Abraham Lincoln's birthday is good time to remind oneself of what we are fighting for, and who we're fighting against. Whenever I need to do that, I often go back to Philip E. Agre's 2004 essay "What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?". Reading it always feels like a mental sharpening of the knife-edge of thought. I think Lincoln would have understood a lot of Agre's points.
When talking about conservatism, I believe it's always important to define exactly what one means. For me, that means linking to a page like Agre's essay every time I introduce the word in a diary.
Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.
One point that Agre makes well is that when believers in Democracy debate conservatives, they should resist the temptation to employ conservative-style anti-reason (the use of emotionally-driven deceptions and false logic to cloud the faculties of reason) but rather they should argue from the point of reason.
Conservatism is built on a fundamental lie, namely the Great Lie of Class Inversion, by which the super-rich are cast as the heroic working class upon which the economy depends, and the poor and disenfranchised are cast as a privilege-demanding and "entitlement-seeking" elite. Because of this fundamental dishonesty, conservatism cannot bear the light of day of truth. Were its real agenda to be exposed, conservatism would appear for what it is--a grossly reactionary and anti-American philosophy. As we are learning, the most efficient way for conservatives to sustain their Big Lie is by continually discrediting the very idea of truth in the public sphere. Any use of anti-reason by the Left serves only to sustain the conservatives in the long run. At least, that's how I interpret Agre. I think he makes a lot of sense.
Personally I think Hillary Clinton indulges way too much in marketing-style politics to be a good president.
Comedy and satire are not by themselves forms of anti-reason, but can be extremely powerful and legitimate rhetorical weapons by which the Left can expose the anti-reason of the Right.
Liberals are the true guardians of civilization
Until recently, conservatives were very good at mimicking reason and appropriating the trappings of rational arguments. On television, this could be as simple as putting on a bow-tie and making gratuitous cultural references to famous philosophers while harumphing at liberals.
Every time I read George F. Will, I am reminded of what a big phony he is. When I read his columns, I feel like I'm being bamboozled. He reminds me of the fake intellectuals I knew in college in the 1980s, the ones I never saw in my Latin class, but instead were off honing postmodern political techniques on the fast track to yuppiedom.
I will always be grateful for the superb teachers and professors who introduced me to all the branches of trivium and quadrivium. Because of them I managed to gain enough enlightenment to be able to partially see through those phonies back then. They are even more transparent now. It is my personal belief that with the right course of instruction---the classical liberal education---anyone can do it---not just aristocrats, but everyone. Enlightenment is the birthright of humanity, including all the peoples that the Right tried to eliminate in the Twentieth Century through warfare and eugenics.
In Ancient Rome, the dire struggle between the rich and the rest of society is documented superbly in the writings of Livy, and goes back to the foundation of the city itself. The advance of civilization is the advance of the People. It is thereby also the gradual retreat of the hegemony of the super-rich Elite, who have shown a historical inclination to use the basest of and most heinous methods to keep power, including murder and slavery when it is convenient. As the words of Lincoln remind us, the United States is essentially a long-running experiment in how we can gradually and dynamically expand government of the People. We are still fighting the conservatives today. Agre's an optimist about the fight against them.
So long to the Postmodern Conservatives
Conservatives stole the "guardians of civilization" mantle because liberals let them. In the Sixties, liberals legimately rebelled against the imprisonment of Establishment thought, but by rejecting classical rhetorical studies as well, they figuratively threw the baby out with the bathwater. Postmodern conservatives like William F. Buckley, Jr. could grab the theatrical robes of classical scholarship, including the patois of rhetoric. Conservatives didn't need to be real scholars. While Liberals were off deconstructing themselves into oblivion, conservatives could simply adopt the guise of classicism without contest, and use the trappings of reason like a thug's cudgel against the Left. They could imitate rhetoric, all the while attempting to subvert Democracy and Science, which are the greatest fruits of civilization itself. In reality, the goal of conservatism is to revert as much as possible to a world "justly dominated" by the rich and powerful, and by their bloodlines.
Thankfully the antipathy towards classical intellecutal discipline by the Left seems to have blown over. It seems like it took looking into the horror of the abyss---Biblical mythology taught in place of science in public schools, the emergence of an anti-Constitutional one-party state---to make enough people on the Left (like me) come to defense of western civilization as the wellspring of our freedom.
Liberals can rout conservatives simply by daring to tell the truth
Agre makes the point that by claiming to hold reason as a "conservative" value, the Right brainwashed many on the Left into believing that any rational argument would always support the conservative cause. In fact, just the opposite is true in almost every case, but by convincing liberals that they must argue mostly from the "heart" instead of the "head," conservatives were able to get liberals to lock themselves in a rhethorical dungeon and throw away the key all on their own.
They cleverly convinced liberals that "image is everything," and enticed the Left into focusing on "messages" rather than the truth. The use of public relations to get the Left to perform this self-lobotomy was perhaps the great meta-narrative of American politics in the last half of the Twentieth Century.
Thankfully the conservative mastery of the marketing of anti-reason does not extend to a mastery of reason itself. Rather, conservatives have so enfeebled themselves that when they attempt rational argument, it now often comes across as pathetic. Conservative rhetoric lately has been reduced to rapid-fire theft and distortion of emerging liberal themes while running around headless-chicken-style squawking about any possible whiff of "hypocrisy."
In the bad old days, anti-reasoning liberals often were self-contradictory enough to make the charge stick. But now Right Wing attempts at literate discourse only highlight the fact that conservatives have really had nothing to offer the politcal dialog but petty critiques, ones that often require only a modestly heightened self-awareness among liberals to understand how their words and arguments sound.
When conservatives are truly challenged in the arena of rationality---when the audience listening to the debate are themselves able to distinguish between reason and anti-reason--conservatives cannot compete. As Agre points out, the purpose of rational argumentation is not to change the minds of hard-core conservatives (something that is typically impossible), but rather to illuminate others with the truth and to fortify them against falsehoods.
One of the most magnificient things about the Internet is how it seems to have poured the life waters of literacy back into American culture. The right currently has no way of coping with his revolution, which took them completely off guard.
As many others have pointed out in words much better than mine, the political sea change we are witnessing is not the swing of a pendulum but the irreversible demolition of a wall. No doubt the long-term goal of the conservatives must surely be to take this electronic power out of the hands of the people, and to somehow, as Bill Moyers recently put it, re-oligopolize the channels of mass communication into their own hands.
Lincoln knew the hand of the reactionary neo-aristocracy when he saw it. So must we. The powerful defenders of the conservative hegemony can't stand what we are doing, and where we are going, and if true to their nature as Agre describes it, they are surely already trying to figure out how to stop us.
Hello, everyone. I am honored and excited to participate in this awesome discussion. I plan to spend my time here mostly posting about history, especially the history of the oil wars in the Twentieth Century.