 The basic conservative worldview, to most of which even the moderate would agree, consists of the following: property is supreme, especially in matters of business, and with a sort of totalitarian structure in the workplace in which the boss is “daddy”, and daddies provide jobs. (In this arrangement unions are a threat to his domination.) We need low taxes and low regulation, preferably by the business interests themselves. Also few restrictions on campaign financing as this will be taken care of by the invisible hand of the market. The environment is subservient to man, whether you look at it as a religious dominion thing or just business. It’s always subservient to growth. There’s something feminine about nurturing and something masculine about exploitation. Besides, if we mess it up more growth will solve it. The immigrant is welcome if he is the right kind of immigrant (depending on what decade it is, his race and income), if he “came the right way”. But we really get nervous about amnesty cases because let’s face it foreigners are scary, and don’t get us started on people with messy or hardship situations. The military projection of power, and by extension man’s right to project power with his gun is important. Both represent strength, courage and patriotic values, which all align with conformity and a seemingly procrustean ethic of white, patriarchal, heterosexual Christian nationalism. The lives of people of other lands are literally not worth the lives of Americans, and are expendable as such if need be. This is American supremacy, which seems to resemble awfully closely a similar kind of supremacy. “Judeo-Christian” and “Western” or “Anglo” heritage and traditions are revered, and the US is proclaimed a Christian nation. Attempts to rectify social justice issues such as race, gender, sexuality or religious pluralism and civil rights are too often politically correct, socially justice warrioring wokeness. What this country needs is more religious freedom, meaning the ability to deny others their rights based on Christian beliefs if you want to force women to carry children to term, refuse to serve them in your business, or force them to listen to your prayers in their school. There is basic agreement with most of this amongst conservatives. Some are more liberal on social issues, some are more isolationist on foreign policy, etc. But even the moderate basically goes along with the main outlines. Over the years, as progressivism has beat them over the head with reality, they have had to soften on things such as race, gender or sexuality; only the extremists now call for segregation, taking the vote from women, etc. But that’s merely conservatism tempered by liberalism. The basic assumptions are the same: Unfettered free market capitalism a miracle of growth, prosperity and scientific achievement. Polluting & destroying the environment is a natural right... people can make more money and buy better land.Traditionalist (white, Christian) Western family values ... bedrock of superior civilization. Limited government... welfare state & services create dependencies that rob people of agency. People need churches and families, not state help... It builds values. Poverty and social dysfunction are the result of individual and cultural problems, not society. It's not our problem. A deeper understanding of this worldview must grapple with the fact that, as we are all motivated both consciously and unconsciously, so too is the conservative. But I would argue the conservative operates far more unconsciously than does the liberal, owing to the particular epistemological requirements of the conservative ideological structure. Liberal Epistemological Authority The liberal is not satisfied with traditionalist epistemological authority. That is, there is rarely a religious or secular dogma that the liberal points to as the “final word” on an argument. Instead, whether the question is one of morality or fact, the liberal reaches to more inquisitive and open-ended forms of analysis. What are other perspectives? What do other cultures say? What is the historical and sociological context? What does the data show? Let’s compare and contrast the different sides. Let’s engage with the art, music, poetry made on the subject and see if there is some intuitive meaning there to grasp. Empiricism. Logic. Skepticism. Humility. Relativism. These are all words in the liberal vocabulary, and which since at least the enlightenment have informally and formally been codified into the institutions and laws of liberal democracy. The university and institutions of journalism are the practical clinics of liberal philosophy – putting into practice its values and methods of gathering knowledge and deriving truths. However, one will note when examining the output of the conservative movement over the past century, the relative paucity of quality contributions made by conservatism to these projects. Apart from a few fields of study in the academy and avenues of journalistic inquiry (both having mostly to do with apologia for the conservative worldview itself) the offerings are scant. The main output conservatives seem to have been toiling at can best be described as propaganda; their aim has been the defense and propagation of their dogma, with very little regard for self-critique, analysis, or really much of what we would consider as testing before liberal modes of epistemological authority. Funnily enough, there is a word that is by all accounts a common pejorative, and yet describes much of the conservative project: “illiberal”. The standard definition is “restricting of rights or freedoms”. This would surely sound ugly enough to a conservative. After all, conservatives love to speak of “freedom”. However, their definition of freedom is defined as much by what it excludes as by what it includes. They often discuss “religious freedom”, by which they mean the right of a Christian to practice their faith to the exclusion of the rights of another, e.g. in being allowed to deny services to someone in a place of business, or to require others to listen to an authority give their sermons in a school or workplace. The costs of their own liberation always seems to be born out by someone else, some other lower status group. They speak of “freedom” in the context of not being required to pay taxes for things they don’t like, or to follow regulations, or to listen to phone menu options in languages other than English, or to have suffer the indignity that some employer somewhere might be giving extra attention to a prospective hire who is not a white, male heterosexual. All of these grievances begin with a chauvinist assumption about a hierarchy of traditional social roles. Sometimes they want things just as they are, but more often they want to return to some imagined past when “things were the way they were supposed to be”, to some pleasant time when everyone was mostly happy and nice and no one was trying to rock the boat, i.e. the power dynamics that enabled people like them to enjoy privileged status were not being challenged. Now, many conservatives will balk at the suggestion that their worldview has an illiberal – selfish even – motivation. Certainly the moderate conservatives will. They will point out that “they don’t see color”, that they believe in women working alongside men. However, here I raise two previous points: that of traditionalist epistemological authority and unconscious motivation. Traditionalist Epistemological Authority If one has not spent the time unpacking one’s own prior assumptions about why they believe what they believe, if they have merely accepted standard dogma about what is true – absorbed maybe through one’s family upbringing or social circles, without testing their ideas against an authority higher than the thought terminating clichés of “it’s always been that way” or “just because” or “it’s just natural”, etc., then one will not have the proper intellectual tools to deal with the complexities of modern life. When one learns of facts about patterns of injustices, or different perspectives about living in different parts of the country or the world, or having different beliefs or values, how would one go about processing this new information? How to compare and contrast, how to categorize, how to dispassionately observe, objectively analyze and possibly accept and even change one’s mind? Because at every step, if one’s guiding principle when dealing with new information contrary to prior assumptions is: my view is correct because it has always been that way/it is a natural law/because it just is, then the new information must be wrong by default. What is the point of debate? Now, certainly conservatives debate. In fact they love to debate. Charlie Kirk, founder of the enormous conservative political action organization Turning Point USA, was famous for showing up on college campuses and challenging students to debate. But what was really going on there? Charlie Kirk was engaging in a form of illiberal debate. That is, he had his mind made up, and had no interest in learning anything new about the world. In fact, he probably had no real interest in teaching others about his own views – precisely because he had no real interest in his own views. If one’s traditionalist epistemology does not allow an expansive and honest examination, with the possibility of serious deconstruction, how well can one ever know what ones own beliefs truly are? Rather, Kirk’s goal was to persuade with an intent to win over and gain power for his movement. Kirk wanted his side to grow. He wanted to enlarge his status and his command over others. He wanted more privileges and political opportunities for himself and his fellow travelers. To this end, it didn’t even really matter how accurate he was with the facts. It didn’t matter how honest he was, or respectful – unless it was useful to his political ends. He would be cordial in person, but then would make vile racist remarks later on in interviews. But he was a far right MAGA extremist, a moderate conservative reading this might think. “I, however, honestly believe in what I say. I am not a racist. I am not a sexist.” Well, they are going to love this: yes, you are. Go ahead and take a deep breath, because I realize this accusation is an old and frustrating one for conservatives. They’ve heard it from the left for years. In fact they’ve built up quite a repertoire of catchy come-backs. “Oh there you go again, playing the race card.” “Why is it always about race with you?” etc. Let me explain, and in so doing I think I can elaborate on how it is I believe the conservative worldview creates cognitive dissonance in its holder, and how this leads to mechanisms of unconscious bias and faulty thinking. Unconscious Motivation As I mentioned previously, unexamined assumptions leaves one vulnerable to ignorance. When it comes to issues of inequality, central to the left critique of conservatism and its core philosophy of system maintenance, conservatism is unable to properly evaluate evidence of inequality in all its forms: race, gender, sex, religious, class, etc.; its thesis basically precludes it (by some miracle, the US constitution has eradicated systemic inequality from the country and where it exists only culture or the individual is to blame). This is why the only real scholarship or journalism on inequality for the past century essentially seeks to defend its core proposition. There’s hardly even any corollary inquiry into basic sociological data or fact finding, not even apolitical or subjective analysis – just simple record keeping of the facts as they are that don’t specifically try and liberate somehow the conservative project from its perpetuation of hierarchical systems. (As far as I know of, I should note. There may be some conservative toiling away in a black studies department doing quantitative research on the prevalence of arsenic levels in southern counties with high black populations. But I could be wrong.) So, from a place of ignorance, one has two options: learn or continue to ignore. To remain a conservative is to remain ignorant. And so one must now accept the bargain. To maintain the comfortable traditionalist garb, with its easy answers and justified privileges, its lazy and unearned social status, one must take up arms against the cognitive dissonance that reality now hammers down daily. Fortunately, the human mind is designed with many mechanisms for this. There is a Wikipedia page with a long list of cognitive biases that serve as a sort of protective cocoon from which one might work. As the facts land their blows, one might consult another Wikipedia page with a great many logical fallacies one might employ to put their opponent off guard. The nice thing is this type of battle can be done completely unconsciously. The conservative can think they are operating entirely in good faith, with perfect objective honesty, and yet to an outside observer appear to almost live in a fantasy world and speak in circles. To those of us on the left, I think this explains well the perspective we have after reading even the most moderate conservative writer. Why do they keep writing about the same thing? Have they ever left the country? Why does it seem that something has to happen to them for them to ever understand anything? Conservatism is not just a different opinion, or even a different value system. Is it a fundamentally constipated worldview. It is incapable of processing the modern world, and more seriously – our form of liberal democratic government, with its guaranteed pluralism, rule of law, respect for human rights and true guarantee of liberty for all. Current events have not shown a break with conservatism, but an apotheosis of it, and one we would be wise to shame from society for good. Categories All
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