Once upon a time in this country’s recent past you could find any number of Washington politicians who considered themselves to be “a liberal Republican” or “a conservative Democrat.” In fact both parties fielded a broad spectrum of legislators, thereby providing a substantial congruent field upon which they could work together.
This past decade, however, has seen a marked shift, most notably within the Republican party, wherein moderates have come to feel unwelcome – or are summarily booted out. As a result, our two political parties are now shaping up to resemble those of England, where you have an explicitly liberal party (there called Labor), and its opposite number, the Tory or Conservative party. Though this keeps things simple it also seems to have made congressional compromise impossible, often bringing government operations to a dead stop.
Contributing to this problem is a radical change in what “conservative” now means and what it stands for. The 1950 conservative was no less interested in ensuring that our government functioned effectively, as it took on tasks that individual citizens, even in the aggregate, could not do for themselves – provide national security, ensure that food and water were reasonably pure, deliver the mail, etc. At the same time, old line conservatives were profoundly budget conscious, feeling strongly that government should pay its way rather than offer entitlements or go to war on credit. Thus, they supported increases in tax revenues so as to ensure that the government could afford to underwrite its foreign policy and pay for the emollients that people expected. The thought of partying now and sticking the next generation with the bill was anathema to them. Finally, these traditional conservatives wanted to see government operate with a minimum intrusion into its citizens’ business and personal lives.
These eminently reasonably aspirations were congenial to most liberals (in both parties) as well, so compromises were readily reached and American democracy worked.
But politicians who call themselves “conservatives” today, however, are a very different breed. They are rigidly ideological and seem to view every issue through the prism of their belief systems, discarding facts that may conflict with how they wish things to be. They are suspicious of science and hold scientists in contempt. Global warming is a hoax. Fluorides cause autism. Evolution and natural selection are “theories,” creationism a fact.
These new conservatives can be relied upon to “stick to their guns” (and also try to ensure that people have as many guns in their homes as they can afford). They lobby for a bellicose foreign policy and, despite beating the drum of fiscal responsibility, are quite prepared to go to war on credit, heedless of the future costs in blood and treasure. Their motto seems to be: “compromise is for sissies.”
In a functioning democracy, when inevitably there is failure to find common ground between starkly different interests, the two parties tend to rotate — to take turns in power. Thus we can expect to see perhaps two or four years where the conservatives hold sway followed by a comparable period in which liberals are able to enact some of its programs. Accordingly, it would be useful to review what life was like in America during the past century when under conservative rule so that we may better anticipate the coming American experience when we may expect conservatives to once again assume power. I believe that the facts demonstrate that had conservatives perpetually run the show over the course of the last hundred years, this country would be a very different place than it is today. We can extrapolate from this into the future, thereby divining what America might be like were today’s conservatives able to take charge for any extended period of time.
We could 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, when 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 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 vociferously 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 have 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 San Anselmo, CA 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 national deficit that 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.
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, ran 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.”
It seems clear that conservatives, by consistently choosing dogma over data and ideology over reasonable analysis are forever on the wrong side of history.