Without fail, Republicans call themselves "conservative," but what does that word mean?
The Republican ice cream store offers three flavors: Fiscal Conservatives, Religious Conservatives, and Neoconservatives. Sometimes the three groups disagree about an issue. Sometimes they agree (but for different reasons). And, to extend the ice cream metaphor, sometimes you can mix vanilla with a swirl of raspberry and sprinkle it with nuts. (I thought about a taxonomy metaphor about insect species with made-up Latin names, but I went with ice cream.)
Not all Republicans are evil or mentally ill. Many Republicans are well-meaning and sane. A few are even intelligent or articulate or both. I strongly disagree with Republicans and their beliefs, however.
So here’s my (mostly) rational essay about the three flavors of conservatism. I tried not to rant too much. I’ve omitted the truly wacky fringe dwellers (doctor-killers and white supremacists and people who think they don’t have to pay taxes because the IRS and the Fed are unconstitutional), although I suppose they could be additional flavors.
Flavor #1: Fiscal Conservatives ("The Best Government Is A Small One That Just Leaves People Alone")
These are the Republicans I can feel the most empathy for. I sometimes even agree with them about a few things.
Libertarians (a small but vocal group who might not really be Republicans) are the most radical proponents of small government. They’re almost anarchists.
I once had great drunken discussions with a guy who was an ideologically pure Libertarian. We agreed about a lot of things: we both favored abortion choice, gay marriage, legalizing pot, and so on. He automatically opposed any laws that restricted a person’s freedom to do anything. On the other hand, he suggested that police forces should be optional ("If you want to pay taxes to support a police force, then you move to a town with a police force. And if you want lower taxes, you move to a town with absolutely no police, then you buy a gun and form a neighborhood watch committee or hire some bodyguards.") And he didn’t believe the government should pay for post offices or public highways or paper money. He did believe in having a military. I don’t remember how he thought we’d pay for it, maybe a voluntary tax (ha!) or maybe sending out Vikings to loot and plunder enemy cities.
Fiscal conservatives (once called "moderate Republicans") generally believe:
* Government is a necessary evil (to do things like post offices, highways, public safety, etc.)
* The private sector is more economically efficient than the public sector.
* Lower taxes are better, but taxes should be high enough to balance the budget.
A lot of fiscal conservatives come from the business world. They believe competition is good. Greed and self-interest and profit are all good because they motivate people. Balance the budget. Communism is bad because you can’t trust government planners to decide how many automobiles (or pencils or shoes) to manufacture. In the old days, fiscal conservatives were often isolationist (or anti-imperialist) when it came to foreign policy.
I’m amused that Republicans are currently saying that the deficit is bad and that we shouldn’t raise taxes. Two of the richest people in the country, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates (and Bill Gates’s father, too), think that the rich should pay proportionately higher taxes because rich people benefit proportionately more from government. When Clinton left office, the federal budget was balanced – for god’s sake, it had a surplus! GW Bush then sent out the rebates and lowered taxes and went to war in two countries (without paying for them) and generally fucked up everything. He finished with a bang: plunging us into the worst depression since 1930. GW was not a fiscal conservative.
At one time, there were a lot of New England Republicans who were fiscal conservatives. They’re now an endangered species – the two Republican Senators from Maine (Snowe and Collins) are almost the only ones left.
Some fiscal conservatives were even pro-choice (Sen. Alan Simpson from Wyoming) or gay-friendly (Sen. Barry Goldwater from Arizona), but they retired or were chased out of the party by the next group of Republicans:
Flavor #2: Religious Conservatives ("After We Die, We’re Going To Heaven Because We Believe in Jesus, But As Long As We’re Alive, We’ll Make Your Life Hell")
When I say "religious" I mean mostly Christian. And when I say "Christian" I mean mostly Evangelical Christian. I have known a lot of people – friends and relatives – who were deeply committed Christians. Some were good people and some were assholes. Christianity isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I could point to people like Bishop Desmond Tutu (from South Africa) or Martin Luther King, Jr., or Jimmy Carter as good examples of Christians who have done things that improved the world.
But we’re talking about Right Wing Conservative Christian Republicans. They might say they want a smaller government in terms of taxes, but they want big, big, gigantic, hugenormous government to enforce morality. You can trace the rise of the Christian Right to groups like The Moral Majority (Jerry Falwell), The Christian Coalition (Pat Robertson), and Focus on the Family (James Dobson), to name a few.
If the religious right ever took over the United States, we could become a Christian version of Iran. The Senate and House could try to pass laws, but a committee of Christian preachers would be able to veto those laws. They’d want to filter everything through the Bible.
They're against:
* Abortion (a sex thing)
* Gay marriage (another sex thing)
* Pornography and cussing and nudity in TV shows and movies (another sex thing)
* Sex education (guess why?)
* Science education (evolution and global warming and stem-cell research)
* Communism (and atheism)
* Other religions (especially Muslims, but also sometimes Mormons or Unitarians or Catholics)
* Forgiving the sins of Democrats who get involved in sex-related scandals (Clinton’s blow job, Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick incident, and there’s probably another third one, too)
They’re for:
* Family Values and Morality (i.e., their own values and morality)
* More police and more prisons (to lock up sinners, er, criminals)
* Home Schooling (so children won’t learn about sex or science)
* Wives being submissive to their husbands
* Constitutional Amendments to outlaw abortion, to ban flag burning, to require school prayer, to declare English the official language, blah blah blah
* Private charity from voluntary donations (but not public welfare from taxes)
* Forgiving the sins of Republicans and Christians involved in sex scandals (Larry Craig, David Vitter, Mark Foley, Mark Sanford, Ted Haggard, Strom Thurmond, and so on and so on). In other words, they’re hypocrites.
I’ll admit that I don’t really care about some of those issues. Home schooling is fine with me (although I pity the child who gets an inadequate education from ignorant parents). And I don’t think I’ve ever burned a flag (although I think the first amendment clearly says I can do it if I want to). But on other issues (abortion and gay marriage and evolution), religious zealots are just so, so, what’s the word, intolerant. And they think about sex way too much.
A lot of them are controlling assholes trying to take away my freedom or my liberty. They’re the exact opposite of the fiscally conservative ("Get Government Out of My Life") people. Religious conservatives believe in a big government (a moralistic nanny-state) that decides what I can or can’t do.
The weird thing is they’re against taxes. Didn’t Jesus say, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s?" I would take that to mean "Pay your taxes." And if those taxes are going to help out impoverished single mothers and old people (aka welfare and social security), wouldn’t Jesus be in favor of that? Didn’t Jesus want us to help out poor people?
Flavor #3: Neoconservatives ("We’re Gonna Make You Say ‘What The Fuck?’")
The neoconservatives (neocons) ran the Bush Administration with the help of the religious conservatives. It's hard to describe neocons without getting angry.
They think that, as the world's one superpower, we should use our military to shape the world and spread democracy. They spy on and punish and torture and kill enemies (real or perceived) at home and abroad.
"Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," so they reward the rich with lower taxes and fewer regulations. They balloon the deficit and crash the economy. They steal elections. They lie, cheat, and ignore any sense of morality (unless a cynical pretense of morality might get them more votes, like pretending to be anti-abortion or anti-gay).
I don't usually agree with the fiscal conservatives or the religious conservatives, but at the very least I can sort of understand how they came to hold their political beliefs. Neocons, however, just baffled me. What the fuck were they thinking? I mean really – What The Fuck?
So I did some research. Here’s what I found about neocons:
The term was first used in the 1920s to describe disillusioned liberals who had become conservatives. However, the modern version of neoconservatism began in the 1970s, with the publication of "Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea," by Irving Kristol (who, incidentally is the father of William Kristol).
Some neoconservatives started out (in the 1940s and 1950s) as Democrats, even left-wing Democrats, even anti-Stalin Marxists. Irving Kristol, for example, was once a Trotskyist. But they came to dislike the baby boomers (hippies, anti-Vietnam protesters, and the counterculture in general), they thought LBJ went too far with his social programs, and they absolutely despised George McGovern. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, they were still Democrats. I live in Washington State, but I’m sad to say that Wikipedia says Scoop Jackson’s office was a breeding ground for neocons (from the Wikipedia article on neoconservatism):
Many [neoconservatives] supported Democratic Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson, derisively known as "the Senator from Boeing," during his 1972 and 1976 campaigns for president. Among those who worked for Jackson were future neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Richard Perle and Felix Rohatyn. In the late 1970s neoconservative support moved to Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, who promised to confront Soviet expansionism.
The term "Reagan Democrats" usually refers to white middle-class voters, often blue-collar men, who once voted for Democrats but were seduced by Reagan’s message. But some more influential Democratic defectors were the neoconservatives, who were mostly upper-class Washington (DC) insiders and former Democrats (and even former Marxists).
It’s very difficult to make a list of what they believe because they say one thing but do another. Here’s a few things they say they believe in:
* Promoting democracy around the world (but not in countries that desperately need it, such as Zimbabwe or Myanmar)
* Saying America is the greatest democracy in the world (but figuring out underhanded ways to win elections)
* Fiscal conservatism (which means lowering taxes but not balancing the budget)
* Freedom and liberty (but spying on citizens and trying to eliminate habeas corpus)
* The rule of law (unless you want to negate a law with a signing statement)
* Compassionate conservatism (ha!)
* De-regulating just about everything (because corporations can make more money by selling toxic toys and poisonous dog food, bundling toxic mortgages, making unsafe food, raping the land, polluting the air, etc.)
Some of them pretend to be religious, but really aren’t. Here’s a quote from Michael Lind about the followers of Leo Strauss, who criticized liberals as being too egalitarian and too morally relative, although there’s a lot more to Straussianism (again from Wikipedia):
For the neoconservatives, religion is an instrument of promoting morality. Religion becomes what Plato called "a noble lie." It is a myth which is told to the majority of the society by the philosophical elite in order to ensure social order... In being a kind of secretive elitist approach, Straussianism does resemble Marxism. These ex-Marxists, or in some cases ex-liberal Straussians, could see themselves as a kind of Leninist group, you know, who have this covert vision which they want to use to effect change in history, while concealing parts of it from people incapable of understanding it.
I'll admit that this verges on being a conspiracy theory. After reading about their origins, I still don’t quite understand the neocons. Maybe I never will.
And that’s the end of this diary. As I see it, those are the three flavors of the Republican Party.
Looking at the current Republican party and their internecine feuds, I think my analysis makes sense. I may have exaggerated or omitted a few things. I’d welcome your opinions or corrections.