Ran across this piece from 2018 in my reading:
And so, it’s long past time to stop giving credence to conservatism as a whole, to treat it as the failed intellectual exercise it has proven to be. Look where it’s gotten us—endless war, mass incarceration, mass shootings, mass opioid death, mass inequality, for-profit schools and jails, virtually legalized white-collar fraud, open racism, suppressed voting rights—and tell me it’s worth anything.
I tried to think of a situation where conservative policy affected me in a positive way. I couldn’t. I’m sure there’s something, yet nothing comes to mind; as considered, effective and socially-positive outcomes generally do not result from the implementation of conservative policies.
Evidence of that can be currently found in the late and inadequate response to the COVID-19 pandemic…but that response is just the latest failure – big and small – of applied conservatism over the past four decades.
It should have been no surprise when Donald Trump said this:
"…the federal government is not supposed to be out there buying vast amounts of items, and then shipping.1 We're not a shipping clerk. As with testing—the governors are supposed to be doing it."
Because that statement is a pure expression of conservative dogma; that the federal government’s scope of function is limited to responsibilities explicitly stated in the Constitution. Trump backed off of that statement somewhat (and boy, are we regretting his involvement now) but it’s clear that applying conservative principles to crisis situations like a pandemic or a category-5 hurricane, they fail and fail hard...and almost everyone suffers.
The actual number of and language describing these ideas varies depending on who you are asking, but the “Father of American Conservatism,” Russell Kirk, proposed ten ideas that, along with other historical sources, form the foundation of modern conservative ideology in this country.1 This person boils them down to a simpler five items reflective of a “common bond” between those identifying as conservative.2 In my experience,3 they can be stated as:
- Constitutionally-limited centralized government,
- Ensuring individual autonomy,
- Enabling markets of securities, goods, and services to reach their maximum potential,
- Adhering to ‘traditional’ moral codes and social orders, and
- Preserving the primacy of American and allied security and economic interests.
Every one of those items provide the intellectual scaffolding supporting conservative policy-making. At least they sound reasonable, right?
I suppose a person can make the stretch necessary to imagine them at their rose-colored-glasses-best as benefiting the public interest…if they are applied (a) on a basis limited by reason, (b) consistently, and (c) emphasize a reasonably utilitarian outcome. Which, with few exceptions, they are not.
At their worst, these principles are used as ideological cover by grifters, the avaricious, and the power-hungry…people whose only real creed is the acquisition, maintenance, and exercise of power to meet their own needs. Everyone else in the tribe are considered suckers who take pride in being “conservative know-nothings”;
...dismiss[ing] the professionals as know-nothings themselves, despite their training and expertise. […] Too often, it seems, conservatives have scorned experts as incompetent, biased, or otherwise worth ignoring because they came up with answers that didn’t fit their politically desired answer. Often, they proclaim experts have a liberal bias.
Whatever the underlying motivation, Americans experience the worst outcomes when conservative political groups like today’s Republican Party are controlling the levers of power. When catastrophic natural or man-made events have occurred over the past 40 years, the conservative response has – again, with few exceptions – failed:
- Disaster prevention, planning, and response to hurricanes Andrew in 1992, Katrina in 2005, and Maria in 2017,
- The current administration’s failure to prepare and manage the response for the current COVID-19 pandemic.
- Giving Iran weapons for hostages (Reagan),
- Giving support to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq against Iranian aggression (Reagan),
- Funding and training Islamic militants to fight Russians in Afghanistan (Reagan) which set the stage for the emergence of Al-Qaeda,
- Fighting Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, i.e. Gulf War I (Bush 1),
- Dismissing Clinton-era strikes on Al-Qaeda camps, ignoring warnings leading up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US (Bush 2), followed by
- The fabricated case for used to justify the non-‘short and inexpensive’ war and occupation of Iraq (Bush 2).
Or is a contributing factor in causing the event, such as the Black Monday crash of 1987, birthed out of corporate opposition to tax reform. Or the Great Recession of 2008, generally accepted to be caused by repealed financial regulation, reckless financial behavior, and a lack of corporate and personal accountability and ethics. And so on.
It’s not just the big-ticket events, either; these failed ideas affect us on smaller and more personal levels. Whether it’s conservatives intentionally trying to limit benefit claims by implementing an inadequate and defect-ridden unemployment system or not providing a path to citizenship for long-time, non-criminal residents or pharmacist ‘conscience clauses’ inserting third-party religious opinion into a doctor-patient relationship or basing economic policy on the idea that tax cuts pay for themselves, or breaking the U.S. Postal Service’s back financially, or whatever 4…there’s more than enough evidence out there proving the conservative approach to just about anything fails to benefit most Americans if not actually worsening or ending their lives.
What’s leaving me scratching my head is why, with 40 years of failure as evidence, does anyone believe in this crap anymore?
I have thoughts on that too, but this post is a bit long already. Kudos for making it this far.
Footnotes
1 There are whole stories that could be told about Kirk and his rejection of the Kristol-Buckley fusion of libertarianism (“Politically, it ends in anarchy…”) and conservatism as well as his criticism of both capitalism and socialism.
2 College Conservative’s 5 principles:
- Protect & Maximize Individual Rights
- Ensure a Limited Government
- Uphold the Rule of Law
- Commitment to Federalism and the Separation of Powers
- Maintain Free & Open Markets (Economic & Social)
Kirk’s 10 principles
- Presence of an enduring moral order
- Adherence to tradition: custom, convention, and continuity
- Prescription, whatever that means.
- Prudence in action
- Diversity as the antidote to social stagnation
- Tolerable imperfection in people and social systems
- The ability to own private property as a means of ensuring a stable economy
- Local control versus centralized authority
- Reasonable restraints on power
- Reconciliation of the conflict between the permanence of tradition and the need for healthy change
3 Looking at what constitutes ‘conservative thought’, there’s a fair amount of make-it-up-as-you-along-by-whatever-is-important-to-you-at-the-moment. It’s just as helpful to ‘Follow the Money’ and ask ‘Who Benefits’ to analyze where conservatives are really coming from.
4 The list is yuuuge, I tell you. The best and biggest list ever, believe me. So large that it can’t be written about here, but trust me on this. Yuuuge.