I was eating dinner in a Chinese restaurant a few nights ago with an old friend and some of his acquaintances. One of them sat down next to me with a cowboy hat on his head. "A Republican hat, " he said. He asked how I was doing and what my political affiliations were. I told him I was a college student interning at the Center for American Progress, and that I was a Democrat. "American Progress huh?" he smirked, "How can you be for progress if you're a Democrat?"
Having made the mistake of admitting being a college Democrat to a man in a "Republican hat," I proceeded to sit through my dinner as he went on and on about how global warming was a joke (it's really the weakening of the magnetic field we should be worried about, he asserted), FDR started World War II (to go save Stalin and his Communist cronies), and we should bomb Mecca to force the Muslim world into submission (cheaper than occupying Iraq anyways). At first, I wondered either if he was drunk or if Ann Coulter was when she wrote this down.
But neither of those were true.
More on the flip.
The sad truth was that this man in a "Republican hat" actually believed everything he was saying (although I'm not sure that applies to Coulter). It's easy to blame a well-organized GOP attack machine for creating this alternate reality where the South won the Civil War, FDR was a Communist, and Ronald Reagan was the son of God, but I believe it goes further down than that. It has to do with the very natures of modern conservatism and liberalism.
One of the amazing things about conservatives is that they can explain just about anything. Religious conservatives have the easiest time doing so since they've spent much of the past two thousand years perfecting the technique. AIDS? God's way of punishing homosexuals. Poverty in America? It's because gays destroyed the family. America's schools doing poorly? At this rate, they'll claim it's because Charles Darwin was gay.
That's not to say that all conservatives are that extreme, but religion has a way of being able to deal with pretty much everything. You can probably find a passage in the Bible to explain just about any phenomenon in the world.
Ditto for economists. If you've ever talked to an economist, you'll recognize that a fair amount of them believe that the rise of dictators, disease, and even marriage can be explained by economics. Likewise, free market conservatives (who are not necessarily economists but certainly believe that economics is the word of God) can connect every problem in America back to the New Deal.
Jonathan Chait wrote a great article in TNR about this:
[Imagine if] God appears in order to affirm liberal precepts: Current tax levels barely affect economic incentives, social programs provide tremendous economic security at modest cost to growth, and most regulations achieve their intended effects without producing undue distortions. Would economic conservatives likewise abandon their views? Some certainly would, but a great many would not. Economic conservatism, unlike liberalism, would survive having all its empirical underpinnings knocked out from beneath it. [...] Conservatives believe that big government impinges upon freedom. They may also believe that big government imposes large costs on the economy. But, for a true conservative, whatever ends they think smaller government may bring about--greater prosperity, economic mobility for the non-rich--are almost beside the point. As Milton Friedman wrote, "[F]reedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself."
Unlike Chait though, I don't think it's just a question of values. It actually alters conservative perceptions of reality. Opposition to the minimum wage and adherence to Reaganomics, despite empirical evidence to the contrary, still thrives among conservatives. You can throw all the examples you want, but ultimately, they'll take theory over fact.
That's not to say the left is any better though. Certainly the "radical" elements of the left are guilty of comprehensive philosophies that purport to explain everything (and thereby suggest some radical agenda to fix it).
Take Marxism for instance. The whole of human history can be explained in terms of class conflict and "historical materialism". Religion? Opiate for the masses. War? A way for the wealthy to subjugate the poor through violence. Ditto for feminism. The Patriot Act? Masculine desires to penetrate the private. The Washington Monument? A giant phallic symbol. Ditto for racial theories, deep ecology, and so forth.
The main difference however is that while most of the leftist theories are fringe movements, conservative doctrines are very much mainstream. Evangelicals are not considered as nutty on the right as we consider hippies on the left. They're also much better mobilized (but that's a different story).
The only mainstream liberal belief is liberalism, yet liberalism doesn't purport to explain everything. Liberals vary from the relativistic "all points of view are valid" to an empirical "reality-based community." We either have no room for theories that explain the world or we can't agree on any. As Chait puts it:
Liberalism is a more deeply pragmatic governing philosophy--more open to change, more receptive to empiricism, and ultimately better at producing policies that improve the human condition--than conservatism. [Of course,] liberalism's pragmatic superiority wouldn't matter to a true ideological conservative any more than news about the medical benefits of pork (to pick an imaginary example) would cause a strictly observant Jew to begin eating ham sandwiches.
In one sense, you could argue that this empiricism and ideological skepticism makes liberalism superior. The "reality-based community" term after all, is used with pride here on dKos. But it does show how much of an uphill battle liberals face. What direction does relativism provide other than that we should be more tolerant? And what do we do if we have to be tolerant of intolerant people? What direction does being faithful to reality mean? Does that mean we burn Thomas Friedman at the stake for claiming the earth is flat?
Conservatives have a much easier time with things. There is a clear direction. Backwards. Social conservatives believe that all things will be well if we return to an orderly society governed by Judeo-Christian principles. Free market conservatives want to go back to an era of lax government regulation. The hey days of the roaring twenties. They know what they want and they are willing to twist the truth to accommodate that vision.
The left wants to go forward, but which way is forward? We can't decide. Core values are a good start, but they still don't give us a clear picture of what we really need: a vision of the good society and what it means to be a good person.
This post is getting too long so more next time. But to close, a reminder of the origins of the reality-based community:
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
