal will not call out to God in extremity (“in vain”); this is for the cowardly conservatives. And the former behavior is as Christ taught. When faced with tribulation, the wise man is like the wise virgins whose lamps had oil. He will be ready to graciously receive God’s will, and it will not even occur to him to call out to God for a last-ditch ministration: This is not how God works out His will, and to think otherwise is such a misapprehension of the nature of the divine, that The Almighty saw fit to enshrine it in its very own principle, The 3rd Commandment. Of course, not only do conservatives cry out the Lord’s Name, like mewling crack-brained calves, when troubles come: They bizarrely conceit that they’re “honoring” “god” by so doing. 4. Remember to Keep Holy the Sabbath. Christ certainly had a higher conception of what the Sabbath represented, as indicated by his willingness to forgo facile, by-the-book homage to the calendrical Sabbath, in deference to the Sabbath “in his heart”. Such conceptions are far, far beyond the ken of most who style themselves “conservative”; particularly (and ironically) if they’re also “evangelicals”. 5. Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother. Modern evangelical conservatism has the temerity to impose upon the Gospels a “rebranded” Christ who is somehow supposed to be correctly construed as a pro-nuclear-family kinda guy; which he insistently, repeatedly—and actually rather impressively—was not. Conservatives would rather garland with a crown of thorns the head of a child subject to an abusive parent, than reflect for two seconds and conceive that their one-size-fits-all conception of honoring parenthood does no favors to anyone but their own strained apologetic for a self-serving family-based authoritarianism. It was surely a keen insight into this which informed Christ’s skepticism of the family unit in the face of eternal verities. Christ’s scathing anti-family diatribes and sly anti-family depredations notwithstanding, honoring one’s father and mother is not necessarily a bad state of affairs. But it takes a liberal mind to place it within a framework of understanding its rights, responsibilities, and limitations. The conservative mind is not so equipped and, as such, leads to the parent-child alienation which so often afflicts conservative families. 6. Thou Shalt Not Murder. There is nothing that the conservative mind likes more than the comforting presence of institutionalized violent fiat. Its idolatrous worship of military might is only one manifestation of this truth. It’s important to realize that when Moses handed this Commandment down to the Israelites, it was a time of unstinting problem-solving-by-mass-execution. Jehovah, Himself, ordered the slaughter of entire races of people, and Moses ordered the rapid-fire killing off of roughly three thousand Israelites in an act of ideological culling. In other words, this may be one Commandment about which it could be said that conservatives line up for its strict defense: Conservatives tacitly embrace the real meaning of this Commandment in its historic context, which has to do with refraining from murder within the in-group, while willingly—even gleefully—murdering outside the in-group. Liberals, on the other hand, read the edict in a broader sense, applying it outside the in-group as well. A perhaps more succinct expression of this idea is to simply say that conservatives adhere to a strict Old Testament interpretation of this Commandment, whereas liberals hew towards a New Testament interpretation. Of course, the Old Testament interpretation means that you can murder as much as you want—the more, the better!—as long as you wear a uniform and are acting on orders from a “good”, “Christian” President—or one of his exorbitantly retained mercenary security “services”—while you’re doing it. 7. Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery. The simple, hard-nosed fact is that if you seek to go slumming in a Gomorrah of marital strife, infidelity, separation, and divorce you’ll have better luck finding one if you go visit a “red state”. Liberals typically just want to have a good time, which in marriage means enjoying the natural bonds of love and friendship. It’s only in the conservative mindset, which seeks a bizarre “solace” in relationship aspects which fall outside those simple necessities, that one will find people falling deeper and deeper into denial. This denial deepens as the delightful fruits of love and friendship take second place to these ultimately unsatisfactory surrogates, like the feigning of religious and ideological conformity in order to “get along”. It doesn’t take long for this emotional house of cards to collapse, as can be inferred by the scary statistics coming out of conservative enclaves. And a survey of the marital messes that afflict conservative leaders, like Louisiana’s David Vitter, are emblematic of this situation. 8. Thou Shalt Not Steal. Conservatives are known for occasionally letting their covers slip on this one. During the first Iraq War, launched by Bush Senior, a popular T-shirt proudly worn by conservatives featured a profile silhouette depicting an American GI holding the barrel of a rifle to the head a kneeling Saddam Hussein. The caption read, “So, how much is a barrel of oil NOW, Saddam?!” Some conservatives may cry “foul”, but this image neatly illustrates how conservatism provides its ranks with a moral one-way mirror. The key idea is that I can call it “stealing” if it feels like stealing, to me. And, wonder of wonders, it never just-so-happens to feel like stealing when it’s my household—or those of conservative elites whose successes I cheer on—that reaps the benefits, however indirectly. Consider the massive theft of capital flight. This conservative cash cow is the imposition by force of elite economic entitlement which steals from foreign public resource pools to confer larger profits on the private interests in one’s favored state. This is the long, sad story of American support for dictatorships and terror in Central and South American states in the post-war period. The ritual undoing of their national social contracts via the U.S. installation and shoring up of dictators is an unholy stew by many moral measures, with massive theft as only one aspect of the atrocity. And to call this a “liberal” position would be foolhardy in the extreme. 9. Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness. Conservatives routinely misquote and selectively elide, doing so in the interests of their ideology. A fairly recent example is the very purposeful-hence-particularly-egregious video misrepresentation of Obama’s “You didn’t make that,” statement. This is one small (but spectacularly transparent) example, and par for the course for conservatives. And here’s a particularly close-to-home example: A shameless conservative writer recently misappropriated a quote from Saul Alinsky, from his Rules for Radicals. The quote: “The third rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means.” What the writer willfully chooses not to tell you is that Alinsky is referring to the abridged moral outlook of the radicals’ ideological enemies, NOT the radicals, themselves! In general, the length of Alinsky’s polemic reflects the lengths to which he felt he had to go to square a circle; to explain how one might keep one’s moral compass when fighting an immoral foe (a morally out-of-control, “conservative” state apparatus). The writer who bore false witness against Alinsky, in service to conservatism, understands that his target audience isn't going to check up to validate the quote; it’s not in their best interests to do so, as disproving the point would only undermine the prime objective, which has nothing to do with an interest in truth and probity. Rather, its function is to gin up church-lady disapproval. And this goes a long way toward explaining how a person can both consider themselves “conservative” and lie and speak false witness against their fellow men and women: Conservatives have a moral split personality, with a half that routinely commits false witness, and another half that feels righteous, all the same. In this same vein, consider Kitzmiller v. Dover, the Pennsylvania “Intelligent Design” (ID) case. Judge Jones, a life-long Republican, decided on behalf of the parents’ wishes that their school taxes pay for science teaching in science classes; not theology, thinly veiled as an ultimately bogus “science”. However, the text of Jones’s decision is permeated by his disgust at the evasive false witnessing which emerged under scrutiny. This ranged from witnesses for the defense (of ID) having surely known of past furtive efforts to cloak the religious pedigree of ID, to outright lying-under-oath by two of the Dover School Board members. Dover was a trial over 1st Amendment protection, but wound up nudging toward an outright fraud case when all was said and done. And it shows how conservatives can think they're keeping the 9th Commandment when they’re not: As long as they're lying to preserve their ideology, it’s by-definition “not lying”. And in fact they're quite sure that this hell-spawned syllogism is sanctified by The Almighty. If you think that God blesses your False Witness, what are the odds you'll ever reform, and opt to simply tell the truth in future dealings with your fellow man? Y'know, the atavism for bearing false witness is such a large feature of the conservative mind that a little research uncovers a sort of bestiary of mechanisms for effective lying, honed and internalized over time by conservatives. Which is why I’m suddenly thinking of Iran/Contra and the twin actors of Ollie North and Fawn Hall. North committed high treason. The culture of stealth action and clandestine maneuvering necessitated by his mission had become the very air he breathed. And, because his faith told him that his breath was a gift from God, it was natural for him and fellow evangelical conservatives to conflate the two. I wrote a little joke in the wake of his Senate bid loss: Q. Why did Ollie lose his Senate bid? A. The non-Christian Virginians had a problem with his criminal record. Of course, characterizing these as “non-Christians” is really a simplification in the interest of brevity and directness in humor. Liberals can quickly and easily infer what I’m getting at in a more precise way. How long will it take you? Fawn Hall was a very interesting case. She may not have been evangelical, but she was absolutely, certainly conservative. How can you tell? Consider two things she said, repeatedly, during her testimony: • I believed, 100%, in Col. North’s mission. • I made a point of insulating myself from Ollie’s actions by striving at all times to keep my role procedural. I never sought intelligence about Col. North’s actual doings. Spoken like a true conservative and, evangelical or not, she also happened to have been speaking like a true evangelical. 99% of the time, after bald assurances that they’re 100% on-board with Christianity, a few simple inquiries make it plain that evangelicals have taken great pains to keep their Christianity quite “procedural”; hence, they can’t really answer your questions, and quickly tell you they’ll “pray for you”, then change the subject. Whether Ms. Hall was simply dodging the questions, or if she had actually achieved the pretzel-twisted brain nirvana of internalizing two contradictory assertions as simultaneously true, the evidence is plain: She was, and probably still is, a great conservative. 10. Thou Shalt Not Covet. Again, conservatism uses man’s inherent covetousness as the driving force behind all economic policies. This was (and, sadly, still is) the lynchpin of Reagan’s “supply-side” economic policies, the shadow of which still hangs like a pall over the republic. This steady degradation of American public life is occasionally punctuated by brief windows of relief, when odd circumstances vault service-minded liberals (like Obama) into office. The recognition of the manifold benefits of cautious and rational maintenance of public assets has produced unprecedented ease, enjoyment, and the promise of advancement to millions of people. Leave it to conservatives to look at those achievements and see only the promise of something that can be dismantled and sold off, at public expense, for thirty pieces of silver. That is conservatism at its most avaricious. Conservatism is, at heart, an ugly, covetous game. The “winners” in that game ride on the backs of the losers of that very same game; the bottom-rung dupes who sell their birthrights for a plate of beans. And that plate of beans is the vicarious enjoyment of the success of the winners. These pitiful rubes would rather lose their health care, their jobs, access to education, well-groomed roads and other infrastructure—heck! They’ll even stand idly by as national treasure is thrown into a pit and torched!—as long as it means that the winners of that game get their pieces of silver. Throw in the fact that the winners—in the real world—wouldn’t even give the time of day to those losers, and you have a fine portrait of the face of pure conservative covetousness. Outro As Satan “masquerades as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14), so, too, does conservatism masquerade as good. It’s deceptively packaged in flowery euphemisms and self-righteous sound bites that promise a vicarious privilege; a warped conceit of freedom which entitles its bearers to feel free to deprive others of their freedom; a concern over a looming “nanny state” which is really just a libertine fantasy of a faux-libertarian “rugged individualism.” In reality, conservatism, in both philosophical and practical terms, simply signifies man’s predisposition to “call evil good and good evil.” It’s all the sins described above, and more, dressed up as “principle”; all dolled up and doled out as a nostrum to bottom-feeding masses, lost in the dream of that beautiful day when the zero-sum game, played out in the worst sense of that concept, will finally pay off for them, in silver dollars. A lot of these types also play the lottery: Six o’ one, half-dozen of the other! Ronald Reagan once quipped, “I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress.” If the Gipper had lived another couple decades, he would have found out how his pitiful little evangelical dog-whistle sized up against the shameless Jesus-humping of that incomparable “compassionate conservative”, George W. Bush.