Conservatives

"If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism, they will abandon democracy" Sinclair Lewis

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." -- John Kenneth Galbraith

What conservatives are really arguing for is a return to the three historic embodiments of tyranny that the Founders and Framers identified, declared war against, and fought and died to keep out of our land. Those tyrants were kings, theocrats, and noble feudal lords....They stripped the president of the power to declare war...Separated the State from the church and they rejected feudalism (broadly defined as "rule by the super rich.) From Thom Hartman's book Threshold.

There's free thinking and then there's indoctrination. Too often conservatism has tended and continues to tend towards the latter. Catholicism in particular, from the destruction of the texts of the Greek and Roman atomists, and the library in Alexandria, to the imprisonment of Galileo, and the policing of Diderot's Encyclopédie, has a rich history of knowledge suppression. And throughout it has used the power of the state to enforce its dogma. In this respect it has been indistinguishable from the Taliban, which is important, because we can see where conservative education led the Islamic world......into obscurity. Letter to the New York Times

Pew found that most staunch conservatives were regular viewers of Fox News, preferring the network to any other news source. Fox has helped to ingrain the idea that Republicanism and religiousity are embattled and oppressed, fighting for survival against the forces of secular extremists. There was, for instance the Fox News-fabricated "War on Christmas" and its fight against the "Happy Holidays Syndrome". The face of the the networks defense-of-Christmas crusade has been the "Killing Jesus" co-author Bill O'Reilly, who this season declared a victory. In December, he said on his show: "It isn't a mythical war on Christmas. It's real, and we just won." Charles Blow NYT 1/2/2014

Modern conservatism has become a sort of cult, very much given to conspiracy theorizing when confronted with inconvenient facts. Liberal policies were supposed to cause hyperinflation, so low measured inflation must reflect statistical fraud; the threat of climate change implies the need for public action, so global warming must be a gigantic scientific hoax. Oh, and Mitt Romney would have won if only he had been a real conservative. It’s all kind of funny, in a way. Unfortunately, however, this runaway cult controls the House, which gives it immense destructive power — the power, for example, to wreak havoc on the economy by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. And it’s disturbing to realize that this power rests in the hands of men who, thanks to the wonk gap, quite literally have no idea what they’re doing.Paul Krugman (9/8/2013)

"I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it." John Stuart Mill. Quoted in Eric Alterman's book: Why We're Liberals

“I can not think of one enduring positive contribution that conservatism has made to American society. A world view inherently opposed to change, the ineluctable engine of human civilization, is doomed to be inherently authoritarian, frustrated, and angry, as history moves past it.” Peter Aretin Comment to the NYT

Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision (8/29/2023)

Can politics kill you ? It Sure Can. (12/22/2022)

An Unusual $1.6 Billion Donation Bolsters Conservatives (8/22/2020)

Trump shares CPAC Hungary platform with notorious racist and antisemite (5/21/2020)

Conservatives want to make the US more like Hungary. A terrifying thought (5/20/2022)

Why Is CPAC Having a Conference Next Month in Budapest? (4/21/2022) Craig Unger in TNR

CPAC Embraces Putin-Lite (4/3/2022)

Top Ten Reasons Liberals have the High Moral Ground (8/10/2021)

Humans are tribal and fragment by race, class, religion, nationality, gender,.... Divisions motivate 'conservatives', result in hierarchy which allocates power, regularly causes conflict, atrocities, and ever more intense war, which with technology advance can become nuclear.

Conservative government is usually oppressive. Driven by fear, it supports government that is anti democratic, does not respond to the people, is not supported by people of good will, and can use violence against political opposition or even its own people. Recently, conservative US politicians campaign with guns and joke about killing political opposition. Former insurrectionists are on key Committees in the House of Representatives.

Putin's Russia is a politically right, authoritarian government that is devastating Ukraine. For example the Taliban enforces a religious regime that is intolerant. The Catholic church dominated Europe for centuries, was complicit in atrocities, and recently captured the US Supreme Court to impose its will, opposed by a majority of Americans. The GOP plan to overthrow the next Presidential election may be successfully decided by SCOTUS unless there are some changes to the law.

Capitalism tends to wealth inequality, class conflict, and in extreme becomes fascist. Such governments have a lot in common: racism, nationalism, theocracy, censored media, loyalists drive out experts, and more.

Racism is an important driver of right wing politics, in extreme leads to genocide as it did in Nazi Germany. In the US fear of , border fortifications, human rights violations,

Nationalism like other conservative ‘values’ leads to exceptionalism, expansion, empire, war, and self-destruction. No one is exceptional.

The most critical challenges are trans-national: climate, population, climate, wealth inequality, pollution, migration, pandemic, nukes, but short-sighted, conservative politics is distracted by divisiveness: religion, greed, nationalism, misinformation. Without change, humanity won’t last long.

Right wing government is dangerous. It may destroy the habitability of the planet.

‘Conservatives’ are authoritarians, which is why they are dangerous.

A lot of people say they are conservative, but it’s not always clear what they mean by that. What ever it is, Republicans are not. Think what it would really mean to conserve.

Conservation of nature is essential, but most Republicans favor extensive mining of fossil fuels, polluting, factory farming, and development that is destructive of nature, likely to cause climate collapse, and devastating for future generations. Republicans are not much interested in conservation.

Science is conservative because, over time, people learn, experiment, discuss, and agree on facts, so it is an accumulative process that establishes knowledge. Many Republicans don’t believe the science. They ignore climate warnings and are much more likely to die of the pandemic.

Media, when responsible, is conservative because it searches out the truth by careful investigation, and adds to knowledge accumulation. The Republican noise machine doesn’t do that. It attacks the press, and spins conspiracies, and often lies shamelessly.

Education is conservative when it teaches the truth. The truth has a liberal bias. Republicans prefer their base uneducated. They reject people who do not agree, censor unwelcome information, suppress the votes of the educated, ban books and even burn them if they do not agree with them.

The law is conservative because cases accumulate into coherent rules for everyone. Republicans packed the Supreme Court with partisan, religious ideologues that chip away at democracy, ruling against the Voting Rights Act, allowing gerrymandering, corporate supremacy, dark money in politics, imperial Presidency, keep labor and consumers down, loosen the law on corruption, and is poised to dismantle the administrative State including the OSHA which it has decided may not require a vaccine mandate, or the EPA which should be mitigating climate damage. The result is elections will be meaningless since their gerrymandered outcome is assured, big money overcomes the will of the people, so government will become even more dysfunctional, and a dictator surrounded by wealthy oligarchs will rule. Like Russia. That is fascism, not conservative.

The Supreme Court, SCOTUS, is partisan, can find in the old text anything it wants, and since Congress is paralyzed, has become an extremely undemocratic governance that is dismantling the republic.

Beware a priesthood interpreting a centuries old document and claiming to make good decisions. Overturning settled law, like Roe or Heller, is not conservative but probably will continue in a further insult to democracy.

Government is as good as the decisions it makes. As you could surmise from the above, Republicans by rejecting established facts make particularly bad decisions. Trump admires dictators and aspires to be one. Should he succeed, there will be no democracy, and the US will lose the republic. There’s nothing conservative about that.

Conservatives don't conserve. They extract wealth from everyone else to reward a privileged elite. As they become powerful, they often go to war, even on their own people.

They believe the President can do anything he wants without checks. Investigations of him are unpatriotic, oversight unnecessary. His followers are armed. Trump attacked his opposition and all supports of democracy: media, elections, courts, fired experts, civil service, and government, staffed with loyalists, became incompetent.

Having failed at insurrection, they are attempting to fix elections by gerrymandering, voter suppression, hack voting machines, foreign interference, big money, candidate selection. Trump told Fox & Friends “If it's easy to vote, Republicans will never win: ... you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again."

Tax cuts for cronies are a good idea, even if they come from public debt, but cuts to our frayed social safety net are not. Save money only when Republicans are not in office. Blame minorities for problems. Build walls to protect wealth. Cut regulations for polluters.

Healthcare is not a right. Everyone covered must pay. Cut public health infrastructure to save money.

Wealth inequality drives immigration, poverty, and other problems. Republicans are unconcerned with fairness. Kids in cages shows conservative approach to human rights and other values.

Conservatives are a part of the political right, and often assert that science, global warming or pandemics are a hoax. Their ideology is that of oligarchs tends toward kleptocracy, and naturally evolves toward wealth inequality and Fascism.

In the US, they are Republicans, the far right.

COVID Anti-Vaxxers Aren’t a MAGA Death Cult — It’s Worse Than That (8/3/2021)

They’re Not Conservatives, They’re Extremists (5/27/2021)

Conspiracy Theories A Conservative Must Believe Today (11/10/2019)

Conservative countries are collapsing.

Conservatism’s Monstrous Endgame: Apparatchiks are corroding the foundations of democracy. (12/17/2018)

...the fundamental truth about the right is that it has always wanted one and only one thing: to keep down those who are already down. This is what unites Edmund Burke and Sarah Palin. (From a review by Mark Lilla of the Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin by Corey Robin.

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." - Frank Wilhoit, American political scientist and author

Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty."  Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

Conservatives

If you are in pure transactionism with just the elites of your base. And your lower caste only believes they are victims in the game of life. If I am a college student, your just asking me to fight a culture war started before I was born

Really pic.twitter.com/wQYucP56oL

— Hermione Granger (@book960) May 20, 2021

"Over the past few weeks there have been a number of commentaries about Ronald Reagan's legacy, specifically about whether he exploited the white backlash against the civil rights movement. The controversy unfortunately obscures the larger point, which should be undeniable: the central role of this backlash in the rise of the modern conservative movement." Paul Krugman, The New York Times: 11/19/2007

"Many conservatives want their world to be peaceful, prosperous, and pluralist, just as liberals do, but they don’t particularly care that it be fair." Adam Gopnik’s book A Thousand Small Sanities. (p47)

In Canada we still call our conservatives Tories.
A well deserved description.
"Tories" originated in Ireland in the 1500's from the Gaelic "toraidhe" meaning plunderer, robber, thief, barbarian & yob.

— ANGRYWHITEWOMANWithoutMalice🍁 (@WithForethought) April 14, 2021

“Political scientist Corey Robin is right to see modern conservatism as an effort to maintain hierarchies. Conservatives fight to protect the privileges of superiors – what Edmund Burke called the “chain of subordination” of soldiers to their officers, worker to their employers, tenants to their landlords, and children to their parents. But these political hierarchies are not the only concerns of conservatives, who will also go to the mat to defend cultural, moral, and theological hierarchies. And conservatives fight most fiercely to defend hierarchies that are falling away.” from Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars, Even When They Lose Elections: Stephen Prothero. Pg 249.

A self-proclaimed ''Moral Majority,'' and its satellite or client groups, cunning in the use of a native blend of old intimidation and new technology, threaten the values I have named. Angry at change, rigid in the application of chauvinistic slogans, absolutistic in morality, they threaten through political pressure of public denunciation whoever dares to disagree with their authoritarian positions. Using television, direct mail and economic boycott, they would sweep before them anyone who holds a different opinion. Bart Giametti, Yale President (1981)

"America's culture wars are conservative projects, instigated and waged disproportionately by conservatives anxious about the loss of old orders and the emergence of new ones. What liberals see as progress, they see as loss. And they are willing to fight and defend what is already passing away. Culture wars are battles between conservatives and liberals over conflicting cultural, moral, and religious goods. But at a deeper level, they are conservative dramas in which liberals are merely props. If liberals weren't there, conservatives would have to invent them (and, truth be told, they often do)." from Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars, Even When They Lose Elections: Stephen Prothero. Pg 13.

the political vision that ties them together... gatherings in Northern California, where agri-business men team up with pastors who have direct access to the Trump White House; to North Carolina, where Christian nationalist leaders recruit clergy to their partisan activism; to Arizona, where charter school operators with sectarian agendas are indoctrinating schoolchildren on the taxpayer’s dime; and to Verona, Italy, where American representatives of what they call a “global conservative movement” gather with international far-right leaders to declare war on global liberalism. We will revisit the strategy meetings of the late 1970s in which it was decreed, several years after Roe v. Wade, that abortion would be packaged and sold as the unifying issue of the movement. The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, KATHERINE STEWART

Tanenhaus suggests the conservative movement finally imploded because, in its senescence, it abandoned the conservatism of Burke, who highly valued prudence and civil responsibility. On this I disagree. The modern conservative movement abandoned Burke at its inception. Its ideology has not changed. What changed was that the movement finally came into full power under George W. Bush. Its ideology was well-suited for political growth but incapable of governing. A movement disdainful of government believes it does not matter who heads the Federal Emergency Management Agency. A movement convinced it alone possesses wisdom and virtue believes it patriotic to mislead Congress about reasons for taking a nation to war. And once in power, when decisions have consequences, a movement that cherishes ideology so much that it will adjust facts to fit philosophy, rather than vice versa, will eventually find reality impinge with volcanic-like force -- and be buried in the ash." From a review of The Death of Conservatism by Sam Tanenhaus

Conservative writer says it all: ‘There is no excuse for supporting this president’ (8/5/2019)

The Devil and Tom Donohue (6/20/2018)

I Went Undercover at a Boot Camp for Young Conservatives-Here's What I Learned (10/16/2017)

Donald Trump Meets William S. Lind (7/3/2016)

Why Bernie Sanders is Starting to Attract Conservative Voters (10/19/2015)

5 Conservative Hoaxes, Lies and Absurd Urban Legends That Have Made America Stupider (9/23/2015)

Katrina and Conservative Failure, Ten Years Later (8/19/2015)

Scientists Discover the Fascinating Psychological Reason Why Conservatives Are…Conservative (7/16/2014)

4 Inconvenient Facts Conservatives Conveniently Ignore (6/4/2014)

Conservatives, Evil and Psychopathy: Science Makes the Link! (5/1/2014)

6 Reasons There’s No Such Thing As Compassionate Conservatism (12/13/2013)

Boehner lashes at conservative groups: 'They've lost all credibility' (12/12/2013)

Inside Groundswell: Read the Memos of the New Right-Wing Strategy Group Planning a "30 Front War" (7/25/2013)

The Morality Brigade (3/26/2013)

Conservatives: The New Taliban (3/13/2013)

Why I Stopped Being A Right Winger -- Modern Conservatism has become a form of Mass Hysteria (5/24/2012)

Low Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism

Blessed are those who Possess Colt Peacemakers

Real Conservative Values

Has American-Style Conservatism Become A Religion ? (9/17/2011)

Top Ten Conservative Idiots (December 1999)

Think again, What is Conservatism ?

From Teleprompter to Torture: Caricature of American Conservatism on display at CPAC 2010

10 Reasons 'conservative' fiscal ideas are dangerous (2/27/2009)

Words are important. Republicans usually call themselves 'conservative', but the word 'conservative' has no relation to Republican activities.

Witness the cheering crowd of conservatives at CPAC 2010. Dick Cheney, the man who helped legitimize torture, renditions, secret prisons, universal phone taps, pre-emptive war, and practically unlimited use of resources for war, speaks stirringly of bringing down our sitting President.

These same people, knowing the dysfunction of our health care system, cheer that they can throw up obstacles to any kind of reform. Meanwhile, they know people in the US are dying for lack of proper care. They call themselves 'pro-life' with the same hypocrisy that they call themselves 'conservative'. Their committment to life stops at birth.  They are blind to the fact that overpopulation is killing nature.

Matt Ygelsias still wonders what conservatives want to actually accomplish in governing:: "I guess I don't really understand what it is that the GOP has a great opportunity to do. The view they're articulating at the moment is that (a) the deficit should be lower, (b) taxes should be lower, (c) Medicare shouldn't be cut, (d) defense spending should be higher. With unemployment at 10 percent, this is a somewhat potent political message that helped them become only slightly less popular than the other party. That's a huge improvement from where they were 18 months ago. But it's not a governing agenda. What would they do if they took over?"

Right Wing Politics is mostly dirty tricks (1/28/2010)

HOW conservatives RUINED GOVERNMENT _ Moyers Journal (video) 1/16/2010

Bill Moyers: Conservative Radicals and the Politics of Vengeance (9/21/2009)

Through the Bush years, without apology, R's have:

Passed trillions of dollars in debt to our children and redistributed wealth upward by 'lowering taxes', profligate spending, putting the cost of war on the tab, and rewarding their crony friends from the government ATM. They say they are for 'shrinking government', but it has grown in ways that demonstrate their hypocrisy. They made the US one of the worst countries for inequality of income distribution and they want to cut social programs.  

They demonstrated an ability to create financial instability, and to bring on economic crisis. See these stories by Joseph Stiglitz.

While Iraq war profiteering was rampant, Congress did no oversight of the privatized, waste in contracting, troops were under strength, under equipped, and rotated too often. Wounded warriors overloaded the VA. Domestic security was compromised by removal of first responders to Iraq, the trashing of the National Guard, and widespread drop outs from service. The Bush administration's Iraq War, torture, and disregard of human rights destroyed the US claim to the moral high ground and its good reputation abroad.

In the US, 'conservatives' are mainly concerned with money. They don't much care about the environment because they would do away with the EPA if they could. They will tell you that global warming is a hoax. They reject the argument for sustainability and dismiss the UN's Agenda 21 effort.

Real Christians, unlike Republicans, would want to assist the poor, make peace, and do good. Republicans do quite the opposite. They are human rights abusers, torturing when it suits them, engaging in renditions, and thumbing their nose at international law. This has cost the US the good will of the rest of the world, and may yet lead to terrorism on our own soil. We are targets now. We are not safer. Warmongering, empire-building Republicans have sacrificed those high American values for greedy, mean spirited, short-term, goals. That is NOT conservative. Evangelical churches have become the propaganda tool of Republicans.

They don't care about other people, they're on their own.

Real conservatives would want to protect the best features of the Constitution at the very least. Instead Bush's administration undermined the bill of rights, neglected important assumptions such as the avoidance of entangling foreign alliances, the revulsion against concentration of power (whether it be the media, corporations, or the Presidency.), or the continued functioning of those 'checks and balances'.

The US, thanks to 'law and order' Republicans now is  a leader in incarcerations of its own people.  The better to suppress minority voting. U.S. elections, thanks to Republicans, do not measure up to even minimal standards.

US government now wiretaps at will, searches people at airports, spies on their every move, conducts much of its public business in secrecy, engages in completely unethical behavior by secret, covert agencies. R's profess support for law and order...just not for themselves.

Party hacks staffed important government positions and incompetence has been the trademark of the Bush administration. Bible school graduates staffed the Justice Department, political minders censored scientists, and corporate cronies were allowed to run regulatory agencies. The results are clear now.

Supreme Court justice Scalia, when discussing the 2000 election, said "Get over it".  The Court has made many bad decisions in the past,  mostly because they always take the Corporate interest over that of the people. Appointing Bush was, in 20/20 hindsight, the worst decision they ever made. The US may never recover from it.

Real conservatives would want to mitigate possible damage to the environment. R's do not.

See Republicans for further details, since they apply the label Conservative to themselves without any clue of what it would mean to conserve. Not only have R's raced to the bottom, they have crashed the US there. As Larry Lessig writes...we have lost our republic. (Download the free book.)

See the forecast.

Bibliography

FREEDOM’S DOMINION: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, by Jefferson Cowie

Broken Government, How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches, by John W. Dean.

The Wrongs of the Right: Language, race and the Republican Party in the Age of Obama: Matthew w.Hughey and Gregory S Parks.

The Reactionary Mind: Corey Robin

Before the Storm: Rick Perlstein

Why the Right Went Wrong, Conservatism - From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond: E.J. Dionne Jr.

Answering Back: Liberal Responses to Conservative Arguments: David Coates

Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power: Seth Rosenfeld

The Conservative Nanny State: Dean Baker (Read it on line.)

The Price of Right: How the Conservative Agenda Has Failed America (and Always Will): Alicia Morgan

Conservatives Without Conscience: John W. Dean

Up From Conservatism, Why the Right is Wrong For America: Michael Lind

CONSERVATISM, The Fight for a Tradition By Edmund Fawcett