Conservatives Without Conscience (8 page)

Conservatism’s Power of Negative Thinking

Given the rather distinct beliefs of the various conservative factions, which have only grown more complex with time, how have conservatives succeeded in coalescing as a political force? The simple answer is through the power of negative thinking, and specifically, the ability to find common enemies. The adherents of early conservatism—economic conservatives, traditional conservatives, and libertarians—agreed that communism was the enemy, a fact that united them for decades—and hid their differences. Today’s conservatives—especially social conservatives, as opposed to intellectuals and the more thoughtful politicians—define themselves by what they oppose, which is anything and everything they perceive to be liberal. That category includes everyone from Democrats to anyone with whom they disagree, and can, therefore, automatically be labeled a liberal. Another group that has recently been designated as an enemy is “activist judges,” regardless of their party or philosophical affiliation. Activist judges are best described as those whose rulings run contrary to the beliefs of a particular conservative faction.

Antipathy to liberalism has been present from the outset of the conservative movement but it only became a powerful unifying influence in the early 1980s. Sidney Blumenthal, when still a staff writer at the
Washington Post,
concluded that “conservatism requires liberalism for its meaning,” for “without the enemy [of liberalism] to serve as nemesis and model, conservative politics would lack its organizing principle.”
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Blumenthal’s observation, made two decades ago, is even more valid today. Leading conservative Web sites, including well-funded think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the right-leaning libertarian Cato Institute, spend a lot of time and money criticizing or complaining with varying degrees of contempt about all matters perceived to be “liberal.”
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Important conservative opinion journals, like the
National Review
and
Human Events,
see the world as bipolar: conservative versus liberal.
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Right-wing talk radio could not survive without its endless bloviating about the horrors of liberalism. Trashing liberals is nothing short of a cottage industry for conservative authors. Take the “queen of mean,” Ann Coulter, whose titles speak for themselves:
Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right
(2002);
Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism
(2003); and
How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter
(2004).
Slander,
for example, contains page after page of scorn, criticism, belittlement, and bemoaning of ideas she believes liberal. Her books have also generated a subsidiary cottage trade in fact-checking her work, which has amply demonstrated that Coulter apparently considers accuracy as something that needs only to be approximated.
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All the hyperventilating about liberalism by conservatives is surprising, because it is so unnecessary. Liberalism is a straw man conservatives love to attack, but there are not, in fact, enough liberals to be a true threat to conservatism. A recent Harris Poll found that only 18 percent of American adults call themselves liberals,
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and the TIPP poll, cited earlier, found the figure to be 20 percent. Although then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich unequivocally declared in 1998 that the “age of liberalism is over,” condemnation of the liberal bogeyman continues to be a clarion call for most conservatives. In truth, conservatives attack liberals, or those they label or perceive as liberal, for several reasons. It is, of course, a handy means to rally the troops, for the conservative base enjoys it when their leaders and prominent voices attack those who do not share their views. It is also a means to raise money; fund-raising letters and drives regularly recount the horrors of liberalism. Many conservatives, however, are simply entertained by reading conservative authors or hearing conservative talk-show hosts rant about liberals. The exaggerated hostility also apparently satisfies a psychological need for antagonism toward the “out group,” reinforces the self-esteem of the conservative base, and increases solidarity within the ranks.
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Law professor John Eastman described the contemporary conser
vative movement as “a bit of a three-legged stool.”
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Eastman wrote that conservatives find cohesion in their efforts to pack the federal judiciary with judges who will work at “recovering the original understanding of the Constitution—one that recognized the scope of federal power over matters truly national, such as national security, but that sought to revive the limits on federal authority in other areas of daily life, as the Constitution envisioned.”
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In short, the concerned effort to oppose so-called judicial activism is important to most all conservatives, and indeed, books, blogs, and essays on the subject have come from high-profile voices throughout the conservative factions.
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Thus, when Bush nominated his White House counsel, Harriet Miers, for the Supreme Court, notwithstanding her stellar conservative credentials she was attacked relentlessly by other conservatives, who doubted she had the cerebral wherewithal to wage battle behind closed doors at the high Court on their behalf.
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National Review
writer John Derbyshire was a leader in the snarling pack chasing Miers, employing conservative rhetoric to do the job. After “reading her thoughts, messages and speeches,” Derbyshire reported, “I mean, the sheer, dreary, numbing m—e—d—i—o—c—r—i—t—y of them.” He concluded:

Notwithstanding a number of less than subtle signals from the White House that Ms. Miers, a born-again evangelical Christian, would indeed
vote the way conservatives wished on issues like abortion, school prayer, sex education, and other social issues, she was eventually forced to withdraw her nomination.

A close study of conservatives reveals an interesting trait: These people do not see themselves as they actually are, but rather as something very different. In short, they seem to have little facility for self-analysis. Consider, for example, Derbyshire’s mean-spirited remarks about Harriet Miers, and now listen to Derbyshire’s take on himself, when he says he “started reading [the
National Review
] in the late 1970s, and it has always kept that agreeable, tolerant, gentlemanly tone, and as long as it keeps it, I shall be an
NR
reader (and, I hope, contributor). The tone comes, of course, from the personality of the founder, Bill Buckley, who is one of the most good-natured men I have ever met—a true American gentleman.”
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Could a man as intelligent as Derbyshire actually believe his comments about Ms. Miers were “gentlemanly”? Not surprisingly, the very conservatives who love to hurl invective against the ranks of their enemies prove to have the thinnest of skins when the same is done to them. Many of the examples are familiar: Ann Coulter, who can trash perceived liberals on national television but has been known to walk offstage when booed, or to start crying when she thinks she is being treated unfairly; Rush Limbaugh, who also makes his living saying unkind things about those with whom he disagrees, thought it unfair, as did his followers, when his addiction to OxyContin was reported, along with the dubious means he serviced his habit, despite his own attacks on others who use drugs. Similarly, Mr. Virtue, William Bennett, apparently found nothing ironic or contradictory in his preaching (and selling) virtue while being a compulsive gambler himself, and was angry when he was found out.

Conservatives Are Often Illogical,
Inconsistent, and Contradictory

Many conservatives, particularly those who are clearly authoritarians, are not aware of their illogical, contradictory, and hypocritical thinking. If made cognizant of it, they either rationalize it away, neglect to care, or attack those who reveal their human weaknesses. Because such thinking seems to be a reality of contemporary conservatism, anyone who operates from a logical mind, or has an inclination for reasoned judgment, can have trouble with it. Social conservatives are especially susceptible to irrational beliefs, as a few examples will show.

Evangelical Christian conservatives speak of their belief in a “culture of life,” a concept drawn from the teaching of the Catholic Church that underlies the evangelicals’ opposition to abortion. But for the Catholic Church, the culture of life also means opposition to the death penalty, which evangelical Christian conservatives fully support and strongly encourage. They are untroubled by the inconsistency of their beliefs, and when this is pointed out they explain it away. The unborn are innocent while those being executed are not, yet the culture of life believes it is God’s wish to protect all life. As another example, social conservatives are deeply offended by atheists who want to remove the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, yet with great solemnity and earnestness they recite—as often as possible—that pledge and its words: “liberty and justice for all.” For all but atheists, they mean. Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited prayer in public schools, Christian conservatives have been up in arms, with the most vocal being Christians who believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Of course, those who truly know the Bible know that Jesus said, “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.
But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray
to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father,
who sees
what is done in secret,
will reward you (Matthew 6:5–7; emphasis added). So illogical is much of the biblically driven political thinking of evangelical Christian conservatives, for whom faith appears to trump reason, that theologians like Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong have written books with titles like
Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism
(1991).

Jonah Goldberg, writing for the
National Review,
has acknowledged the contradictions within modern conservatism. Rather than finding them a problem, though, he deems them a virtue. “The beauty of the conservative movement,” he said, “is that we all understand and accept the permanence of contradiction” in thinking. One can envision George Orwell spinning in his grave in frustration at a remark like that, for it is pure “doublethink.” Goldberg noted in passing that Jesus was not a conservative, which is certainly true, and is another fact ignored by the religious right. It does not take a particularly close reading of the New Testament, or the teachings of Jesus, to appreciate that the term “politically conservative Christian” has an oxymoronic quality. This is why conservatives have had to invent terms like “compassionate conservatism.” But for those who believe that contradiction is a thing of beauty, the concept of compassionate conservatism will not tax credulity whatsoever.

Psychological Perspectives on Conservatism

Public criticism by conservatives greeted the work of New York University professor John T. Jost and his collaborators when they published a report entitled “Political Conservatism as Motivated Cognition.”
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This study examines the psychology of political conservatism, basing
its findings on a mass of data: forty-four years of studies by social scientists investigating conservatism, using eighty-eight different techniques and involving over twenty-two thousand participants.
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Because its results are founded on empirical information drawn from experiments and testing—and conservatism views itself as grounded in empirical thinking—the negative reaction seemed out of place. Indeed, conservative commentators devoted little serious attention to the study, rejecting its conclusions based on a press release.
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Jost and his collaborators developed their working definition of “conservative” by reviewing dictionaries and encyclopedias along with the literature of historians, journalists, political scientists, sociologists, and philosophers from the mid-1950s (which, according to most conservative scholars, generally marks the beginning of the modern conservative movement in the United States) through the end of the 1990s. The study placed apt parameters on its inquiry while focusing on those who would be considered conservative under most any characterization. Their survey of the usage of the term “conservative” over roughly a half century revealed “a stable definitional
core
and a set of more malleable, historically changing
peripheral
associations.”
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While its core meanings were considered to include “a resistance to change” and “an acceptance of inequality,” its peripheral meanings were more complex, because not only did they change with time, but in some cases they overlapped the core meanings. For example, the study found the peripheral focus of “conservatism in the United States during the 1960s entailed support for the Vietnam War and opposition to civil rights, whereas conservatism in the 1990s had more to do with
being tough on crime and supporting traditional moral and religious values.” In addition, the authors provide examples of people who became conservatives for reasons having nothing to do with the identified core meanings, yet who later accepted those aspects of conservatism “because of their association with likeminded others.”
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