Conservative no more

Few weeks ago I was having some fun with a quote from P.J. O'Rourke.

"Neither humorists nor conservatives believe man is good.  But left-wingers do."

I was a bit baffled by it at first glance but after a little study I concluded it meant two things.  P.J. O'Rourke thinks all left wingers are Fidel Castro and he's never heard of George Clooney.

Something like that.

Along the way, though, I noted that I know more than a few conservatives who think very highly of their fellow men and women and some leftishy types who think that human beings are pretty sorry specimens.  Me, for instance.

It's not necessary for liberals to think people are good; it's only necessary to think they are improvable.

And conservatives never had to hold people in contempt.  They just had to have a healthy distrust of a certain class of folk, those who seek and obtain political office.  Conservatives could think well of their neighbors, near and far, but also think that there was just something about getting into politics that turned a person into a crook and a snake.

This kind of conservativism actually has a very progressive and American pedigree.  It's how come we decided not to have a king.

Conservatives didn't even have to think that all politicians couldn't be trusted.  The ones down in Washington might be a pack of sharpers but the ones on your town board could be a decent enough group.  This is how it still happens that people who vote straight Republican when electing Presidents and Congressmen are very progressive when it comes to what they expect of their local governments.

It does seem to me that if you really don't think highly of human beings, if you see them as a pack of wolves, your politics aren't going to be libertarian.  You're going to see your own self-interest and the self-interest of the wolves at the door as irreconciable and that means you're going to take a very strong anti-wolf line.  The natural political views of conservatives who think as O'Rourke jokes they do would be not conservative and definitely not libertarian.  They'd be authoritarian.

Guess what.

The Republican Party used to include a powerful group of the old, genial brand of conservative.  They came mostly from the Northeast and the Midwest.

But the Party has been captured by the Southerners, whose brand of traditional conservativism was founded in the old Confederacy.  The Republican leadership in Washington has inherited the politics of people who thought it was perfectly all right for them to own other people and who developed a strong authoritarian bent in order to enforce that right.

Mark Twain once wrote that the trouble with the South was that it had been poisoned by reading too much Walter Scott.

He meant that in order to avoid facing the fact that they were just another brand of the thugs and bullies all too common in history, the ones who've always survived by forcing other people to do their work for them, the southern aristocracy had convinced themselves they were carrying on a tradition of romantic chivalry.  They were knights and their fair maidens, they were lords and ladies of the manor, protecting their vassals and enjoying the gratitude and love of those they so protected.

Their spiritual heirs are not conservatives.  They are would-be aristocrats.

They show it in their arrogance, their profligacy with other people's money, their unshakeable faith that the best way to deal with all problems is to attack with guns blazing---I mean this figuratively and literally---the pride they take in humiliating members of their own party who disagree with them, and the way they treat all challenges to their policies not as arguments but as blood feuds.  Their honor is always on the line.  If it was still the custom for members of Congress to carry walking sticks and sword canes, the floors of the Capitol building would be constantly slippery with the blood from the broken heads and sliced up bodies of all the Yankee upstarts who dared to challenge them, suh!

These guys, as characters, would not be out of place among the war hawks who forced the country into the disasterous war with England in 1812 (We lost that one, folks.  The British didn't take us back when they could have because they had Napoleon to deal with, but they licked us good and proper) or among the cavaliers who pushed for secession and started the War Between the States (They lost that one too).

There's no requirement for aristocrats to think people are good or bad, on the whole, only that to believe that some people are superior to most everybody else and you happen to be one of the superior types.

Aristocrats know they can't make any claims to being smarter than everybody or more talented or more moral or even richer---one of the chief characteristics of aristocrats is an incredibly bad business sense and a cultivated habit of spendthriftyness.  They are continually in need of being bailed out by smarter, more financially prudent types.  Jews, through much of history, Yankees here in the United States.  (The Red States of the old confederacy survive on Blue State money, and notice the way the current crop of conservatives mix up Yankees and Jews.  They don't care.  To them Jews and Yankees are the same thing---bankers holding their markers.) Without talent, brains, character, or wealth, their claims of superiority rest on one quality---power.

They are superior because they can beat you up.

Notice the way their lapdogs and attack poodles love to spit the word "loser."

That's all there is in an aristocracy.  Winners and losers.  Top dogs and bottom dogs.

The old type of conservatives in Congress, who are mostly from the Midwest and the Northeast, can't seem to get it into their heads that there is a difference between them and their Southern "friends."  The old conservatives seem to think that at some point the Southerners will start paying attention to their ideas instead of just bullying them for their votes, that they'll let them take the lead on some issues instead of expecting them to just salaam and follow orders.  But as Jeanne D'arc points out in this excellent post, aristocrats don't share power.

Conservatism...has always been about preserving the prerogatives of an aristocracy...Sometimes the best way to preserve your power is to let in a few new allies. But the fundamental idea has always been that society functions best when born leaders pass on their genes, money, beliefs, habits, skills, weapons, and other assorted accoutrements, to their children, who in turn become the next generation of leaders (with, if necessary, a small infusion of new blood). This tends to work best when non-leaders accept their state as natural, deferring to their superiors' wisdom -- in other words, when we don't bother to ask ourselves whether it's really true that the king knows who deserves to be tortured and believe that if we just stop pestering the vizier with our childish worries about secret deals he'll come up with a perfect energy policy.

Jeanne has a slightly different take on the nature of conservatism.  She sees it as having always been about creating aristocracies.  I wonder what she makes of all those Yankee farmers and Midwestern progressives.  But she's right about the nature of the men who are running things in Washington now.

But in my lifetime, I don't think American conservatism has ever been as boldly aristocratic as it currently is: Do not ask questions. Do not expect even minimal accountability. Whatever they do is, by definition, perfect,  because they do it and they are God's chosen. L'etat c'est moi. There's no denying we've had a few embarrassing presidents in our history, but when, before this millennium, have we seen the ascending of the idiot prince to the throne? And yet they call us an elite, those of us watching the little hope and security we have -- our pensions, our access to health care, the laws that keep us from being poisoned or losing our jobs unfairly, the investment in our kids' schools -- slip away.

Comments

[Sown Eye]

"The old type of conservatives in Congress, who are mostly from the Midwest and the Northeast, can't seem to get it into their heads that there is a difference between them and their Southern "friends."

Rubbish. They're the same breed of cat. There is not a single republican member in congress who is not a swine. Not one.

[denisdekat]

P.J. O'Rourke is a coward. Only a coward would write a book titled "give war a chance" and not sign up for service. Afterall, we need more soldiers...

[Steve Paradis]

Michael Lind covers the Southern Bourbon brand of conservatism quite well in "Made in Texas". He also mentions the breathtaking self-confidence of the breed, who enjoy flaunting their advantages and superiority, certain that these displays will overawe the peasants.
They seem to know their base.