The Crumbling Pillars of American Conservatism and What Remains of them

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Thu Sep-13-07 04:50 PM
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The Crumbling Pillars of American Conservatism and What Remains of them

The rapidly declining status of conservatism in the United States has been demonstrated in the past year by the continually falling approval ratings of George W. Bush, the turnover of both houses of Congress to the Democrats last November, and the large and widening disparity (See graph on page 2) in Americans calling themselves Democrats compared to Republicans, from 43% - 43% in 2002 to 50% - 35% in 2007. Bush’s declining poll numbers have been especially striking. Glen Greenwald in his new book, “A Tragic Legacy”, points out that, according to Washington Post – ABC News polls, Bush’s end of year approval ratings have declined from 2001 to 2006 from 86% to 66% to 59% to 48% to 39% to 32%.

Some have insinuated that the current record low approval ratings of our Democratic controlled Congress, currently standing at around 20%, demonstrates some mitigation of that trend. However, the evidence does not support that at all. If the current low Congressional approval ratings had anything to do with an upward trend in conservative support, there would be some other evidence for it, and the decline in Congressional approval since the 2006 election would be limited to Democrats in Congress. Instead, both parties in Congress have suffered declines in approval since the 2006 election, and although the decline has been greater for Democrats, Democrats still lead Republicans by a substantial amount.

Rather, the decline in Congressional approval appears to be mainly fueled by disappointment that the Democratic majority has turned out to be substantially more conservative than was anticipated when the American people gave them their mandate on Election Day 2006, especially with regard to their failure to take significant steps towards ending the Iraq War and towards reigning in the president.

Let’s consider the reasons behind the declining support for American conservatism, starting with a consideration of what American conservatism is:

The pillars of American conservatism

About three months ago I posted an article on DU titled “The Five Pillars of George W. Bush’s Republican Party”, which discussed the following five overlapping groups of people who provide the major support for today’s Republican Party:

1) The “economic royalists” – Those who believe that it is the main purpose of government to protect their God given right to have more wealth than the vast majority of other people.
2) The militarists
3) The propagandists and destroyers of our First Amendment rights
4) The crooks
5) The gullible – Those who are convinced by the others that the Republican Party benefits them.

That post could just as well have been titled “The Five Pillars of the American Conservative Movement”, since almost all Republicans are conservatives. And given the extent to which our newly elected Democratic Congress’s apparent rightward movement has disappointed so many of us, I think that it now makes more sense to think in terms of conservatism in general as our major national problem, rather than just the Republican Party. So let’s take a look at the pillars of American conservatism, this time in terms of its policies rather than the groups of people who constitute it:

There are three major related categories of policy objectives of today’s American conservatives: 1) Economic policies that enable the wealthy to become wealthier, at the expense of everyone else; and 2) Militarism/imperialism; and 3) Interference in the personal lives of people, purportedly motivated by their “Christian” values.

Conservative economic policies are mainly defended by the “economic royalists”. But since their numbers are quite small, they need a great deal of help from gullible Americans of average income whom they can convince to support their policies by making them believe that it is to their economic advantage to do so or that it is the right thing to do.

Militarism and imperialism are supported by war profiteer crooks and by ordinary war profiteers who simply make millions or billions of dollars out of war through legal means. Again, the numbers of these people are quite small, so they need a great deal of help from the gullible and those who can be persuaded by nationalism. Nationalism is, I believe, akin to racism. Those who are entranced by it call it “patriotism”, and they believe that being born an American makes them superior to other people, even though most of them do as little to earn their American citizenship as White Supremacists do to earn their whiteness. Furthermore, most of these nationalists have considerably less respect for the documents that provide the foundation for what is great about our country (i.e. our Constitution and Declaration of Independence) than do other Americans.

I believe that the “Christian” face of the American conservative movement is more or less merely a ploy. That movement is for the most part morally bankrupt, so its Christian façade is a good ploy to convince many millions of Americans that far from being morally bankrupt they are instead morally superior.

The potential fragility of the American conservative movement and how they keep the damn thing together

The reasons for the potential fragility of the American conservative movement should be obvious upon giving it a little bit of thought. Their economic policies benefit only a small minority of Americans, at the expense of everyone else; and the same thing can be said about their imperialistic/militaristic policies.

Thus, they must use a lot of smoke and mirrors to keep it all together. As I noted above, to sell their economic policies they convince many Americans that they will benefit them. To sell their wars, they appeal to fear or to nationalistic sentiment – which they call “patriotism”.

To do their selling they turn to pillar # 3 – The propagandists and destroyers of our First Amendment rights. This can’t be emphasized too much:

The virtual monopoly by supporters of the Republican Party on the ownership of major news sources in our country does much to stem the free flow of information. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, our corporate news media failed to explain to the American people that the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq was based on little or no evidence; even now they refuse to inform us in any detail of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths resulting from our invasion and occupation of their country; during both the 2000 and 2004 elections they failed to follow-up on clear evidence that George Bush had failed to fulfill his National Guard commitments; and they failed to explain to the American people that the proposed Bush tax cuts would benefit only our wealthiest citizens.

And to compound the problem, George Bush has denied our First Amendment rights through the use of so-called First Amendment zones to prevent protesters from being heard, by denying access to journalists who criticize him, by threatening to jail reporters who criticize his administration, and by paying shills (with taxpayer dollars) to write government propaganda disguised as news.

But destroying our First Amendment rights is often not enough. Election fraud has been of great value to them in recent years in rounding up the votes that they can’t get through other means. There is much evidence of vote switching fraud in national elections from 2002 to 2006; there is evidence of widespread election fraud in 2004; there is evidence of widespread election fraud in 2006; and the Bush administration fired their federal attorneys for either refusing to investigate non-existent election fraud by Democrats or for pursuing too aggressively cases of election fraud perpetrated by Republicans.

And then there is bribery of our election officials by the wealthy, such as cases uncovered in 2006 involving Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, and Bob Ney. But those cases are only the tip of the iceberg. Much more common is the legalized bribery built right into our political system, which gives the wealthy a highly disproportionate voice in all of our elections. It’s perfectly legal as long as the deal isn’t “explicit”, for example put in writing or tape recorded so that it can be proven.

How and why the policy pillars of conservatism are crumbling during the Bush presidency

There is a limit to how much and how long one can fool even the most gullible of people. It seems hard to believe that so many millions of Americans could fall for the idea that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and other aspects of his economic agenda could benefit them. But fall for it they did. And constant propaganda announcing soaring economic indicators during the Bush presidency served to enable many of these Americans to believe that if they waited long enough the benefits would trickle down to them eventually. But after almost seven years the promises had worn thin, and many formerly naïve individuals began to get suspicious of the reasons for the ever widening wealth gaps in our country, as well as the reasons for the decline in their own economic prospects and status.

The Bush response to Hurricane Katrina also makes the point. George Bush has never given a damn about the poor. His refusal to provide the funding for the levee repair that could have prevented the catastrophe, his failure to respond to the emergency itself, and his refusal to push for adequate reconstruction all put his callousness on national display for everyone to see who cared to see.

Much has been said about the consequences of the failure of George Bush to initially deploy enough troops to Iraq, as a reason for the failure of our country to secure victory there. By contrast, much too little has been said about the moral failures of that war as a major reason for our military failures there.

Almost nothing is said in this country about the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis dying in this war; almost nothing is said here about the four million Iraqi refugees the war has produced; almost nothing is said about the fact that, although American corporations were paid tens of billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure, that effort has nonetheless been a miserable failure, producing a deplorable lack of electricity and potable water; almost nothing is said about the fact that billions of dollars given to those corporations are unaccounted for, and yet there are few if any consequences for them to face; almost nothing is said about the fact the majority of Iraqi despise us for what we’ve done to their country and desperately want us to leave; in short, almost nothing is said about the fact that the main purpose of the war was and is to facilitate billions of dollars in profits flowing into the coffers of Bush and Cheney’s corporate friends, as demonstrated by the fact that virtually every law that they have pushed through over there has been targeted towards just that purpose.

Under such circumstances this war and occupation was destined for failure from the start. A larger initial force would probably have slowed down the insurgency, but it would have come nevertheless. There are few peoples in this world who wouldn’t hate being invaded by an imperial power and who wouldn’t put up strong resistance against it.

This war has been a failure primarily because it was based on the bedrock conservative principles of imperialism and war profiteering. If it had been successful there would have been more of the same, just as Hitler in 1941 pushed his overwhelming military advantage until he pushed too far and the tide turned.

The disingenuous attempt by conservatives to distance themselves from George Bush

In his book, Greenwald gives numerous examples of how conservatives have tried to distance themselves from George Bush. More preposterous yet, these conservatives now try to claim that George W. Bush is not a “true conservative”. Some even say that he’s a liberal!!

Peggy Noonan, for example, former Bush I speech writer and Reagan worshipper, regularly praised George W. Bush’s integrity and character when he was popular. But in 2006 she said “He does not appear to rethink things based on new data… For him there is no new data, only determination”.

In the aftermath of the 2006 elections, the New York Times noted:

Since the election, a chorus from the right has been noisily distinguishing between conservative and Republican, blaming deviations from conservative principles for the election losses. From George Will to Rush Limbaugh, conservatives cut loose with criticisms of Republicans for spending too much at home and getting bogged down in Iraq.

And Rich Lowry, writing in the National Review in 2006:

In recent years we have watched a Republican Congress disgrace itself with its association with scandal, with its willful lack of fiscal discipline, and with its utter disinterest in the reforms that America needs. And at the same time we watched a Republican president …. fail to take steps to win a major foreign war.

Of course, these attempts to disassociate conservatives from Republicans are absurd, since it was conservatives who repeatedly cheered those same Republicans and those same Republican policies as long as they were popular. It was self identified conservatives who voted for George Bush by the whopping margin of 84% to 15% in the 2004 election, while liberals voted against him by an even greater margin, and moderates voted against him by a healthy margin too.

George Bush has not changed from 2001 to 2006. He is hardly capable of change. He has not lost his conservative “principles”, and he has certainly not become a liberal. The only thing that has changed is that his policies have become revealed for the conservative disasters that they are. Conservative attempts to now distance themselves from the policies and presidency that they formerly slavishly endorsed can now succeed only with great difficulty and with tremendous assistance from our conservative corporate news media.

A few words about the Christianity component of the American conservative movement

I’ve said a lot about the economic and militaristic aspects of the American conservative movement, but relatively little about its Christianity component. That’s because I believe that the leaders of the conservative movement include the Christianity component mainly as a cynical means of getting votes. Whereas the economic and militaristic components are of crucial importance to them in their drive for wealth and power, the Christianity component is just for show. I just don’t believe that they have any concern for the well being of fetal stem cells or Terri Schiavo, for example, nor do I believe that they really care whether homosexual couples marry.

The Christians who fall for the cynical line of piety professed by Republican and American conservative leaders are quite gullible and not very clear thinking in my opinion. Jesus was a liberal who cared deeply about the poor, not the strident and hate filled authoritarian scold depicted by today’s conservative leaders. And the leaders of today’s Christian Right have virtually nothing in common with the leaders of Christian organizations that played major roles in anti-slavery and women’s rights movements of the past, for example.

I really don’t know what to make of the thinking or motivation of the rank and file Christians who fall for this kind of thing and go out to vote for people like George W. Bush merely because of his professed Christianity. I’ll just leave it at that.

The remaining pillars and what now needs to happen

Thus have conservative principles been shown to be a miserable failure, and thus have conservatives fallen dramatically in the eyes of the American public during the past few years.

But they are far from dead. They still have much control of the news that Americans receive; they still have billions of dollars to use to bribe … I mean influence our elected representatives; and they still have the electronic voting machines and the will and energy to disenfranchise voters and thereby rig national elections.

Much needs to be done. I have written a great deal about the need to impeach and remove from office our president and vice president. The need to do that is no less now that it has been, in order to bring the rule of law back to our nation and to avoid setting a terrible precedent that marginalizes our Constitution. I will be participating in next week’s impeachment rally in Washington, D.C. to that end.

But there are other equally important things that must be done to take our government back. We must break the monopoly that a wealthy few have on our news media, so that they will be unable to continue to have such disproportionate influence on the news that Americans see and hear. Repealing the Telecommunications Act of 1996 would be a good place to start with that.

We must find a way to take the money out of politics. Putting strict limits on maximum contribution amounts by individuals or corporations (meaning criminalizing “money bundling” among other things), and requiring the public financing of elections would be a good place to start with that.

We must be vigilant about preventing election fraud by enacting laws to disallow DRE voting, creating harsh penalties against dirty tricks to disenfranchise voters, and making hand recounts of paper ballots standard procedure for all contested elections. I’ve discussed these and other preventive measures in some detail here.

Until those things are accomplished I don’t think that we should be surprised to find that we continue to elect representatives who are far to the right, much more attuned to the interests of the wealthy, and far more militaristic than the average American.