Conservatism Eats Itself

The point of view Texas just correctedThe Texas school board's new curriculum continues the tragic decline of modern American "conservatism" as a movement with intellectual heft and consistency of thought.  Conservatives once imagined that they stood athwart the breach that threatened to replace individualism, inherited values and freedom with the top-down collective conformity of the Soviet Union.  Now, the right indoctrinates the young before college to counter the propaganda of the liberal intelligentsia, brands anyone that opposes extra-legal torture as "soft on terror" and attempts to "bureaucracize" language by calling torture "enhanced interrogation" and capitalism "free-market enterprise."  It is a tragedy that conservatives would embrace propaganda and torture, reducing their legacy of strident opposition to Communism and its evils to froth of partisanship.  Communism was evil because of what it did, not why it did it, if we do evil then we are no better.  

If only more people were temperamentally conservative - humble, careful and limited in their approach to politics- rather than ideologically conservative, which amounts to a shopping list of positions their team supports.  The need to ensure ideological purity in all walks of life- media, education, religion - is deeply un-conservative, because it undermines the importance of real life as distinct and superior to political life.  The distrust of government that underpins conservativism isn't because government ruins everything, but because the interventions of the state are an abstraction that makes experiencing authentic human existence more difficult.  By subjecting everything to an ideological litmus test, conservatives cease to have an experience apart from ideology.  For example, Glenn Beck says conservatives should leave churches that advocate "social justice," which he equates with closet Nazism (no, really!).  If you leave your church, the place you go to consecrate your holiest and most sacred beliefs, because of something a political commentator told you then clearly your church is not your religion.

Liberals are not superior to conservatives, they fall prey to the temptations of homogenizing their lives to avoid the awkwardness of meeting anyone or anything that disagrees with their preconceived notions.  However, liberals suffer from a crisis of confidence in their injection of ideology into culture; while everyone seems to agree that the media, academia and Hollywood are run by the left, those institutions stridently deny their bias and bends over backwards to prove their objectivity.  There are exceptions, but the institutions at least feign objectivity.  I imagine powerful liberals suffer from a paternalistic belief that everyone secretly hates them and most are too stupid to understand their enlightenment so they water it down for the rubes.  Faced with this sort of insidious liberalism, conservatives have been driven to read deeply into every part of culture to find examples of a hidden liberal agenda.  In the process they have lost their credibility as advocates of human authenticity: conservatives strive for a life of purity, not genuine expression.

Assuming culture's deep-seeded liberal bias- which is a hell of an assumption when I have to read so many stories about reconciliation and other parliamentary procedures that were frequently used by the Republicans but seemingly invented by the Democrats - I could see conservatives advocating a correction of past liberal overreach.  If the Texas School board banned Sex Education, a position I disagree with, I could appreciate their intentions; however, the active censoring of history that conflicts with the conservative version of the world is disgraceful.  It demonstrates a hypocritical lack of faith in core conservative beliefs, as though kids learning the facts will not come to the "right" conclusions.  Stephen Colbert quipped "reality has a well known liberal bias," in the parallel conservativ-eality is simply white, never black, and red, never blue.

Comments

[bill]

"Reality has a well known liberal bias" It may in the coastal enclaves, but it sure doesn't in Texas. Why can't the good citizens of Texas decide for themselves what balance their textbooks should contain? The reason is that while the words, "liberals are not superior to conservatives" sounds nice and self effacing; in reality liberals assume their massively superior intelligence . Folks in San Angelo, Texas and Broken Arrow, Oklahoma like the down home folksiness of Sarah Palin and think Nancy Pelosi is an absurd hag and dumb as a fence post. They overlooked Bush's tongue-tied
speech and liked his basic human decency while they view President Obama not in racial terms (contrary to the fevered theories on MSNBC) ,but as a clueless ideologue who is tone deaf to real people's concerns. I doubt the twain shall meet and the divide will only deepen.

[Joseph Cox]

See, if the fine residents of "real America" just wanted to highlight conservative themes and accomplishments, such as the Reagan revolution and the role of Republicans in Civil Rights (U.S. Grant in particular is underrated on that score), then I would understand and think "leave Texas to the Texans." That's the beauty of federalism: we bleeding heart atheists don't agree with how Texas wants to raise its kids, well, at least they don't get to impose their values on our children, and vice versa. The problem as I see it is a lack of intellectual honesty, and pretty explicitly: the Texas school board punishes Thomas Jefferson two centuries later for a letter he wrote advocating separation of church and state and removes the word "capitalism" from the textbooks because it's the sort of thing pointy headed liberals say.

For anyone, from any side of the spectrum, to defend that as mere "correction" or "re-balancing" is flagrantly rooting for the home team over actually judging what happened with any fair-mindedness. It doesn't have anything to do with Nancy Pelosi or President Obama, and dragging them into this is precisely why conservativism rings hallow these days: everything is a slight on your values, everything is part of the campaign against these anti-Christ liberal figures and, while squinting to see signs of hatred for the middle of the country, openly dismissing the Coasts as Sodom and Gomorrah is pro forma. What the Texas School Board did was pathetic, don't be sullied by associating with them.