The obsolete conservative mentality

29 Oct 2009

Several conversations and thinking-sessions recently have brought me to a new conclusion: conservativism is obsolete. Mind you, I’ve thought the GOP was obsolete for a while (with no real leader, and Michael Steele proving his inaptitude at every possible opportunity), but this is starting to translate to conservative values as a whole.

If anything, the election of Barack Obama symbolizes an end to the era of extremes. Arguably, that’s an era that America’s been stuck in since its inception. And for an understandable reason. When you have a country born of a violent revolution (whether or not it was just isn’t even at issue here”, that mentality of** **“we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more” is bound to stick around. It’s a core part of what’s up to this point been an inflexible American mentality.

But I’m not afraid now to prophesy the end of that. There are definite signs that this era is coming to an end. Call it relief from Bushism, call it being starstruck, but those things are worth something.

We’re talking to Iran. We’re working for meaningful diplomacy in the Middle East. We’re closing Guantanamo. We’re passing inclusive hate-crimes legislation. We’re going to pass health care reform (so help me G-d).

This isn’t meant to be a laundry list of things that Obama has done right – there are plenty of things he’s done wrong. So far, Afghanistan is a big one, and I’m not yet sure where it’s going from here. But there’s a significance to this progress that is underestimated.

To argue this point, I want to address what I see as the core concept of conservatism – absolutes. Personal responsibility, personal liberty, moral integrity. Now, I don’t mean to trash those things – they’re all very good. I’m all for responsibility, liberty, and integrity. But I don’t look at them in a vacuum. I don’t pretend that you can separate them from all other worldly concepts and still treat them in the same way.

Take, for example, the Republican war on climate change science in the 90′s. Regardless of the industrial, economic, or personal motivations behind the actions of many prominent conservatives, one of their most devastating weapons weapons was the magnification and misrepresentation of scientific uncertainty. Now, I’m not saying there aren’t conservative scientists (there are many smart people who are conservative), but the aggressive right-wing politics that the Gingrich house espoused appealed deliberately to the fear that uneducated conservatives have about uncertainty.

I can’t really call myself a scientist – I’m a college student studying various sciences, but I can say that I have a very good knowledge of and deep respect for the scientific process. It’s a process that’s different from almost any other. The “scientific community” (a phrase which implies more unity of opinion than does in fact exist) has deliberately created a process designed to be self-sustaining (in that those whose ideas are determined to be sound are then given the ability to make that judgment about others), and accurate (in that people are directly responsible for the content, execution, and ramifications of their ideas). There is no other intellectual system this rigorous.

To destroy the public’s perception of that well-founded structure, conservatives (with the aid of industry lobbyists) turned to people’s fear of the unknown. That fear is, at its heart, very unscientific. While a conservative in that fight might say that science cannot explain everything (factually correct), a scientist would argue that that’s mising the point. Science is about quantifying uncertainty. Science accepts that there are certain things we’re not currently capable of understanding, for a variety of reasons, and sets as its primary goals defining the limits of what those concepts are, working to increase our knowledge of the unknown, and allowing us to find concrete ways of expressing exactly what it is we don’t know.

This process is fundamentally subverted by that of politics. Take, for example, the 2001 Data Quality Act. In essence it gives the OMB the power to decide what does and does not constitute valid scientific information. This is a fundamentally unscientific concept. The government has not historically and should not have the capability to make scientific judgments. Within the peer-review process, a scientists rigorously check their colleagues’ work and verify their conclusions. There is no entity doing this for the federal government. So when the government can reject scientific evidence based on anything other than the direct advice or opinion of the scientific community (perhaps indirectly, as in a scientific claim that has been debunked in a peer-reviewed journal), it gains a huge advantage. Suddenly, the government is able to misrepresent scientific data. The only people who can call them out on it are scientists, and when you combine this with a toxic conservative ideological distrust for formally structured, impersonal systems (like the peer-review process), it’s easy to paint scientists as conspiracy theorists who must be stopped by the dedicated pro-small-government advocates. It fits right into those same constituents’ fears of big government. In their mind, the conservatives are coming into office to shrink the government and prevent the scientists from using their massive deceptive structure to fool the common folks.

I’d argue that the 1990′s Gingrich-controlled House attitude towards climate science is largely responsible for some current political phenomena as well. Specifically, the added role that the government played in scientific processes is in my opinion the reason that prominent climate deniers, long disgraced and disproved by near-unanimous consensuses (unanimous to an unusual magnitude), still gain public attention. Had the government acted on the scientific community’s best advice at the time it was given, those people would have quickly faded into the background. And yet we still see this misinformation published by major news organizations. That’s because in the early years of the debate they gained a legitimacy they could have found nowhere in the scientific community due to the government’s willingness to feature their views. That’s a direct result of industry lobbying and concerted GOP efforts to publish false data and conclusions to the public as truth and undermine the legitimacy of well-founded scientific claims based on ad hominem, irrelevant attacks.

For a movement that prides itself on individualism and government non-intervention, conservatives are remarkably willing to support the government in applying their own morals to others. Two good examples of this are abortion rights and marriage equality. In both situations, you have extremely personal issues with far-reaching consequences for all those involved. Decisions on abortion or marriage are among the most important anyone could make in their life. And yet, conservatives are willing to paint with a broad brush the challenges people face in deciding whether or not to have an abortion or the feelings people have for one another, and declare one thing right and one thing wrong in every situation. Absolutism, again. There are endless examples. Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, health care, and so on. In each of them, conservatives are willing to stick to principles of absolutes that are at their core restrictive. To be sure, I, as a liberal Democrat, have very strong values, but my values are based around freedom of choice. I believe that everyone should have the right to choose whether or not they have an abortion. Everyone should have the right to choose who they marry. Everyone should have the right to choose where they get their healthcare from. We should pursue foreign policy that opens us up to the rest of the world, not secures our status as a superpower at the expense of diplomatic relationships. And I believe that the government should take a strong stance to prevent anyone from taking away someone else’s choices. By creating a public option to prevent corporate monopolies on insurance, by passing inclusive hate-crimes legislation (yay!) to prevent crimes and intimidation against people who make different choices, by preventing conservatives from intimidating those who’ve chosen to get an abortion. That’s the government’s job. To give people the freedom to make their own choices.

That’s why I’m declaring the impending doom of a movement based around restrictions of liberty. One that believes, and I am sure quite honestly in most cases, that the way to do this is by taking away the fundamental structures designed to preserve individual freedoms. By seeking to undermine policies designed to strengthen those structures and add new ones as they are found necessary. That hasn’t worked in the past, it isn’t working now, and it will never work.

And I think America is waking up. I’m not claiming that this is a shift I expect to happen in the extremely near future. But this country has been fundamentally changed by the election of President Barack Obama.

It’s change we can believe in. And we’re never going back.