On Conservatives
Entry #4 in my analysis of the streams of today's ideological river.
In a lot of ways, conservativism is the most immediately comprehensible of political ideologies, especially if its practitioner is from the U.S. or the U.K. At its heart, conservativism is saying “I got mine”, and those are two countries that have absolutely gotten theirs – and probably yours, too.
Conservativism is also the most just-what-it-says-on-the box ideology; as opposed to socialism (which comes in a variety of flavors and requires the sommelier to provide guidance and interpretation) or liberalism (which doesn’t even mean the same thing from one country to the next) or even fascism (which doesn’t mean anything), conservativism means ‘to conserve’. If the world has been good to you, you want to keep it as it is. If you have been lucky in life, your life will remain lucky provided no one goes and changes the rules on you. Conservativism is the political philosophy that comes closest to the principle of not messing with a good thing.
In fact, it so firmly occupies this psychic space that it is easy to understand why it attributes the sin of jealousy to socialists and other do-gooders. Obviously, these troublesome Reds want to change the system; it hasn’t paid off for them! Conservatives don’t put much stock in empathy, because if you’re a winner, it’s hard to make yourself think about what the life of a loser might be like. If the system works, why change it? If you’re the one at the top of the heap, why upend the heap? And even if you don’t directly benefit from the status quo, it’s the status quo for a reason; no one is a bigger believer in nebulous concepts like ‘human nature’ than the conservative.
Before you start to say ‘I see the appeal’, though, consider that you can never simply ask ‘Who is a conservative?’. You must first ask the more important question ‘What are they a conservative about?’. Plenty of conservative impulses, both good and bad, can be found everywhere on the political spectrum. Indeed, conservativism may be the most understandable of all social impulses for the most banal of reasons: We are raised to think the world is right and proper the way it is, that rules exist to be followed, that authority figures are obeyed because they deserve our obeisance, and that you should do as you are told. You are taught this for a reason: because society already has a lot of problems, and teaching children that the system you burden them with is the right one takes a lot of work off your plate right off the bat. All but the most precocious cling to it at least through adolescence. As a means of social control, it’s hard to beat teaching kids an ideology that encourages self-policing.
Of course, thankfully, by the time most of use become teenaged, we start to question at least some of this. We start to ask: Where does power come from? From where is authority derived? Do we have a responsibility to those the system has not rewarded? These are troublesome questions, but they are necessary, and humanity would not have walked too far down its current path – for better or for worse – if we had not started to ask them. Conservatism of a universal sort is quite literally a children’s ideology, but we were all children at some point. Where the view starts to break against the rocks of the world is when we never question it, never let it guide us to uncomfortable inquiries, never let the people who do not share it explain why it does not work for them.
Even then, the question becomes “What are you conservative about?” rather than “Are you conservative?” We have been taught to kill the censor inside of us by the time we take our first tentative steps down the path of liberalism or liberation, and we rarely stop to consider that conservativism may sometimes be valuable, or that some ideas and structures are worth preserving. It is here where we recognize that the real human tendency to believe that the system works, that mommy and daddy always have our best interests in mind, and that everything works out for the best in the best of all possible worlds has been fatally hijacked by those who not only never arrive at the point of questioning it, but who think that to question it at all is to commit some dreadful heresy. It is here that conservativism becomes not just an ideology but the property of ideologues, where liberty gives what to libertarianism, where naïve objectivity becomes stubborn Objectivism, where reactions transform us into reactionaries. While it is true that the liberal bourgeoise are ultimately the enablers of fascism, they are not its natural consistency; that title belongs to conservatives, not because they are the worst among us, but because they have less far to travel to arrive there.
It is for these reasons that I find myself with less to say about conservativism than other political ideologies (and that if you’re bothering to read this, you are giving a blessing for this essay’s relatively modest word count). Conservativism is almost literally child’s play. It is the natural inheritance of most of us, and most of us either grow past it or learn to keep our mouths shut about it. Even in countries where some form of socialism has taken hold, there are plenty of conservatives; they have just learned perhaps the simplest political lesson of all after “I got mine”, which is “Go along to get along”. So long as their needs are met, their lives are untroubled, and they can get through the day with minimal hassle from whoever is in charge, they won’t bother to rock the boat, for the very reason that they are conservative. The dangers of taking their views to extremes do not exist in a vacuum; they are imposed on them by radical agitators who take the simple advice of leaving people alone and transform it into the creation of rigid hierarchies decorated by gaudy cruelty.
Perhaps it seems that I have left conservativism off the hook here. Perhaps this seems odd, given the utter ruin to which the dominant flavor of conservatives has led our nation and the world. And it is true that, especially in the failure of liberalism to address the failings of capital, rigidly ideological conservativism has transformed itself, if not entirely into fascism, at least into a convincing simulacrum of it, with all of its viciousness and callousness but none of its vitality or energy. But this is usually the fault of a leadership class that has seen a vacuum of power and taken advantage of it, of a void of political education and a lack of concern for the kind of world that void can create. Conservativism in and of itself does not produce the kind of leaders who make a joke of human society; it merely encourages the general tendency to think we ought to obey leaders generally, without too much questioning, and to listen the most to the ones who shout the loudest. Authoritarianism is not the same as fascism, but it’ll do in a pinch, and a pinch is what we’re all in right now.
Conservativism, in the end, is quite literally a stupid ideology. It is the view one develops of the world when one does not know any better, and among even its leading proponents, it is famously difficult to find a true believer. Hypocrites abound among the conservative leadership because they are not preaching a gospel that they truly worship; they are only looking for a hook sharp enough to catch in the mouths of the slowest and dullest fish in the pond. Hucksters, grifters, frauds, phonies, and cheats abound, because it is the easiest belief to which one can pay lip service. When one does find a genuine conservative leader, it is usually a journey of but a single step to fascism, for the requirements of genuine ideology are generally too much to be borne. The fact that so many of today’s conservative luminaries seem to actually believe the horse tonic they are peddling to the rubes – in today’s America, quite literally – is a depressing commentary on how far we have fallen, but there is still plenty of free fall to come before we hit the bottom of the cliff.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that political education is real, and it is valuable; and it is easier to change the minds of conservatives, who tend to merely lack perspective and experience of any circumstance but their own, than it is of the committed fascist (who cares about nothing but his own potency and power) or the dedicated liberal (who already thinks she has attained moral and political perfection and needs no improvement). And the further good news is, even if most conservatives cannot be convinced, threatened, or persuaded into a less dim-witted and hostile belief system, they can at least be told to pipe down and keep their grubby little thoughts to themselves and out of the body politic. This is, I cannot deny, an extremely cynical point of view about other human beings, but I come by it honestly – have you seen the way people drive? – and it should be a relief to anyone that cynicism might work in our favor for once.
The world, I am sad to say, will always be full of what a famed critic of communism once described as “ordinary fuckin’ people”. We will, I am also sad to say, need them to win. Even if they do not take up arms in the class war, we will need them to stay out of the way. What I am not sad to say is that there is no need to entertain dark visions of gulags or guillotines for most of these people. They are simply stuck in first gear and have been for most of their lives, because they have never had to climb a hill. With the right political education, they can be made helpful to the people, and a few may even surprise you. And the ones who don’t, well, they may forever remain idiots. But so long as they are ruthlessly kept away from any position of authority (which, I am neither happy nor sad to say, will probably result in some spectacular disciplining of their fink leadership class), they can at least be, to borrow a phrase that conservatives fraudulently attributed to communists, useful idiots.