This last November,
conservatives of various stripes captured the House of Representatives and many State houses, and their chances for capturing the Senate and perhaps even the White House two years hence are considered much enhanced. Accordingly, we may soon experience substantial changes in many areas of American life.
Of course, forecasting any country’s precise destiny is a hugely perilous enterprise, given the frequency with which even the most savvy seers are blindsided by wholly unexpected world events, but our best resource, however imperfect, for predicting how conservatives will mold this country’s future is to examine what they have done in the past. So let us take a quick, one hundred year survey of all the things conservatives have done (or tried to do) for us.
We might start back in, say, 1906 when, with every means, conservatives fought the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act which now ensures that, for example, upon you open a bottle of aspirin, aspirin is what you get (and all you get), and also guarantees that your ballpark hotdog won’t kill you (at least not right away). Throughout the first decade of the 20th century conservatives consistently tried to stymie enactment of child labor laws and the creation and funding of the National Park and National Forest Services; had things gone their way ten-year-olds would still be working twelve hour days and there would be no Yosemite, no Yellowstone or no Grand Canyon.
In 1919 conservatives sabotaged the entry of the United States into the League of Nations, thereby vitiating the democracy’s efforts to throttle Hitler before he acquired the strength to wage war. That same year conservatives pushed through the 18th Amendment giving us prohibition, bootlegging and organized crime. And today, having learned nothing from Al Capone, they continue to press the hideous, expensive, bloody and futile war on drugs instead of for their legalization.
In 1935 conservatives labored to block the creation of Social Security upon which forty percent of older Americans now entirely depend for their basic needs. (And they’re still trying to privatize it – as if Wall Street hasn’t done enough damage to retirement plans.)
In the early 1940’s they opposed giving aid to Great Britain in its lonely struggle against Hitler – until December 7th, 1941, when the Japanese Imperial Navy took the matter out of their hands.
In 1945 they opposed as extravagant the G.I. Bill which sent tens of thousands of returning World War II veterans to college and in one fell swoop tripled the size of America’s middle class.
In the 1960’s they battled to defeat passage of the Civil Rights Act which finally gave Black Americans the vote ostensibly won a hundred years earlier, and in the 1970’s opposed the creation of the EPA, the work of which is why, for example, Southern Californians can now safely inhale when they step outside their homes. Conservatives fought tobacco warnings and smoking restrictions, arguing that “the connection between cigarettes and cancer remains a subject for debate” – the same position they now take with regards global warming.
All right, admittedly this is all ancient history. What have conservatives done for us lately?
At every opportunity conservatives stripped away the financial regulations which could have gone far to ameliorate and perhaps prevent the current economic debacle, the leveling of our housing market, and the near-annihilation of our middle class; conservatives still refuse to accept that though capitalism is the greatest machine for creating wealth ever devised, absent government regulation and oversight it is akin to taking a ride in a powerful automobile that lacks both steering and brakes.
Conservatives, heedless of how through history faith-based violence has repeatedly brought the slaughter of entire peoples (see Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Hamas, Rwanda, Armenia, the Taliban, the Spanish Inquisition, the great Christian crusades, etc., etc., etc.) – nonetheless continue to push for the dissolution of America’s separation of church and state and for more religion in government. And allowing their religious convictions to subordinate common sense, conservatives insist that – to cite just two examples – were the two gay women living down the block from my home to succeed in their fondest wish to tie the knot, heterosexual marriages will somehow be destroyed; or should an openly gay, decorated soldier be allowed to continue to serve (as he does in most European armies), then American troop morale and national security will be imperiled.
Conservatives exploited the 9/11 atrocity and fictitious weapons of mass destruction in order to thrust several hundred thousand young Americans into the midst of millions of furious, endemically aggrieved Muslims who have been at each other’s throats for a millennium and will doubtless continue as such long after the last G.I. has been killed or maimed. Conservatives also opposed the tax increases necessary to finance these Middle East military misadventures, thus creating an unprecedented deficit our children and most probably our grandchildren will have to pay off – if they can find the money.
How about here at home? Pleased with your automobile’s impressive gas mileage? Don’t thank conservatives. They fought every legislative effort to mandate that American car manufacturers match the fuel economies of their Asian competitors. Ditto their fierce opposition to mandatory seatbelts and air bags which collectively have cut highway fatalities by a third.
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All right, you say, whatever their possible wrongheadedness on social issues, at least conservatives can be counted on to try to shrink the size of government and reduce federal spending. Sorry, no such luck. In its two terms in Washington, the Bush administration, the most conservative in a generation, increased the size of the federal government by fifty percent, cut through the Clinton surplus faster than you can say fiscal responsibility and left Obama a one trillion dollar deficit. You see, conservative politicians, much like their liberal colleagues, really like expensive stuff. They just don’t like paying for it.
But it gets worse. Thirty-two percent of Medicare costs are incurred the last four months of life, largely due to the underwriting of obscenely expensive “heroic” measures that at most add a few weeks of painful life; yet conservatives stripped from the Obama Health Reform Act the providing of a tiny sum to pay for end-of-life counseling between the patient, the patient’s family and their doctor where they might explore more rational options such as Hospice care or end-of-life home nursing.
And of course, it is conservatives who form the bulk of those daffy folks who insist that Barack Obama is a non-Christian born in Africa; and who venerate such prospective national leaders as my personal favorite, Sarah Palin, who recently assured Fox News viewers that Africa was not a continent but “a country.”
But conservatives have never allowed facts to stand in the way of ideology; if the facts fail to support the belief system they rearrange the facts. In short, by repeatedly choosing dogma over data, conservatives have consistently aligned themselves on the wrong side of history, and if, as so often in the course of human affairs, past is prologue, we may soon see more of the same.