Unstoppable (7 page)

Of course, part of the problem of the confusion among conservatives is that almost everyone is calling themselves, in some policy arenas, a conservative these days. Consider how times have changed. In the early fifties Peter Viereck quoted liberal Robert Bendiner: “Out of some 140,000,000 people in the United States, at least 139,500,000 are liberals, to hear them tell it. . . . Rare is the citizen who can bring himself to say, ‘Sure I'm a conservative.' . . . Any American would sooner drop dead than proclaim himself a reactionary.”
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Nowadays, the situation is more the reverse.

But since, as we have seen, it's getting hard to tell what a conservative is, with so many of them adopting liberal, even radical positions, we might wonder how different at least the traditional conservative is from those holding classical liberal views.

After all, both conservatives and liberals claim the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence authoritatively and generically embody their principles and philosophy, not just their sense of patriotism.

What About the Voters?

Now let's go find out how people on Main Street answer the questions of what is a liberal and what is a conservative. After all, intellectuals can battle their respective adversaries inside and outside their spheres of thought, making rarified distinctions, but the votes come from the people, who attach images and steadfast behaviors to those two labels. Whatever names they choose, people love to label themselves and others politically. It is convenient shorthand, designating one's beliefs and providing a sense of belonging. Here
the labels do not come with the micro slicing and dicing of the intelligentsia.

Most Americans who call themselves libertarians or conservative are, like most self-styled liberals, largely politically inactive. As noted, half of either camp do not even vote. So what are they thinking when they apply these labels to their identities?

Here are some unsurprising replies received from questions I've asked regular people in conversations around the country.

       
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“I'm a conservative because I want lower taxes.”

       
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“I'm a conservative because I want less government, less regulation, less Big Brother, less welfare, and a strong military.”

       
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“I'm a religious conservative because I want to see strong family values respected. I am against abortion.”

       
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“I'm a conservative because I believe in the free enterprise system, not socialism. I want to vote for candidates who are tough on crime and support the right to bear arms.”

       
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“I'm a conservative because I don't believe we're as smart as our ancestors and their tested traditions.”

       
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“I'm a conservative because the liberals have ruined our country with wasteful government programs and overregulation, and have always been soft on atheistic communism.”

Now what does a proud liberal say in similar chats at the proverbial diner?

       
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“I'm a liberal because I'm tired of seeing the little guy, the working stiff, get screwed by the big boys.”

       
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“I'm a liberal because my elderly parents would be out on the streets if they didn't have Social Security and Medicare. Caring for others in need is being a liberal.”

       
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“I'm a liberal because as a minority who's felt discrimination, I know tolerance is a good thing for everybody. The civil rights laws were pushed by liberals and were long overdue.”

       
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“I'm a liberal because I don't want the rich messing with our elections and right-wingers telling us how to behave and who to associate with. There's a reason for the separation of state and religion.”

       
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“I'm a liberal because liberal philosophy is a fairness philosophy. Also, I favor Main Street over Wall Street, which always gets the bailouts.”

       
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“I want my children to drink clean water, breathe clean air, and eat safe food. You can say I'm an environmentalist. I suppose that's liberal.”

(I'm sure you can add other reasons to both lists.)

What can be said about such identifications? First, they reflect the constant hammering of these same associations by the politicians and allied radio and TV talk show hosts year after year. Second, they probably flow from experiences such as a run-in with the IRS, dealing with some irritating regulations, being blocked from school prayer, seeing the flag disrespected, getting sick or ripped off, being raised in a family that deeply empathized with the poor or being poor, and being African American, Hispanic, or a woman subject to racist or sexist discrimination. The pluses and minuses felt in life quickly fortify the images that attach to the “conservative” or “liberal” label. An identifier with one camp or the other could be part of a conservative, evangelical church or a member of a union or military family. They could be hereditary Republican or Democratic voters because of their grandparents and parents, and therefore they are self-styled as either conservatives or liberals.

The Danger of Looking Solely at Labels

When citizens engage in one-step conclusions about the meaning of liberalism or conservatism and don't engage in the complexity of these traditions, they put themselves at risk of being unable to detect the hypocrisy of the leaders of their own camp and fail to
confront their false and misleading statements. Sometimes, even when they learn that a so-called conservative politician has violated nearly every principle of conservatism, the voter is so mesmerized by the hype that the realities of the situation are ignored.

For example, here is an exchange I had years ago with an avid Ronald Reagan fan:

       
“Why are you such a Reagan supporter?”

       
“Simple: he is for lower taxes, less regulation, less spending, and smaller government.”

       
“Well, did you know that he increased the federal debt more in sheer dollars than all previous presidents combined, from George Washington through Jimmy Carter? He sent all his deficit-spending budgets to Congress from the get-go.”

       
“Is that so?”

       
“Did you know that he raised taxes fifteen times after he lowered them in 1981–1982?”

       
“No. That's hard to believe.”

       
“Did you know that in January 1989 he left government larger in number of employees and contractors than he received from Jimmy Carter? And did you also know that before he was president, he would speak out against government subsidies to businesses, but as president he continued and even increased some of them?”

       
“Are these really the facts?”

       
“Yes. Are you still a Reagan backer?”

       
“Forever.”

How Progressives Can Change Minds and How Politicians Befuddle Them

The previous example indicates that it's difficult to budge the opinion of someone who has become fixated on political labels. When
it comes to dealing with self-designated political categories, altering an individual's opinion is, as Professor Howard Gardner points out in his challenging book
Changing Minds
, quite complex and difficult.
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Presidential political campaigns focus on changing the minds of maybe 10 percent of the electorate. The vast number of remaining voters do not waver. Most voters vote the party, regardless of the candidate, even though they say they vote for the candidate.

The key to opening people's minds on matters of specific public import is to go down the abstraction ladder. While categorical positioning is strong at the aforementioned higher levels of generalization and labels, going down to situations where people live, work, buy, eat, raise their children, and play invites a different kind of thinking—one that reflects people's sense of fairness, their desire for health and safety, their inherent fondness for the harmonious wisdom that often was called “plain old common sense.”

Take, for example, people who do not like government regulation. Ask them whether they want their cars recalled for correction when the manufacturer discovers a deadly defect? Obviously, they say, “Sure.” Then ask, if the manufacturer doesn't do this, whether the Department of Transportation should have the regulatory authority to make them recall the vehicles? The same sequence can be followed with government safety regulation on medicines, drinking water, air pollution, workplace dangers, electrical wiring, and other, often silent, invisible perils to one's health and safety. Granted, there will be, at even more concrete levels, disagreements on how far to go with safety standards or penalties, but still, support for these regulations' existence clearly embraces all but the hardest-core libertarians, who believe that if people want to avoid air pollution, they should just move away or not inhale. However, for most people, when dogma meets life's perceived necessities, the latter usually wins the polls.

Even the charming, soft-spoken Ronald Reagan ran up a hill when he faced the public's rejection of the judgment he made from
the top of the abstraction ladder. Campaigning for president in 1980 in Michigan, he attacked the proposed air bag standard as restricting our freedom. I sort of agreed with him. Upon being asked for comment by a Detroit reporter, I said, “Yes, the air bag does restrict the driver's and passenger's freedom to go through the windshield in a crash.”

The time-tested approach by the few who wish to politically dominate the many is to pull the many up the abstraction ladder, away from the realities on the ground into the stratosphere of general principles, values, symbols, myths, and particularly images, whether these are secular or selective religious references. Republicans and their wealthy backers have courted and assisted the Pentecostals and fundamentalists. The Democrats and their operatives, on the other hand, welcomed the social gospel of mainline Protestant churches in the struggles for civil rights, peace, and improvement of the plight of the poor. Since the sixties, the language of religion in political rallies and elections has intensified. This is especially the case for the Republicans, who kept up the abstractions as they focused on hot-button issues such as abortion and the danger of ungodly gays. (Yet down at the family level, away from the abstractions, Dick Cheney gives unconditional love to his lesbian daughter.) At the same time, the Democrats, recognizing some distance between formal religious institutions and political events, have stayed more focused on the widely felt deprivations of the people, tying this issue in less strongly with religion.

Along with the strategy of arguing from the top of the abstraction ladder, another ruse to confuse the people is the presentation of a bipolar view of liberals and conservatives as totally distinctive, a perspective fed by numerous false stereotypes, which service the controlling processes of the ruling classes. It is a sophisticated strategy of divide and rule put forward by the governing monetized elite, who watch it work like magic to distract voters, along with the mainstream media, both during and between elections, into
seeing the world divided into two irreconcilable camps. Few note the points I have raised here, such as the divisions within conservatism as well as the confluence of many liberal and conservative positions. Instead, by focusing on the battle between the two camps, everyone overlooks the fact that the motor of our whole system is the workings of concentrated power, which is abusing the vast majority of the people indiscriminately. This “imaginary” division is promulgated even in elementary school education, where, for example,
Scholastic News
class materials instruct millions of schoolchildren to choose one of only two sides for mock elections.

Where a clear mind will note the distinctions and confluences I have outlined in this chapter, corporatism is by far the greatest practical generator for perpetuating and funding the belief in this rigid, distracting divide.

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