The Failure of Movement Conservatism and the Fall of the United States
The United States of America is falling from within. I don’t
mean that in a Krushchevian “we will bury you” sense. It should be obvious that
it is simply a fact. (1)
The coronavirus and our national leadership’s response to
the crisis has been marked by incompetence, stupidity, and arrogance. Individual
state responses have been variable and in the case of Texas, the state
government has pretty much abandoned any attempt at leadership, foisting navigating
a deadly health crisis on county and municipal legislatures.
I don’t think I need to recap the shameful and disastrous
steps that have brought us to this moment as a direct result of ineptitude,
venality, and absolute ignorance on this White House Administration’s part.
This is not debatable. It’s obvious. Whether “the Base”(2) gets it or not is
immaterial. Whether the followers of their cracked-brained leader understand the
reasons for what is transpiring around them and affecting their loved ones (which
they don’t seem to grasp) and others (about whom they neither know nor care) or not is almost irrelevant.
However, it is obvious to all who have eyes that the United
States isn’t just acting like a failed state; it is one. The government has
failed to protect its people across a broad spectrum of a chain of command from
the executive branch down. With a failed tough guy wannabe in the supreme position of power, the
rot grows more obvious each day.
This administration has done nothing to “make America great
again”, unless you consider weakening regulation, destroying the fabric of
health, education and welfare, and lining the pockets of the rich with more profit
and then claiming this is great for the economy. However, it didn’t appear sui
generis. Forget the numbers that turned out to vote for a Trump Rex
Dynasty; the conditions that led to the ascendancy of this insanity lay within
the founding of the republic.
None of this is or should be news. While I admit that the
exercise of pointing in backwards and looking for causes that lead to a specific
moment is like asking who made the arrow I was shot with and where did come
from, when what I need to have is the arrow removed, it does have value in
understanding how to move forward. Without knowing the source of the corruption,
there will be no way to cure the rot.
Covid-19 has thrown into sharp relief the self-centeredness
of many if not most, in the Republican Party. Yes, I’m talking party politics
because this has been a well-orchestrated movement that began with the Movement
Conservatives in the late 1940s/early 1950s and to the Republican Party’s
credit, they mobilized and spread their ideology skillfully and thoroughly over
successive generations. In this, they have been extremely disciplined and far-seeing.
(3)
Sadly, their ideology is based on the supremacy of the individual
above all others. Essentially, the Randian aspects of the Party have brought us
to a society where you can do what you want within the bounds of the law. There
are several caveats, though.
One is that if you want to do something that’s not quite
within the law, you will need to get that law changed by lobbying for bills to
be passed that will assist your ability to see your goals through. To do that,
you will need to shore up support for those law-makers who feel the same way or
if they don’t feel the same way, your contribution to their continuity in
office needs to be sufficient to bring them around. Quid pro quo, in other
words. A phrase that Republicans seem to disavow but use quiet accurately when
it suits them.
The other caveat is this works best if you’re not a minority;
that’s mostly not an issue since most legislators have been white males. And
there’s the rub; the sea change that happened in the U.S. in the middle sixties
wasn’t just window dressing. Disenfranchised communities raised their voices.
The Civil Rights Movement and the feminist and sexual revolutions became viable
social forces for a reason. Blacks and other minorities, women, and gay people had
been either erased from or never asked to join the decision making processes
over their lives and when they did, were met with further oppressive force.
Anyone who says that this is not the case is either a fool for
lack of education and critical awareness or if you lived through this era, a
blind bigoted idiot. I grew up with blind bigoted idiots. I didn’t have to
travel far to find them because they would out themselves from the get-go. And
not just in Texas but even in New York and Boston. Perhaps even more so in the
liberal bastions of the North because racism was even more a matter of class
issues and division than people would let on; the expression of racism in the
northeast seemed to me so much more bitter than in the southern states because it
was exacerbated by power structures that were in place to ensure that kind of
social division. This is not to say that all racists were working class (far
from it) but that the expression of racism was more socially acceptable among
whites (I am one, by the way, in case it’s not clear) at lower socioeconomic
levels. In any case, race and class were and continue to remain, scalpels and bludgeons
for the powerful.
This may be changing, given what we’ve seen; it’s apparent that
people have had enough and Black Lives Matter is a vital movement that may just
provide the light needed to get us nationally moving forward on matters of race.
That said, the opposing force is still there; greedy, self-interested and
predominantly white politicians who want to maintain their grasp on power.
A pandemic and its effects (on both health and public policy)
and race and political power structures are all related here. You cannot tease
out the response to one and not find the other two entwined. You cannot not
find that the administration’s move to remove the pandemic response teams from
the previous administration unrelated to a lack of concern for national
healthcare and policies that protect its citizens from the systemic racism that
has been with the country since its founding. Oh, and sexism; women’s accessibility
to healthcare has been highly impacted since the flourishing of this administration,
as well. And there’s still that little issue of unequal pay that hasn’t been
addressed.
People – and by people here, I mean white people – do not
want to hear that their country is racist, that by extension they are racist.
Similarly, people do not want to be told what to do even in the face of an
existential threat. The conservative element in this country has often decried
the “rise of the nanny state” and cried “you can’t tell me what to do” all the
while telling everyone else how to behave. This would be funny if it hasn’t
been such a large part of why we’re at this moment.
These same voices either don’t know or don’t understand the
basics of history or science. Worst of all, they don’t understand that there
are human beings who suffer as a direct result of their stupidity. You don’t
want to wear a mask? Fine, but stay inside and away from others who may be harmed
or killed by your selfishness.
Expand on that though, with all the white power in the
country, and it’s clear to see that the Other is all those who don’t look like
me, who I don’t want in my neighborhood, and whom I fear. When it comes down to
it, many of these people will sacrifice the elderly, immunocompromised, and already
ill with all those dark-skinned people whom they fear. And they will doom
themselves by their ignorance.
It is these people who rally around an administration that
plays to their fears. I used to think that the people in administrations like
this one were simply exploiting the stupidity of their base to cynically remain
in power. I used to think that most of them probably didn’t share the beliefs
of their benighted, bellicose supporters. George Wallace seemed anomalous to me
because he was essentially Archi Bunker; but it soon became clear that was not the
case. The G.O.P. in my lifetime has always been racist and yes, sorry to burst
the bubbles of their ranks, elitist.(4)
I’m not avoiding racism in the Democratic Party because, if
nothing else, that’s a non-starter. These days, racist (or overtly racist) Democrats
stick out like sore thumbs and rarely have long careers. Also, the party itself
is essentially supported by people who don’t want to be Republican for
reasons that should be self-evident. It has nothing to do with building a
welfare state, imposing socialism, taking away your fucking gun, and creating a
bloated administrative bureaucracy for government. People who vote Democrat are
for the most part, people who don’t like the Republican Party. Again,
for legitimate reasons.
We would like to think we go to the polls rationally and vote
with logic. We don’t. We really don’t.(5) The asshole that wants to deregulate
environmental protections is someone I don’t like and therefore, easy-peasy, I’m
voting for the other guy. Even if the other guy is in the pocket to dubious
special interests, holds regressive views on other matters. And there’s the downside
to a two-party system.(6) Both parties know this, but I’ll grudgingly admit that the
Democrats have, however imperfectly, their hearts in the right place.
Would the pandemic have been met with a better, more
pro-active response had Hillary Clinton been in office? Sure. If only because
there would have already been in place a response team comprised of experts and
scientists who would have coordinated with their peers in countries already
affected and assisted the government in a plan to respond to the spread of this
virus. This is why you plan for emergencies, and this pandemic was never
anything that we thought would never happen. But this is why ignorance,
stupidity, and greed is dangerous and electing people to high office driven by
ignorance, stupidity, and greed results in a country that has one-fourth the
world’s population and the highest rate of infection.
It is why the economy has tanked under this pandemic. It is
why this is a terrifying moment but few, I genuinely believe, very few, feel the
terror of the moment. A country led by elected leaders who devalue human life
to this magnitude is a failure. An electorate that insists that a plague is a
conspiracy theory even in the face of two and a half million cases
and 124,000 deaths is a failure.
I would hasten to add that it’s not a lack of education. I
had the same education as many of these old assholes (I have no other word that encapsulate what I feel about their policies and reductively, them) who are in office; for the
younger people, perhaps our educational system has failed to inculcate the spirit
of inquiry (okay; it was never intended to do that!) and concern for society
(quit laughing) but it has certainly failed in simply teaching them how to figure
out what’s factual from what isn’t. They have grown up with the internet; it’s
easy enough to Google Snopes or do some research. Oh. Wait. That would mean
that you’d have to question everything enough to do your own fact-finding and then,
you’d have to have the acuity to understand the difference between fact and
fiction. Sorry, I lost my head. This country is a failed state.
Notes:
1. This is not an original notion. Chomsky, among
others, nailed it long ago. More immediately is Derek Thompson’s article “America is Acting Like a Failed State” in the Atlantic. See also Failed States. Noam Chomsky. Metropolitan Books. 2006.
2. This is a frivolous note, but it did occur to me
that “Al-Qaeda” (al-qa'ida) translates as “the base”; irony abounds.
3. It’s worth looking at what we mean by “conservatism”.
The Britannica entry
is instructive and I think it’s relevant to quote its passage about distinguishing
types of conservatism: “In The Devil’s Dictionary (1906), the American writer
Ambrose Bierce cynically (but not inappropriately) defined the conservative as
“a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the
Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.” Conservatism must also be
distinguished from the reactionary outlook, which favours the restoration of a
previous, and usually outmoded, political or social order.”
This entry from United States History
is slight, but offers resources that are worth exploring.Justin Dyer’s “The Decline of
Movement Conservatism and the Rise of the Alt-Right” in Public Discourse is
required reading for context. Indeed, it’s worth quoting in full his
observation about the schismatic aspects of U.S. conservative politics in
general and the new breed of alt-right conservatism of the Trump camp in
particular:
“What is clear is that generational
and ideological changes, demographic trends, and the decline of traditional
religiosity in the United States have made it difficult, if not impossible, to
maintain a successful national political coalition around the tenets of postwar
conservatism. Economic liberalism (including liberal immigration laws), hawkish
foreign policy, and cultural traditionalism have historically been viewed as
the three legs of the conservative stool. As George Hawley demonstrates in
Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism, however, being a conservative and
being on the right wing of the political spectrum are not necessarily the same
thing. In other words, not all of conservatism’s adversaries are in the
progressive camp. Many of Donald Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters, for
example, dissent from standard conservative orthodoxy on free trade, foreign
policy, and immigration.”
4. Last, Rod Dreher at the American Conservative called it. His article “The Death of Movement Conservatism” is a conservative’s clear-sighted observation of what’s become of his party. I do disagree with Dreher on a number of things, but there is no schadenfreude from my side on what he must have felt when he wrote this four years ago. I very much recommend this.
Yes, yes, I know, I know. The Republican Party is
(was) “the party of Lincoln”. Can we please retire the alt-right’s pathetic and
lazy rhetoric on this, if nothing else? The parties flipped ideologies in the
earliest part of the twentieth century and it’s sad that so many seem to think
that what was true in the middle of the nineteenth century holds true. Again,
Americans are not much for grasping history. Eric Rauchway more or less pinpoints
the switch to William Jennings Bryan. I think this is sound and makes a certain
amount of sense. Obviously, there had been earlier antecedents, so perhaps we can
trace the switch to the late 1800s. To learn more, check out this Live Science
article (“Why
Did the Democratic and Republican Parties Switch Platforms?”)
5. This is pretty common knowledge and it doesn’t
take much to find the literature, but I have to admit, this Psychology
Today article from a few years back is instructive. (“Which Emotions Have
the Most Impact on Voters?”, Michal Ann Strahilevitz Ph.D., posted October 28,
2012. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-money-and-your-heart/201210/which-emotions-have-the-most-impact-voters)
Comments
Post a Comment