A word from Officer K: An open letter to a conservative friend
Happy Friday, everyone! Today, our own Officer K has graciously allowed me to post this essay he wrote for his Medium account. You can find it here. It is, quite simply, a barn-burner. I'm always amazed by the wisdom members of this community exhibit. This is no different.
***
Dear H.:
In the twenty-something years I have known you, you have identified as one variety of conservative or another. This I have never held against you, because it is not the label someone applies to themselves but how they embody it that matters to me. That said, what we call ourselves often matters to those who consciously attune themselves to labels as a form of signal.
What I wonder now is how anyone of conscience or morals can use this label, “conservative”, without knowing what it has come to represent. Unless, of course, they know well what it represents, and are proud to identify with it, conscious of all that has happened directly under its banner. If so, I weep for them, for they are in love with something that will never love them back, and that has gone out of its way to prove it is the enemy of human life.
I held off on writing those words for the longest time because I could not find a way to make them sound like hyperbole or hysteria. Now all I have to do is point around us. I know you are as appalled by recent events as I am; of that I have no doubt. But I must ask, why do you still cling to the label, “conservative”? Or for that matter its ugly cousin “libertarian” (read: a conservative with a stash of ketamine)? What does it offer you? And more importantly, what has it taken from you in exchange for whatever it offers you?
In about the same span of time as I’ve known you, and somewhat longer than that, the term “conservative” and all attached to it has degraded to the point of leprosy. As I write this, it now stands as identification with a political party that has at best been grossly negligent (we will not speak of worst here) in the deaths of at least 800,000 Americans — not Iraqis, not Afghanis, but their own countrymen, in the span of around three years, many of them who would also identify as “conservative”. The term stands as identification with a political party that has either refused to repudiate, or winked at, reactionary political violence of a kind that proudly wears the swastika and burns crosses. It does not stand for “the party of Lincoln” or even the “pro-business party” or anything else so affirmative. It stands for a grotesque unseriousness about the matters of governance. It stands for death, mine and yours alike.
What I wonder is this. What if this is not an aberration, not a miscalculation on the part of one major political party in this country, not even an opportunistic chasing of power on its part as of late, but the inevitable results of every single step it has been taken, with all deliberation and all heed, for decades now? And if it is, are you prepared to live with that? I know I am, for I have no choice.
***
When Trump first gained what at the time seemed an inexplicable level of attention amongst Republican voters in 2015–2016, I felt unease of a kind I hadn’t felt in my lifetime. If the party had played chicken with demagoguery before, they were now throwing themselves entirely under its wheels.
Trump was himself not the real problem. He was only the most recent and gross manifestation of the problem. Trump-ism, as we have come to call it, was the problem. Everything under the conservative label devolved and became Trumpism in terrifyingly short order, because it was easier to seek and consolidate the power of crass charisma under this boorish incompetent wastrel than to actually govern with sagacity and judiciousness, since that has always been difficult, thankless work.
Or — more simply — everything under the conservative label had always been like this, just legitimized and made to seem not so terrible, because the people who vanguarded it were very good at diabolizing anyone who had the nerve to say the emperor had not even a fig leaf to clutch to itself. And then the newly coronated naked emperor ran out in public and flashed everyone, and a world poisoned by decades of bothsiderism could summon no headline to counter this stronger than “Views Differ On Clothing-Optional Power”.
Before the election, a number of conservatives self-organized under the label “Never Trumpers” spoke out against him. I did not believe then that this klatsch would have the slightest effect on public opinion, because the number of people who read The National Review and had their voting choices influenced by its editorials number somewhere in the dozen or so. Compared to the millions who laid eyes on Trump and saw a revanchist idol, the incarnation of all their inchoate dreams of spitting in the face of everything they hated, the Never Trumpers were beyond impotent.
Once the election ended and Trump took power, many Never Trumpers performed the most craven realignment of opinion I have ever seen in public life. The few who remained to denounce Trump had to wait until people began dying by the hundreds of thousands to not seem like lone voices in the wilderness. And even they still seem uneasy with, or hostile to, the idea that maybe the ideology they had been pursuing for decades had in fact been the problem. (Ideological extremes have this in common: the ideology is never at fault, only the implementation — that is, the implementers.)
I found the phenomenon of this pivot fascinating, because I believe it told me far more about the current conservative mindset, even at its most allegedly cultivated, than any statement they could have published. It told me that when they resisted Trump, it was mainly because they held out hope for some milder, less virulent version of him to be eventually placed into power — someone who would simply have the good sense not to say the ugly parts out loud, but to continue to nod and wink and not give away too much of the game to the rubes. The better to ally themselves with whoever might succeed him. When this failed, they decided it was better to ally themselves with the one who ended up with the power anyway, so as not to miss out. And when the conservative factions of Senate and Congress circled wagons time and again to protect the President from being removed from power over things that would have removed any other president a dozen times over, I knew I was dealing with cowardice as a primary political principle.
But I was not surprised, really. I was angry and shocked, but not surprised, because it fell perfectly in line with the way the GOP had embraced such things for decades at the expense of every other quality they brought to the table. I was shocked, but not surprised, when I saw Newt Gingrich tweeting approvingly on December 7th of a past year about the awe-inspiring show of military force Japan, not America, manifested on that day in history. As with so many other things, it spoke volumes for those willing to listen. What has come to matter most to them is the mere demonstration of power, and the willingness to align oneself with the highest embodiment of it in whatever form it comes, even if it comes from one’s supposed enemies. In such a worldview, America does not matter because of its professed ideals or its groping towards betterment; it only matters as a manifestation of the will to power for those ruling it.
This is no caricature, not in the slightest, of what conservative principles have degraded into. It is about the getting and keeping of power at all costs, at the expense of actual governance. It is about projection of one’s own deficiencies onto others, the better to control the discourse about what such deficiencies are and how they are to be handled. It is about turning public life into an asymmetrical cultural war, where the slightest faults of others are death sentences but one’s own terminal deficiencies are forgivable transgressions. (Forgiveness is a privilege granted, not a commodity transacted.) It is about hypocrisy as a signaling mechanism, a way to filter away the rubes who actually think the rules apply to everyone. It is about creating all of this as a hermetic bubble in which to seal one’s self and as many other suckers as one can bring along, the better to milk them for all they can give. And none of this is new, either; it is simply now that the mask can no longer be kept on, because one of their own, one they decided to invest with the mantle of cult leader, tore the mask off himself.
I defy anyone with a remaining germ of honesty in them to make a case that anything that happened in, say, the eight years of Obama bears the slightest resemblance to the four of Trump. The two major political factions in this country are simply not symmetrical in their peccadilloes, let alone their derangements, and the one most responsible for this asymmetry has refined to an art form the practice of normalizing and internalizing this asymmetry, of making us feel ashamed of trying to see that one of the two major political parties in this country is simply not sane anymore.
An example. Perhaps now you will begin to make noises about “political correctness” or “cancel culture”, and attempt to evoke in me a righteous horror of how those on the left have no tolerance for dissenting views, etc. When people speak of “political correctness”, they are more often than not referring to the idea — hard to fathom by some, I must imagine — that some people prefer not to be called ugly names that are specifically designed to denigrate and degrade them (especially when those words are rooted specifically in the subjugation of those people as chattel), or that some people want to have their choice of gender presentation respected, or any number of other things that if they came from conservatives would be rationalized as “manners” or “respect”. The idea that one’s biological sex and one’s gender presentation do not necessarily correspond is a concept that has been present in societies for millennia, but only now is being dragged out as evidence of modern decadence. And yet somehow respect for others who ask not to have their murders rationalized as “trans panic” or what have you is considered too much. Evidently only “manners” and “respect” are real when certain people ask for them; the rest of the time, they are shrill and unreasonable demands made by people who need to stop whining about how tough life is.
Sensible people no longer find ugly jokes about gay people or blacks or women funny, because in the last few decades the subjects of those jokes have stopped becoming mere ciphers in the minds of the public, that is if they even existed at all. They have, chiefly through their own unrelenting efforts, achieved some recognition as actual human beings. Perhaps one shouldn’t be surprised that if you try to dehumanize them you will now get slapped down in return, and not merely by them but even by some of your own peers. And what of the mockery of Nazis by the left? Is that somehow unfair? Given that not being an actual Nazi replete with swastikas or Confederate or Boer flags is an impossibly low bar to clear, what can I say?
And when people speak of “cancel culture” they are, again, not referring to something new. They are only using a neologism designed to evoke horror in the uninstructed, to make it seem as if they are describing some awful new phenomenon custom-built by liberals to ruin everything. Perhaps we should just use the original term for this time-honored practice, ostracism, again something society has practiced since time immemorial for people who do things it finds distasteful. Only now it is being used to disempower people who have habitually abused the default power granted to them by dint of their biological sex or their skin color or the fact that they were lucky enough to be born wealthy and without much need to feel a responsibility to the world that allows them to spend their money on something in the first place.
I must note here, I do agree that not all canceling is productive. I must also note that many of my own peers feel this way as well, and that this is emblematic of how many on the left question their own motives, as they ought. There is the growing sentiment on the left that the cheap power provided by indiscriminate canceling is not worth it. But you will forgive me if I have little patience for people who demand absolute judiciousness for public figures who leverage their power (and asymmetry of same) for gross personal gain, then turn around and screech about how those who expose the hypocrisy and double-dealings of such folks must somehow now be held to an impossible standard of neutrality that does not exist anyway.
Perhaps now you will trot out some mention of leftist violence, whether it be in the alleged name of Black Lives Matter or antifa or anticapitalist protesters smashing store windows when G7/8/20 summits are held. I am not alone when I say these things win no one over, and anyone with a responsible attitude towards social change knows this. But of this I should first note the way actual violence and mere protest are bundled together by the incurious, the better to make them all seem impossible to tell apart by anyone else. What I find most worthy of note, though, is again, the asymmetry, specifically the asymmetry of categorization: the way a state’s capitol, or the capitol itself, can be invaded by white men with weapons and be legitimized with the risible term “militias” instead of the proper term terrorists, while protesters calling attention to acts of unpunished asymmetrical state violence are routinely mislabeled as “rioters” and “looters” (and need do nothing more to earn the label than to be in the same city when rioting and looting takes place, no matter who actually does it). And this is not even something conservatives have to do themselves, as they have spent decades poisoning the well of discourse around such things, so much so that mainstream media outlets have internalized this asymmetry, the better to avoid the righteous indignation of daring to equate real patriots with those brick-throwing scum. They are very good at getting other people to do their demonizing and gaslighting for them, especially the people who ought to be most in the business of exposing and neutralizing it.
***
Where there are consistent threads in the conservative mindset, all of them have been exposed nakedly by the events of the last few years, and most acutely by the last year of the Trump administration alone.
The first thread is resentment towards any authority save their own, towards the idea that there is any authority to be had but their own. I suspect this is rooted in the belief that all authority is ultimately illegitimate unless it is simply the expression of force by the self. For if all authority found in laws and norms only exists in the form of a clenched fist and not a shared ideal, then one’s own authority can scarcely be held legitimately either. It can only be held in defiance of others, not in cooperation with them. Hence the sense that the only real authority resides in the threat of violence — and not the violence reserved by the state as a last resort for its collective protection, but violence one can inflict on others for daring to suggest there is any other sovereignty but the self that is protected by violence.
By “authority” I mean chiefly political authority, as evinced by the reflexive resentment towards the idea that a society requires collective efforts, and that some of those efforts end up being compulsory (read: taxes) because the sheer scale and heterogony of modern life makes it impossible to get anything useful done otherwise. Even the biggest of public or private companies cannot work at even a fraction of the scale needed to take up the slack of governments — and if they did, it would come at the cost of investing them with power that does not have even the pretense of being in the public good. To decry taxation as “coercion” is to ignore that it may be the least worst form of coercion needed to provide society with the minimum level of functioning required to avoid famine, or drowning in one’s own waste products, or averting an extinction-level meteor strike.
I know far too many conservatives who are proud of the fact that they would give all they had for their immediate relations, but raise the greatest of stinks when it comes to the upkeep of the society, or even the neighborhood, that makes such things possible in the first place at all. What they are really saying is: don’t take any of my money. Their resentment of taxes in principle does not seem to extend to, say, the way the poor are de facto taxed by way of things like service fees that are ratcheted up every year. Or when it does manifest, it never does so in the form of political action against such things for all. Or it manifests in the form of boondoggles like “flat tax” schemes that appeal chiefly to the innumerate. (If both I and Jeff Bezos are taxed 1%, for him it’s a sneeze; for me it might well mean making rent. People unable to grasp this distinction seem less innumerate than willfully ignorant.)
But by “authority” I also mean intellectual authority, the startling concept that there might in fact be other people in the world who know more than you do about a given subject because they have spent a lifetime studying it with a community of other like-minded folks, and that such people might even be able to give you constructive advice on what to do if you are willing to clean the wax of self-importance out of your ears long enough to hear them. In the time I have been alive, I have seen the conservative faction in this country go from a respect for science (if not automatic deference, as is suitable) to such outright, seething hostility that it beggars the imagination. The consequences were at first little more than irritants; now, they are a menace to both public health and order on a scale that even authors of the pulpiest of pulp thrillers would have found it laughably outlandish.
When someone who has spent a lifetime of studying a subject tells you that it is not a good idea to do something, or that there might be harm in it worth examining more closely, and someone’s first response is a swell of resentment that someone has the temerity to tell them what to do, that tells me the problem is far more deeply rooted than a simple “mistrust of science”. It is a by-product of the progression of the rest of the philosophy towards its bitterest end, where the only authority is the self that is defended by violence and reduces all other things to the least common denominator of transactional commerce. It is a pathology that insists it cannot fail, but can only be failed.
And please, do not counter this with mealy-mouthings of how the left has its own problems. No one disputes this. But its issues simply do not manifest as existential threats of this magnitude, and never have. Nothing in that vein ever came close to engendering a public health crisis that has so far killed more of our people than most of our recent wars combined. Believe this and you fall victim to the myth of symmetrical malignance, the sort of thing that ends in a panoply of formulations but always begins with those imbecile words “both sides”.
***
The second thread is hypocrisy, something many of us are willing to single out but which few of us seem to recognize the real significance of. I once believed that a hypocrite could be shamed out of their hypocrisy by simple exposure. Now I realize that above a certain social stratum, hypocrites become immune to shame; you can’t shame the shameless. If anything, the shameless thrive on the attention; it is a sign the hypocrite is doing an excellent job of placing themselves above quotidian morality and getting outrage from “the right people”.
You may remember the line that most Americans do not think of themselves as poor, but as temporarily frustrated millionaires. The hypocrite’s behavior is a beacon to such a mindset: Be like me and you can have it all. You just have to ignore everyone who tells you you’re a monster for having it that way. And if you’re surrounded by other such so-called monsters who will forgive you and protect you and give you sanction, it isn’t so bad. It is a strategy to hijack the discourse around morality, to make it into a game where you tell other people what to do but don’t have the same responsibility in return, because power shared is (so they think) power lost.
The degree of spiritual death required to embrace this philosophy remains beyond me. But the opposite of hypocrisy is not disarming honesty of the “fuck your feelings” variety; it is reflexive skepticism, something that we are not largely encouraged to cultivate in this society. In conservative circles, skepticism of one’s self is seen as a sign of personal weakness and therefore a weakness that endangers the movement, and so is actively discouraged anyway. On the left, this tendency also exists, but by and large it is counterbalanced, to excess, by soul-searching of the kind that often paralyzes the well-meaning into inaction. And the ones on the right who witness this are only too happy to feed it, the better to enhance the asymmetry in their favor.
***
The third thread is the adoration of power as an absolute. Of this I have already said a fair amount, and so rather than repeat previous points I will bring up new ones.
Power takes many forms, but the two that are most immediately relevant are political power and money. We speak of checks and balances on power, and I find it striking how the conservative view is to be as strident as possible about checking governmental power while at the same time barely uttering the most timorous murmur about checking the power of money. Perhaps, again, it is because they find all authority except their own to be intolerable, and that they ultimately put more trust in the power of buying things than they do in the power of people working together. Perhaps that is also why they are steadfastly uninterested in how, beyond a certain point, wealth becomes toxic to everything that is not wealth. (People who talk about “market efficiency” are quick to forget that markets optimize chiefly for themselves and not much of anything else, including human beings.)
But most everyone shares some blame for the adoration of money as power; too many of us readily believe in the myth that the presence of wealth is the sign of success. I am not against the idea of someone enjoying the fruits of well-earned success, but at what point do those things become blights on all those around them? When I am told someone has twenty cars and an estate big enough to hold a racetrack for all of them, I feel not even envy but dismay, pity even: a man can only drive one car at a time, eat one meal at a time, sleep in one house at a time, as Roger Ebert once said. More than that and he is trying to compensate for something he will most likely never have.
And if you are annoyed that I make wealth into a moral issue, I only do so as a bulwark against those who make claims for wealth as evidence of virtue in the first place. Cunning, perhaps, and maybe savvy in business, but hardly virtue. And, again, hypocrisy enters the picture: perhaps all those pearls about wealth as virtue are just the things we throw to the pigs, when we who actually have the money know better. Virtue is for the little people, you see.
I am not asking that Bezos and the like be gibbeted up in public, even if in some of my darker moods I think it would solve a great many things at once. (To pretend no one thinks darkly at some point in their lives is to be willfully ignorant of human psychology.) What I do ask is that we laugh out of existence the mindless, reflexive deference people show to wealth— even by, and maybe especially by, other wealthy people, since the only thing a millionaire is jealous of is a billionaire. I suspect this deference is simply displaced envy, the whole temporarily-embarrassed-rich-people phenomenon I talked about before. If someone harbors chronic jealousy in their soul, no amount of wealth dispels it.
I have seen you exemplify, many times, how the value of commerce as the apex of social ideals leads you to do and say things that are far too silly for someone of your evident intelligence, and so which I am left to interpret as a kind of canned conservative virtue signaling and not actual insight. At one point you shared with me an article about a couple of black kids who set up a lemonade stand and were promptly harassed by the cops in their own for trying to run a business without a license. You cited this as a classic example of the state interfering with the freedom of the individual to conduct commerce. Nowhere, it seems, did it occur to you how the problem was that a couple of black kids were given abhorrently disproportionate grief for doing something that any number of white kids in the same town could do without even so much as getting a second glance from anyone, least of all the cops. And when others pointed out how this was the far more likely interpretation in a society where police routinely murder black people on the flimsiest of pretexts and face no real consequences for doing so (least of all police reform that would prevent such things from happening with tiresome, numbing regularity), you responded by getting annoyed at how your one-size-fits-all interpretation of this event had a hole punched in its side. You, like far too many other people, resent the idea that race is indeed an issue in this world, but your approach to combating it is to hope earnestly it will just go away if only we (especially we who have the misfortune of dark skin or another country on our birth certificates) would stop talking about it so much. You also seem to believe — and this is my point here — that markets exist on some idealized plane above the real-world prejudices of their creators, when in fact they just embody and amplify those prejudices with terrifying efficiency. This is something anyone with actual firsthand experience with racism can testify to, and be promptly ignored for by everyone who is lucky enough not to be born wrong, because if it didn’t happen to them it didn’t happen, period.
One good way to combat the unthinking deference to the value of the rich is to build a society where people at the very least do not unnecessarily starve, something that has been abundantly within our reach since the end of WWII and perhaps even before that, but which we only refrain from doing so because of the conservative morality play model of society that sees any attempts to do something about unneeded suffering as coddling, or a source of fraud, or any other number of chimeras that do not withstand scrutiny but are nevertheless easy to propagandize against. If people were less fearful of falling through the cracks in our world, I suspect they would feel a lot less thoughtless respect for the wealthy — or, at the very least, be able to tell the difference between those who had earned their lot honestly, those who lucked into it, those who inherited it wholesale, and those who straight-up stole it. The wealthy are only too happy to obscure the differences between these things, the better to have us climb atop each other in a battle royale to see who can emulate them the most foolishly. Perhaps that is why they resent the idea of skepticism about the power or importance of wealth, since it exposes their moral vacuity. This was something the Christian ideal was meant to awaken in people, the idea that it is not material wealth but spiritual evolution that defines the best in us — at least before a sizable slice of it was hijacked by the conservative movement and mutilated into the ghoulishness of the prosperity gospel.
I have spoken throughout this essay of the asymmetry of the conservative ideal, and I am certain that is key to how it derives its strength in a society where the unspoken assumption is that we share a level playing field when some in fact go out of our way to make sure we do not, and also make sure that any attempts to call this out on its face are attacked as “anti-conservative bias” and thus made impossible to discuss plainly. The conservative movement is quick to insist on checks on governmental power (unless they themselves embody it), but again, is weirdly lax about checks on the power that capital provides. And, again, this makes sense if you believe all public cooperative power is somehow fundamentally illegitimate, and that the only legitimate power is in what money can buy. This works up to the point where money ceases to be able to purchase things like breathable air, but I imagine that is why some of the richest of us are eyeing Mars as a nice place to visit and maybe to stay. They do not act as if this world, and by extension the uncountable majority of us, are worth saving anyway; their corner of it is what matters, even if there is no real way to save that apart from the whole. They believe they can, in fact, take it with them. Too bad for the rest of us.
***
The fourth strand I see is revanchism, or ressentiment. In this I see the fullest incarnation of what drove so many people to vote for Trump, even when it went directly against their best interests to do so. (It seems we have learned nothing as a society from Dostoevsky: that people sometimes do not do what is in their best interest, but often the absolute opposite, if only to prove they are in fact men and not cogs, and damn the consequences.) What drove them was not the need to improve the lives of all, or even just to improve their own lot, but to make the lives of some allegedly undeserving others worse. The cheap emotional satisfaction of revenge tasted better to them than anything else on the table, even when it ended up giving them stomach cancer.
People around me expressed amazement that some of Trump’s staunchest supporters were upper-middle-class whites. I wasn’t surprised by this at all. They were the ones who felt they had the most to lose, whether or not it was remotely true. For decades they had been propagandized into believing that the only thing that stood between them and hordes of welfare cheats and lazy blacks out to loot their pockets was the GOP. Proletarianism is a mindset, not a formal social stratum. The wealthiest man in the world can feel like an aggrieved pauper if his wealth gives him no real joy, and our world optimizes routinely for wealth over joy, so maybe it’s no surprise we keep turning out so many such people. If such people were disappointed in Trump, it was because many of them found out too late how they were collateral damage in the hippy-punching that ensued, although some of them were not even all that upset about getting put to the torch in the name of owning the libs.
One quality I see amongst all people of conscience is the need to be aware of one’s own propensity for revenge, and to trade that instead for a devotion to justice and compassion. It is a process, and it is not an easy one to perpetuate. If my neighbor puts out a Trump sign, he is telegraphing his adherence to a political movement that might well spell death for both of us. What I want for him most is not to drop dead, but to be made aware of his complicity with evil, and perhaps to stop giving it power, because it destroys his life too. If he waves a pistol in my face, though, all bets are off. I spend as little time as I can thinking about getting even, but nowhere am I commanded to turn the other cheek to people who consistently choose giving power to someone who cannot even be bothered to not get us stupidly killed.
***
I could go on about all this. But the more I write, the more I feel the problems I have outlined are only going to be self-evident to those whose moral wells have not already been poisoned by decades of bad faith arguments. If you can’t recognize that the conservative/reactionary mindset in this country is a unilateral blight on its upkeep, that it exists now as nothing more than a veneer of respectability for terrible things, that it has not only just now degenerated to winking at Nazis but has always enjoyed that privilege, then you are part of the problem, and all I can do is ask as Oliver Cromwell once did: I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken…
In my own life I have largely said nothing about this to others who identified as conservative, because I valued their friendships more than I did their ideologies, and I imagined they would return the favor. I figured in time reality would rub their noses in things. I was not at the time equipped with enough experience to understand how easy it is to ignore even what one’s nose is being rubbed in, particularly if the pay is good enough.
I know that there are many social intoxicants in this world. Money is one. Another is peer pressure. A third is validation, and there is little that feels more validating than having one of your own take the commanding heights of power. That was what Trump gave his base when he took office. Despite the fact that he had undisguised contempt for the people who voted for him, he gave them the feeling that the shoe was on the other foot, and it was going to kick hard against all those moochers and liberals. Then that foot came down on them, not just once but many times, and by that point they had thrown their lot too far in with a philosophy of cruelty to back out.
I was close to a number of such people. They did not wish me harm, at least not to my face. And that to me was the ultimate problem: being in the same room with them was no defense against their animosity. They would have given me the shirt off their backs, but they were not in favor of supporting a society that would protect me as well as them — because the only society they believed to be truly legitimate was the one within arm’s reach. Everything else did not really count.
I suspected many of them were not even conscious of this. It was simply impossible for them to recognize it even when I tried to wave it under their noses. Or, when they did recognize it, they elected (pun intended) time and again to do nothing about it.
When I was growing up, I was conscious of how my country was imperfect, but I did not feel there was any shame in admitting to our faults, so long as that led to corrective action, to continued improvement across the board. I was not, and still am not, of the Noam Chomsky mindset that found the United States to be an existential blight upon the world, and among those left of the center in this country such people are a noisy and largely powerless minority, Bernie Sanders notwithstanding. One can be ashamed of one’s country’s past without automatically being its enemy.
But soon even the hardly insurrectionist notion that America was imperfect, but perfectible (provided we faced ourselves and our defects without hypocrisy) became unstomachable by the right. In time they backed themselves into the untenable position that the country was and always had been just awesome, just dandy, which served the convenient double purpose of making impossible any discussion about actual wrongs and allowing the power to label what was actually wrong to pass into their hands.
I imagine you have read all this and thought to yourself, perhaps with flashes of anger: I’m not like that! Well, no, none of us like to think we are. But I have been writing these words on and off for hours now, and here and there in them I recognize strands of behavior within myself that I know correspond perfectly to these behaviors. I know that I am not selfless, that I am more than capable of thinking first about myself and my own and my world dead last. And I do all I can to not let those things cloud my vision. I’ve seen them manifest consistently enough in me to know eternal self-vigilance is the price of compassion, and that a compassionate society is not possible if the only compassion that is possible is horizontal compassion with one’s peers. It is valuable to enjoy and exhibit such compassion, but by itself it is not enough.
What I cannot believe any longer, and I think now I never will, is the idea that anyone who self-applies the label “conservative” is unconscious of what it means and what it has become. It requires a pathological degree of self- and other-ignorance to do so. Trumpism is conservatism now, and from what I see it always has been, just in a not-so-noisy form. It requires people to say yes to a worldview that is not just deadly in theory but has been proven absolutely so in practice to many of its own adherents, and to plenty of others as well — and is very good at convincing people the real murderers are over there somewhere. Trump and the ideal that claimed him, only to be claimed by him in turn, are now one. They cannot be disentangled, the way one might pull apart two enmeshed combs.
If there is anything to be reclaimed from the conservative ideal, it is not anything that exclusively deserves the name anyway. All that has been claimed under its name has been done so in the name of asymmetrical cultural warfare. If we talk of “family values” while evincing contempt for actual families, or “fiscal responsibility” when a Democratic president enters office only to hastily drop all talk of such things the minute they leave, or to be “pro-life” while literally allowing its own constituents to drop dead in their homes because of the administration’s own hopeless incompetence or indifference or malice, or to be “pro-business” when what they really meant is pro-their-particular-business — whenever one of these terms is trotted out as some exemplar of the “conservative ideal”, I cannot help but laugh. None of them needed the conservative ideal to survive, let alone thrive; if anything, they have been poisoned by it, crowding out all decent competition for how they can be embodied. And of the conservation of things that cannot be replaced, like breathable air or a biosphere suitable for human life — all things one would think someone calling themselves “conservative” would be inclined to support — there is either silence or sneering contrarianism.
If the term “conservative” is not entirely vacuous, perhaps all it means is the natural prudence and skepticism required to examine any proposed changes to the social order. Things cannot change too quickly, that much we can all agree on, and we need to rely on expert insight to act accordingly. But if history has shown anything, it is that any modern social order, by dint of its own scale and concomitant inertia, embodies a conservative outlook by default. Inertia hardly needs the kind of defense bruited for it in the conservative ideal, save for those who think having to share their world a little more fairly equates inevitably to losing everything.
But no amount of rhetoric may matter here. And maybe no number of facts, either, even if those facts are the direct product of the philosophy in question: hundreds of thousands dead and climbing, a country’s institutions and reputation in tatters, economic disaster, and the response by the standard-bearers of the philosophy in question is to get all hot and bothered that people have the temerity to point any of this out because they believe it threatens their suzerainty. If all this is not enough to demonstrate to a thinking mind that the conservative ideal has become a death wish from which nothing can be salvaged, then what more can be said?
It hardly surprises me that one description of conservatism I have heard, from one in its own ranks, is “a man standing athwart history yelling, ‘Stop’.” To which I say: get down from there, you idiot, before you get yourself killed. Or, for that matter, get us all killed.
Yours in friendship,
K