Continuing the thoughts I started to write about in my previous post, I'd like to start by quoting the mighty Krgthulu, whose recent refrain on this topic went like this:
But no: Greenspan KNOWS that deficits do these terrible things, and finds it “regrettable” that they aren’t actually happening.
Krthulu is complaining about the same basic thing as the Senator from the great state of Michigan: the economic policies our conservative elites prefer in the face of the deepest and most painful recession since the Great Depression are punishment for the unemployed and austerity for the rest of us, in the full knowledge that such policies will only make the economy worsen. More importantly, he's pointing out an important clue: our conservatives aren't just trying trying to crash our whole system of politics and economics; they're pissed off that it isn't going down shrieking in poisonous flame as easily as they want for it to be.
It's not hard to see the pattern expressing itself elsewhere. Take another example, like where John Derbyshire made an ass of himself last Friday with this post at The Corner:
At the same time, as a constitutional pessimist, I’ll own to a certain grim satisfaction. The infantile optimism of post-JFK America may have met its match down there in the Gulf.
This went quite a bit beyond where Congressman Joe Barton went when he withdrew his apology for apologizing on behalf of the White House for "shaking down" British Petroleum for a $20 billion escrow fund for what folks in the financial risk management trade like to call "liquidated damages" associated with the Deepwater Horizon disaster. (Hey, at least he didn't stack a third apology on top of the first two— he just bluntly and unapologetically began asserting that the second apology was insincere. And on that note, can I just say how sad I am that George Carlin has left us?)
"A grim satisfaction," Derbyshire says. Does it sound to you like he likes seeing calamity strike at more than just the economic livelihood of the Gulf of Mexico states? Like his "grim satisfaction" is about seeing a knife stabbed through the heart of the American way of life? At the laying of waste to the foundations of American democracy? Sure does to me.
Because we all know what else died besides JFK when Oswald put those bullets through his motorcade in Dallas back in 1963. What died in those short years of assassination and calamity was the old WASP aristocracy.
Now would be a good time to remind the audience of the sage words of Dr. Phil Agre, who— before he wandered off in what I would charitably describe as "the state of being tired of London"— gave us a long essay on the subject of What Is Conservatism? And Why Is It So Brain-Damaged Wrong? The overly simplified summary is as follows:
As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:
Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.
Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.
These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States.
When you get the time, I recommend reading the longer essay. It's a bit dated in parts, but it's worth it.
Of course, a lot of oily water has passed under the bridge since Dr. Agre wrote that rant, and matters have become pressing since then. I'm now of the grim mind to think that we are currently plagued with no ordinary conservative movement, but a particularly virulent and malevolent form of it— the kind that really needs to be stopped well before it gets to the strength we are seeing it exercise in America today.
I won't call it out by the kind of names it's gone under in the past, but I'll quote a common description of it taken from the current Wikipedia article on it:
[They] believe that a nation is an organic community that requires strong leadership, singular collective identity, and the will and ability to commit violence and wage war in order to keep the nation strong. They claim that culture is created by collective national society and its state, that cultural ideas are what give individuals identity, and thus rejects individualism. In viewing the nation as an integrated collective community, they see pluralism as a dysfunctional aspect of society, and justify a totalitarian state as a means to represent the nation in its entirety. They advocate the creation of a single-party state. [They] reject and resist autonomy of cultural or ethnic groups who are not considered part of [their] nation and who refuse to assimilate or are unable to be assimilated. They consider attempts to create such autonomy as an affront and threat to the nation. [Their] governments forbid and suppress openness and opposition to [their] state and [their] movement. They identify violence and war as actions that create national regeneration, spirit and vitality.
Maybe you don't much like Wikipedia. I can't argue with that right now. Instead, if you want to insist on going to the primary sources, consider this carefully mined and polished quote:
After socialism, [our movement] trains its guns on the whole block of democratic ideologies, and rejects both their premises and their practical applications and implements. [We deny] that numbers, as such, can be the determining factor in human society; it denies the right of numbers to govern by means of periodical consultations; it asserts the irremediable and fertile and beneficent inequality of men who cannot be leveled by any such mechanical and extrinsic device as universal suffrage. Democratic regimes may be described as those under which the people are, from time to time, deluded into the belief that they exercise sovereignty, while all the time real sovereignty resides in and is exercised by other and sometimes irresponsible and secret forces. Democracy is a kingless regime infested by many kings who are sometimes more exclusive, tyrannical, and destructive than one, even if he be a tyrant.
Yes, this quote is more openly anti-democratic than your average American tea-partier likes to appear in public, but this is pretty much— in so many words— what the GOP currently believes about the democratic process. (Given the original source, they're not likely to admit it any time soon.)
It's how and why the GOP minority in the Senate can kill the jobs bill by using its minority power to deny cloture, knowing all too well that the majority will be blamed for the terrible consequences of their effect on American governance. Their goal is to prove what they believe about democracy to be true by making it happen by any means necessary.
It's how and why John Derbyshire can feel comfortable smirking over the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico and satisfied that somehow the "infantile optimism" of American liberal democracy might soon be coming to a carefully engineered end.
Phil Agre was right. Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. Moreover, this is not news. Again, the mighty Krgthulu:
It’s truly a new Dark Age, in which famous professors are reinventing errors refuted 70 years ago, and calling them insights.
He's being polite. In my line of work, the act of "reinventing [well-known] errors and calling them insights" has a special name: bullshit.
What else did Phil Agre say about conservatism? Oh yeah... It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.
It would be nice if this were to become common sense again. I've got a bad feeling that we're going to be waiting a long time before we're that lucky. In the meantime, I recommend reading this old piece, Who Goes Nazi?, by Dorothy Thompson from the ancient stacks of Harper's archive.
You may, sooner than you think, need to learn how to read people the way Dorothy Thompson describes in that piece.
