Читать онлайн "Conservatives Without Conscience" - Dean John W. - RuLit

Republicons: Young people who learned their conservative theory back in college and since have given themselves over to activism, either as Republican campaign strategists or as policy advocates. Newt Gingrich is their hero, and Grover Norquist (of the Americans for Tax Reform) is their leader. They have politically gold-plated résumés and no time for pessimism.

Catocons: Hard-core libertarians who recognize that even if your goal is to dismantle government, you have to play the Washington policy-wonk game to change things. Their leading think tank is the Cato Institute.

Platocons: Allied with, but different from, the Aquinacons, the Platocons are the disciples of the late Leo Strauss, who excited generations of students at the University of Chicago about classical political philosophy. Not all Straussians are conservatives, however. Still, their belief that ideas are intrinsically important, and are not just manifestations of class interest or historical prejudice, puts them at odds with the academic left.[46]

There is almost no end to the ways in which the conservative factions can be sliced and diced.[47] Nonetheless, they all fall neatly within three general categories, with their current significance determined by poll numbers that indicate their relative size within the conservative movement.[48] In February 2004 TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics (TIPP) conducted a nationwide survey that gathered information across the left/right political spectrum. It found that conservatives constituted 43 percent of their respondents, with moderates at 35 percent and liberals at 18 percent. The TIPP poll sample revealed a higher percentage of conservatives than has been the norm for other polls. For example, the national election exit polls for eight elections between 1976 and 2004 have fairly consistently shown conservatives at 33 percent, moderates at 47 percent, and liberals at 20 percent.[49] But the size of the conservative response to the TIPP poll provides an excellent basis for the poll’s follow-up question, which asked conservatives about the nature of their conservatism. In response, 52 percent of conservatives described themselves as social conservatives, 49 percent as fiscal conservatives, and 13 percent as neoconservatives. (The 114 percent total appears attributable to overlapping responses, for there is no doubt that some social conservatives would also view themselves as fiscal conservatives.)[50] Absent from this TIPP poll are breakdowns for categories like traditional conservatives, religious conservatives, and right-leaning libertarians, because these groups can easily fall within social conservatism, fiscal conservatism, and neoconservatism.[51] Most revealing in the TIPP poll is the strength of social conservatism.

Conservatism’s Power of Negative Thinking

Given the rather distinct beliefs of the various conservative factions, which have only grown more complex with time, how have conservatives succeeded in coalescing as a political force? The simple answer is through the power of negative thinking, and specifically, the ability to find common enemies. The adherents of early conservatism—economic conservatives, traditional conservatives, and libertarians—agreed that communism was the enemy, a fact that united them for decades—and hid their differences. Today’s conservatives—especially social conservatives, as opposed to intellectuals and the more thoughtful politicians—define themselves by what they oppose, which is anything and everything they perceive to be liberal. That category includes everyone from Democrats to anyone with whom they disagree, and can, therefore, automatically be labeled a liberal. Another group that has recently been designated as an enemy is “activist judges,” regardless of their party or philosophical affiliation. Activist judges are best described as those whose rulings run contrary to the beliefs of a particular conservative faction.

Antipathy to liberalism has been present from the outset of the conservative movement but it only became a powerful unifying influence in the early 1980s. Sidney Blumenthal, when still a staff writer at the Washington Post, concluded that “conservatism requires liberalism for its meaning,” for “without the enemy [of liberalism] to serve as nemesis and model, conservative politics would lack its organizing principle.”[52] Blumenthal’s observation, made two decades ago, is even more valid today. Leading conservative Web sites, including well-funded think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the right-leaning libertarian Cato Institute, spend a lot of time and money criticizing or complaining with varying degrees of contempt about all matters perceived to be “liberal.”[53] Important conservative opinion journals, like the National Review and Human Events, see the world as bipolar: conservative versus liberal.[54] Right-wing talk radio could not survive without its endless bloviating about the horrors of liberalism. Trashing liberals is nothing short of a cottage industry for conservative authors. Take the “queen of mean,” Ann Coulter, whose titles speak for themselves: Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right (2002); Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (2003); and How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter (2004). Slander, for example, contains page after page of scorn, criticism, belittlement, and bemoaning of ideas she believes liberal. Her books have also generated a subsidiary cottage trade in fact-checking her work, which has amply demonstrated that Coulter apparently considers accuracy as something that needs only to be approximated.[55]

All the hyperventilating about liberalism by conservatives is surprising, because it is so unnecessary. Liberalism is a straw man conservatives love to attack, but there are not, in fact, enough liberals to be a true threat to conservatism. A recent Harris Poll found that only 18 percent of American adults call themselves liberals,[56] and the TIPP poll, cited earlier, found the figure to be 20 percent. Although then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich unequivocally declared in 1998 that the “age of liberalism is over,” condemnation of the liberal bogeyman continues to be a clarion call for most conservatives. In truth, conservatives attack liberals, or those they label or perceive as liberal, for several reasons. It is, of course, a handy means to rally the troops, for the conservative base enjoys it when their leaders and prominent voices attack those who do not share their views. It is also a means to raise money; fund-raising letters and drives regularly recount the horrors of liberalism. Many conservatives, however, are simply entertained by reading conservative authors or hearing conservative talk-show hosts rant about liberals. The exaggerated hostility also apparently satisfies a psychological need for antagonism toward the “out group,” reinforces the self-esteem of the conservative base, and increases solidarity within the ranks.[57]

Law professor John Eastman described the contemporary conservative movement as “a bit of a three-legged stool.”[58] Eastman wrote that conservatives find cohesion in their efforts to pack the federal judiciary with judges who will work at “recovering the original understanding of the Constitution—one that recognized the scope of federal power over matters truly national, such as national security, but that sought to revive the limits on federal authority in other areas of daily life, as the Constitution envisioned.”[59] In short, the concerned effort to oppose so-called judicial activism is important to most all conservatives, and indeed, books, blogs, and essays on the subject have come from high-profile voices throughout the conservative factions.[60] Thus, when Bush nominated his White House counsel, Harriet Miers, for the Supreme Court, notwithstanding her stellar conservative credentials she was attacked relentlessly by other conservatives, who doubted she had the cerebral wherewithal to wage battle behind closed doors at the high Court on their behalf.[61] National Review writer John Derbyshire was a leader in the snarling pack chasing Miers, employing conservative rhetoric to do the job. After “reading her thoughts, messages and speeches,” Derbyshire reported, “I mean, the sheer, dreary, numbing m—e—d—i—o—c—r—i—t—y of them.” He concluded:

Total on the left	248 people	23 percent
Extremely liberal	20 people	3 percent
Liberal	103 people	10 percent
Slightly liberal	125 people	10 percent
Moderate or middle-of-the-road	279 people	26 percent
Total on the middle	279 people	26 percent
Slightly conservative	143 people	13 percent
Conservative	166 people	16 percent
Extremely conservative	31 people	3 percent
Total on the right	340 people	32 percent
Had not thought about	187 people
or did not know, or	10 people
refused to answer	2 people