Category: History

Republicans seem to have come off the rails. They shut down the government in a temper tantrum over Obamacare, but that’s only the most visible part of it. Some Republicans are now blaming Obama for letting the government get shut down, while others, like Texas Governor Rick Perry, are calling Obamacare a criminal act. They scream about more and more, and they seem madder and madder. What accounts for this nearly unhinged rage?

I think the only way to understand this rage is to know a bit of the history of conservatism. The basis of conservatism is a desire for stability and a skepticism of change. It’s right there in the name, they want to “conserve” things. Conservatism as a distinct political philosophy was born out of Edmund Burke’s horror at the bizarre turn of events of the French Revolution. What began as a movement for liberty, equality, and fraternity, descended into a chaotic bloodbath. Conservatives have been trying to stop, or at least slow, changes in society ever since. But more often than not they’ve failed.

Most of the changes that conservatives have opposed over the years have been proposed by, championed by, and driven by liberals. This includes such major movements toward liberty as the abolition of slavery, the expansion of women’s rights through suffrage, and the civil rights movement, but includes thousands of minor policies. At each step conservatives tried to stop change, but more often than not liberals won.

In this country, particularly from the 1930’s to the 1980’s and the election of Ronald Reagan, conservatives fought a losing battle. Conservatives fought, and lost, the battles over welfare, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, the voting rights act, affirmative action, and a broad range of government regulation of the economy, from workplace safety regulation to environmental protection. In each fight the conservative argument has been remarkably consistent: these changes will not just alter a legal issue, but will also change the nature of society. From the beginning, ever since Burke, conservatives have seen their fight as not solely political or economic, but primarily social and cultural. They believe that certain economic conditions and government policies are essential to the maintenance and preservation of a successful culture.

The election of Reagan seemed to indicate a turning point in the long and futile battle against the advances of liberalism. Finally a true conservative had won nationwide. But while Reagan’s victory was a political success, it didn’t turn the tide on the culture. Conservatives tried to engage on cultural issues – spawning the “culture wars” – but this was futile. It quickly became obvious that, despite their political gains, conservatives were losing the culture.

But they had to keep fighting because they were fighting (in their minds at least) for the soul of America. So every battle, regardless of how trivial, had to be engaged. They won many political battles (elections of Presidents, appointments of conservative Justices, gains in the Senate, control of the House in 1994), and most economic battles (widespread deregulation and ascendency of their small government and anti-tax ethos), but none of those victories produced the social restoration they envisioned. To top it all off, the culture continued to degrade. And since political and economic victories were not producing the cultural revival they envisioned, they grew increasingly frustrated.

To a very real extend conservatives have been on a five hundred year losing streak. For five hundred years, traditions, norms, and social institutions have been eroded, chipped away, and fallen. Modern conservatives may dispute this history, but they feel the loss in their bones. And this deep seated sense of loss creates a frustration that permeates their approach to politics.

Because they are fighting to preserve the culture, and because they are not succeeding, each battle, political, economic or cultural, becomes more important. For conservatives, each battle is a rear-guard action. With each loss they give more ground. Take, as one example, the fight in the 1990’s over expanding the opportunities for women in the military. They lost that fight, and then they had to try to stop gays from serving openly in the military. They were able to stop that advance, at least temporarily in the 1990’s, with “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” But then, some twenty years later, that prohibition fell. Now the Pentagon is planning to open most combat roles to women. For conservatives this steady erosion of their values has been played out in most every public policy issue, from civil rights to business and environmental regulation. They have learned that if they give ground once, they will be constantly pushed back.

With each loss, conservatives lose something they once held dear; with each loss a social or cultural norm is forever abandoned. They know that if they lose any fight it only means that they will be pushed back even further, and will have to fight again deeper in their own territory. And so every fight is critical, and must be engaged at all costs. They also know that no issue is too trivial to ignore. Every issue is the tip of the iceberg, evidence of bigger things yet to come. Every liberal proposal is the camel’s nose under the tent flap. Conservatives know that many liberal policies start out in academia, then fall blithely from a politicians lips, then gain a constituency and eventually become a piece of legislation. And the history of the last century has been the history of repeated conservative inability to stop the liberal advance. If you doubt me, think about how gay rights have advanced in the last twenty years.

For many conservatives the election of Barack Obama was the last straw. They would’ve been outraged by the election of any Democrat, since it indicated that the conservative tide (which began with the election of Reagan and crested with the election of George W. Bush) had crested and was beginning to recede. But to them Obama isn’t just any Democrat. He embodies many of the government programs that they loathed, including Civil Rights, Affirmative Action, Welfare, and government backed student loans, to name a few. But he also embodies new cultural norms they disdained: he’s urban, mixed race, academic, raised by a single mother, culturally aware, and sort of hip. He’s the face of a changing society. He’s the face of the changes that conservatives have fought against for nearly a century.

Obama represents everything conservatives oppose, and so his proposals – for anything – are anathema. And then he proposed a government reform of the American health care system. This was too much. Conservatives have fought against government involvement in medicine since the 1930’s. Ronald Reagan made the transition from actor to politician based in part on his lecture tour warning about the evils of socialized medicine. Reagan said that “one of the traditional methods of imposing … socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project, most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.” But this is just the “foot in the door” and eventually “your son won’t decide when he’s in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him.” And in issue after issue over the last century, conservatives see what happens when liberals get a foot in the door.

The battle over Obamacare is existential. It’s a fight that must be won at all costs. Opposition to “socialized medicine” is not some minor cultural issue, but an issue central to the conservative worldview. And so they are willing to do whatever it takes, shut down the government, destroy the nation’s credit rating, harm the nation’s economy, to stop it. They must stop it all costs because they believe that the harm in letting it pass is far far worse. It is the culmination of their worst fears, it indicates that they have indeed lost the final battle.

I’m amazed by the almost unquenchable Conservative anger. They’re angry at President Obama, certainly, and willing to do anything to destroy him and defeat his programs, but they’re also surprisingly angry at each other. Conservatives have been angry for a long time, but the intensity rose after Obama’s election, and boiled over after the Health Care reform law passed. This sent the Tea Party into the streets and started their jihad against moderate Republicans. Their anger is now an incoherent rage.

This underlying anger is baffling to many liberals. I know because I am one. Most of my friends are liberal, and much of what I read comes from liberal news sources. Liberals don’t understand the anger because, from their perspective, conservatives are winning. Conservative ideas dominate most areas of American political life, including the economy, foreign policy, and the law. This is a product of a thirty year conservative ascendancy, which began with Reagan and culminated in the Bush years, when Conservatives controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. Even now Conservatives control the House and have a virtual lock on the Senate. Conservatives are winning, but are madder than ever. Why is that?

I think that their political success is a major cause of their anger. Since the Fifties, if not before, conservatives have decried the supposed decline of America, and in particular, the decay of the American culture. This decay is brought about, in their minds, by government policy. Regulations hamstring the entrepreneurial spirit and stifle American’s innate drive. Welfare leads to dependency and contributes to the breakdown of the family, and this leaves people open to the allure of promiscuous sex and illicit drugs.

Movement conservatives have been plotting their take-over of the government for generations. Their goal has always been to save America, and they think that the only way to do this is to transform government. Since 1980 they’ve been remarkably successful. Reagan won in 1980, and Republicans have held the presidency 20 out of the last 33 years, and since the Republican revolution of 1994, they’ve controlled one or both Houses of Congress as often as Democrats. In that time taxes were cut, welfare reformed, the military bolstered, Originalists put on the bench, and bureaucrats friendly to industry and hostile to regulation peppered throughout the government. And conservative political theories (limited government and states’ rights), and legal theories (originalism) dominate the national political debate. Now even liberals accept these views. Refugees from Wall Street run the Obama administration economic team, Obama’s foreign policy is a pale legacy of Bush policies, and even ostensibly liberal judges base their rulings on the supposed original intent of the framers of the Constitution.

But here’s the problem: this political success hasn’t cured the social ills that Conservatives are fighting against. If anything, society has gotten more tolerant, or if you’re a conservative, more decadent. Popular entertainment is worse than ever. Divorce rates have stabilized, but remain at spectacularly high levels. Nearly half of all births are out of wedlock. Drugs are rampant, religion is fading.

There was a saying when I was a kid: “the faster I run, the behinder I get.” That’s how conservatives must feel. The more political victories they gain, the sicker society gets.

But there’s something else that must add to their despair. Conservatives are not only winning politically, they have won economically. Conservative economic theories—capitalism, free markets, limited regulation—dominate, not only at home, but around the world. In the grand, one-hundred-and-fifty year battle between capitalism and communism, between free markets and socialism, capitalism and free markets won. And won overwhelmingly. There are only a handful of communist nations left, and they’re a pathetic bunch: North Korea, Cuba, Burma. Even China has thrown off communism as an economic theory, though they hold on to aspects of dictatorship.

The free market won, but what has it wrought?

There’s no market more free than the marketplace of the American culture. Our debased culture is the product of nothing but the desires of the consuming public: no government control, no outside oversight. The only driving force is the desire to make money, which according to Adam Smith’s theory of the free market, should benefit society as a whole. There’s a demand, and someone creates a supply. Whether it’s hard core pornography, misogynistic music, moronic movies, a “liberal” news media, or a television culture disdainful of religion, tradition, morality, and family values, all of these exist because of the demands of the American people. The culture is a perfect free market. And it’s a sewer.

Let me be clear, the free market didn’t debase the American culture. All the free market did was give Americans the choice, and they chose. Take music as one example. Every type of music under the sun is available on iTunes, from alternative to Zydeco, and literally everything in between. Opera? check. Classical? Absolutely. Bluegrass? Yep. Contemporary Christian, smooth jazz? You name it, it’s all there. But what’s at the top? Schlock, nonsense pop, and thuggish rap. The free market gave the American people the choice, and they chose the music, the television, the movies, in a word the culture, that we have today. Make no mistake, that which conservatives most revere—the free market—has produced that which conservatives most disdain—the American culture.

The unseen hand, which is supposed to guide free exchange based on supply, demand, and the profit motive to produce socially beneficial outcomes, has instead slapped us in the face.

Most conservatives don’t make this connection directly, but there’s no doubt they feel it in their bones. “The faster they run, the behinder the get.” They are closer than ever to the Government takeover they envisioned in the 1950’s, but their political and their economic success has only made things worse. When they win, they lose. Something seems wrong, but they can’t quite identify it. And it’s making them frantic.

A rational, disinterested observer (admittedly not me) might suggest that their underlying theory is flawed. But conservatives are unwilling to engage in critical self analysis and unable to question their theories of government, economics, and society. In their view the theory can’t be wrong, it must be something else. The most obvious target is their political opponents, and in their frenzy they accused liberals of all manner of treachery. And so we have Fox News and talk radio calling liberals treasonous, and Rick Santorum accusing President Obama of actually hoping that Iran develops nuclear weapons. Or as Newt Gingrich once said: “no grotesquery is too extreme.” But this tactic hasn’t succeeded because they’re attacking the wrong target. But rather than re-assess, they just get madder, and look for other targets. Now they purge the impure: Witness Tea Party candidates challenging moderated Republicans in the last few primary elections. But that too has failed, as it inevitably would.

Conservatives are now turning on themselves, like Soviet commissars casting about for blame for the failure of the latest five year plan. The theory must be sound; the problem lies in implementation. And so each group within the broad conservative coalition blames the others. The libertarians, Ron Paul and his supporters, blame the Bush era neo-cons for screwing things up when they were in charge. The Tea Party blames the moderates. The cultural warriors, like Rick Santorum, blame the moderate and the libertarians. Romney, the Rockefeller Republican, didn’t share the rage, and tried to rise above it all, and ended up as everyone’s target.

Conservatives must be confused. Their economic ideas have won, and they can win politically, yet they keep losing socially and culturally. At some point reality becomes inescapable, and they must feel, deep in the pit of their stomach, that there’s a problem with their underlying theories. But they can’t change because they’ve developed a perpetual motion machine of anger, a möbius strip of confusion that leads back to frustration, and as they go around and around they get madder and madder. Each economic success further debases the culture; each political victory is more futile.

There must be some disquiet, some deep angst in knowing that your lifelong goal is a failure. But not just a failure, more than that. Your pursuit of the beast has only made it stronger, more adept, more popular. It is as if, at the end, Ahab realizes that his pursuit of the whale has increased its virility, his chase allowed it to spread its seed beyond its natural realm, and now the oceans are full of white whales.

Conservatives like Senator Ted Cruse are like Ahab, roaming the deck and raging against forces beyond their control. Ahab thought his foe was a whale but he was really up against nature and a changing world. Conservatives think their foes are liberal politicians, “secular humanists,” and the “biased liberal media.” But, like Ahab, they are up against forces beyond their control. Perhaps, in the dark of night they recognize this, and they lay awake worrying that others may catch on. But during the day they lash out, using anger to mask their fear, and vicious attacks to hide their frustration. But their anger is leavened not just with shame but with the disbelief that as they get closer to one goal their ultimate goal slips further away.

Conservative anger has become an incoherent rage that is incapable of being sated. It is a rage that has become so hot that it is now self-consuming.