by John W. Dean
Conservatism Today: A Dysfunctional Family
No doubt the adamancy with which some conservatives insisted on their interpretations, or views, of history led to the movement’s eventual splintering into several factions. Whatever the origin of their disagreements, however, they remain a divided family. Today the Republican Party strives to contain conservatism’s constituent groups, some of whom get along and others who do not. It is not possible to identify precise divisions within conservatism, because many conservatives identify with more than one dogma. William Safire cleverly made this point when he conducted a personal “depth-poll” of his own brain to find out what held together at least “five Republican factions.” Safire, it appears, sees himself as an “economic,” “social,” and “cultural” conservative with “libertarian” impulses and the idealistic instincts of a “neoconservative.” “If these different strains of thought were held by discrete groups of single-minded people,” acknowledges Safire, “we would have a Republican Party of five warring bands.” He concedes that all these varying attitudes cause him “cognitive dissonance,” which he experiences as “the jangling of competing inclinations, with the owner of the brain having to work out trade-offs, suppressions and compromises until he or she achieves a kind of puzzled tranquility within.” Safire said his dissonance is “forced into harmony by the need to choose one leader who reflects the preponderance of” his views.[44]
In 1996 the Washington Times’s magazine Insight examined “Who’s Who in America’s Conservative Revolution,” an article that highlighted the remarkable degree of sectarianism in the right wing, a fact well known to most conservatives. Insight noted that there were thirteen print journals geared toward the various factions of conservative readers.[45] These journals represented “distinct, though overlapping, philosophies,” which the magazine, a well-known conservative publication itself, divided into ten different species of conservatives. Here, in highly compressed, occasionally paraphrased, and updated form, is a glimpse of the modern conservative family tree:[*]
Austriocons: The paleoconservatives (paleocons), so called because they were conservatives back when most of the neoconservatives (neocons) were still Trotskyites, are split over the issue of free trade. Those paleos who are followers of the “Austrian” school of economics, i.e., the free-trade libertarians who honor Ludwig von Mises, were dubbed by Insight as “Austriocons.”
Buchanocons: Paleos who have rebelled against free trade and the unaccountable global bureaucracies that they believe it is producing. Their political leader is Patrick Buchanan. Since 2002, they have had their own journal, The American Conservative.
Neocons: Intellectuals who drifted from the far left to the center to the right, carrying their flagship magazine, Commentary, with them. They are mostly Jewish, and mostly New York based. Neocons tend to be militant internationalists. They publish their own inside-the-Beltway weekly, The Weekly Standard.
Aquinacons: Neocons acquired a Christian wing when the Reverend Richard John Neuhaus founded his monthly magazine, First Things, patterned after Commentary. However, this is an increasingly distinct group, one that can be called “Aquinacons” because its members focus on the work of a rising generation of academic experts on the natural-law theories of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.
Radiocons: (Just kidding, says Insight.) This group includes talk-radio conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, Gordon Liddy, Mike Reagan, Blanquita Cullum, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, and other popularizers of the political and cultural right, if not their enormous middle America audiences.
Sociocons: Often lumped with the religious right, these social conservatives advance secular arguments for curbing abortion, divorce, illegitimacy, rights of homosexuals, and drugs. Its leading lights are the Family Research Council, the Institute for American Values, and columnist Cal Thomas.
Theocons: Conservatives who actually favor a more or less theocratic application of biblical law. Unlike Aquinacons, they reject natural law. In fact, this faction is far smaller than some in the news media believe, according to Insight.
Republicons: Young people who learned their conservative theory back in college and since have given themselves over to activism, either as Republican campaign strategists or as policy advocates. Newt Gingrich is their hero, and Grover Norquist (of the Americans for Tax Reform) is their leader. They have politically gold-plated résumés and no time for pessimism.
Catocons: Hard-core libertarians who recognize that even if your goal is to dismantle government, you have to play the Washington policy-wonk game to change things. Their leading think tank is the Cato Institute.
Platocons: Allied with, but different from, the Aquinacons, the Platocons are the disciples of the late Leo Strauss, who excited generations of students at the University of Chicago about classical political philosophy. Not all Straussians are conservatives, however. Still, their belief that ideas are intrinsically important, and are not just manifestations of class interest or historical prejudice, puts them at odds with the academic left.[46]
There is almost no end to the ways in which the conservative factions can be sliced and diced.[47] Nonetheless, they all fall neatly within three general categories, with their current significance determined by poll numbers that indicate their relative size within the conservative movement.[48] In February 2004 TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics (TIPP) conducted a nationwide survey that gathered information across the left/right political spectrum. It found that conservatives constituted 43 percent of their respondents, with moderates at 35 percent and liberals at 18 percent. The TIPP poll sample revealed a higher percentage of conservatives than has been the norm for other polls. For example, the national election exit polls for eight elections between 1976 and 2004 have fairly consistently shown conservatives at 33 percent, moderates at 47 percent, and liberals at 20 percent.[49] But the size of the conservative response to the TIPP poll provides an excellent basis for the poll’s follow-up question, which asked conservatives about the nature of their conservatism. In response, 52 percent of conservatives described themselves as social conservatives, 49 percent as fiscal conservatives, and 13 percent as neoconservatives. (The 114 percent total appears attributable to overlapping responses, for there is no doubt that some social conservatives would also view themselves as fiscal conservatives.)[50] Absent from this TIPP poll are breakdowns for categories like traditional conservatives, religious conservatives, and right-leaning libertarians, because these groups can easily fall within social conservatism, fiscal conservatism, and neoconservatism.[51] Most revealing in the TIPP poll is the strength of social conservatism.
Conservatism’s Power of Negative Thinking
Given the rather distinct beliefs of the various conservative factions, which have only grown more complex with time, how have conservatives succeeded in coalescing as a political force? The simple answer is through the power of negative thinking, and specifically, the ability to find common enemies. The adherents of early conservatism—economic conservatives, traditional conservatives, and libertarians—agreed that communism was the enemy, a fact that united them for decades—and hid their differences. Today’s conservatives—especially social conservatives, as opposed to intellectuals and the more thoughtful politicians—define themselves by what they oppose, which is anything and everything they perceive to be liberal. That category includes everyone from Democrats to anyone with whom they disagree, and can, therefore, automatically be labeled a liberal. Another group that has recently been designated as an enemy is “activist judges,” regardless of their party or philosophical affiliation. Activist judges are best described as those whose rulings run contrary to the beliefs of a particular conservative faction.
Antipathy to liberalism has been present from the outset of the conservative movement but it only became a powerful unifying influence in the early 1980s. Sidney Blumenthal, when still a staff writer at the Washington Post, concluded that “conservatism requires liberalism for its meaning,” for “without th
e enemy [of liberalism] to serve as nemesis and model, conservative politics would lack its organizing principle.”[52] Blumenthal’s observation, made two decades ago, is even more valid today. Leading conservative Web sites, including well-funded think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the right-leaning libertarian Cato Institute, spend a lot of time and money criticizing or complaining with varying degrees of contempt about all matters perceived to be “liberal.”[53] Important conservative opinion journals, like the National Review and Human Events, see the world as bipolar: conservative versus liberal.[54] Right-wing talk radio could not survive without its endless bloviating about the horrors of liberalism. Trashing liberals is nothing short of a cottage industry for conservative authors. Take the “queen of mean,” Ann Coulter, whose titles speak for themselves: Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right (2002); Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (2003); and How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter (2004). Slander, for example, contains page after page of scorn, criticism, belittlement, and bemoaning of ideas she believes liberal. Her books have also generated a subsidiary cottage trade in fact-checking her work, which has amply demonstrated that Coulter apparently considers accuracy as something that needs only to be approximated.[55]
All the hyperventilating about liberalism by conservatives is surprising, because it is so unnecessary. Liberalism is a straw man conservatives love to attack, but there are not, in fact, enough liberals to be a true threat to conservatism. A recent Harris Poll found that only 18 percent of American adults call themselves liberals,[56] and the TIPP poll, cited earlier, found the figure to be 20 percent. Although then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich unequivocally declared in 1998 that the “age of liberalism is over,” condemnation of the liberal bogeyman continues to be a clarion call for most conservatives. In truth, conservatives attack liberals, or those they label or perceive as liberal, for several reasons. It is, of course, a handy means to rally the troops, for the conservative base enjoys it when their leaders and prominent voices attack those who do not share their views. It is also a means to raise money; fund-raising letters and drives regularly recount the horrors of liberalism. Many conservatives, however, are simply entertained by reading conservative authors or hearing conservative talk-show hosts rant about liberals. The exaggerated hostility also apparently satisfies a psychological need for antagonism toward the “out group,” reinforces the self-esteem of the conservative base, and increases solidarity within the ranks.[57]
Law professor John Eastman described the contemporary conservative movement as “a bit of a three-legged stool.”[58] Eastman wrote that conservatives find cohesion in their efforts to pack the federal judiciary with judges who will work at “recovering the original understanding of the Constitution—one that recognized the scope of federal power over matters truly national, such as national security, but that sought to revive the limits on federal authority in other areas of daily life, as the Constitution envisioned.”[59] In short, the concerned effort to oppose so-called judicial activism is important to most all conservatives, and indeed, books, blogs, and essays on the subject have come from high-profile voices throughout the conservative factions.[60] Thus, when Bush nominated his White House counsel, Harriet Miers, for the Supreme Court, notwithstanding her stellar conservative credentials she was attacked relentlessly by other conservatives, who doubted she had the cerebral wherewithal to wage battle behind closed doors at the high Court on their behalf.[61] National Review writer John Derbyshire was a leader in the snarling pack chasing Miers, employing conservative rhetoric to do the job. After “reading her thoughts, messages and speeches,” Derbyshire reported, “I mean, the sheer, dreary, numbing m—e—d—i—o—c—r—i—t—y of them.” He concluded:
This is a person who never had an original or interesting thought in her life. Reading Miers is like suffocating under a mountain of polystyrene packing blobbles. What on earth does it say about the President that, knowing, as he must have, how completely and irredeemably second-rate she is, he would put her name forward? The world, certainly in places like the Supreme Court, is a never-ending war of ideas. To ask which side of this war Ms. Miers would fight on is pointless. She doesn’t know the war is underway; and if she knew, she’d probably think it could easily be brought to an end if we’d all just be nicer to each other.[62]
Notwithstanding a number of less than subtle signals from the White House that Ms. Miers, a born-again evangelical Christian, would indeed vote the way conservatives wished on issues like abortion, school prayer, sex education, and other social issues, she was eventually forced to withdraw her nomination.
A close study of conservatives reveals an interesting trait: These people do not see themselves as they actually are, but rather as something very different. In short, they seem to have little facility for self-analysis. Consider, for example, Derbyshire’s mean-spirited remarks about Harriet Miers, and now listen to Derbyshire’s take on himself, when he says he “started reading [the National Review] in the late 1970s, and it has always kept that agreeable, tolerant, gentlemanly tone, and as long as it keeps it, I shall be an NR reader (and, I hope, contributor). The tone comes, of course, from the personality of the founder, Bill Buckley, who is one of the most good-natured men I have ever met—a true American gentleman.”[63] Could a man as intelligent as Derbyshire actually believe his comments about Ms. Miers were “gentlemanly”? Not surprisingly, the very conservatives who love to hurl invective against the ranks of their enemies prove to have the thinnest of skins when the same is done to them. Many of the examples are familiar: Ann Coulter, who can trash perceived liberals on national television but has been known to walk offstage when booed, or to start crying when she thinks she is being treated unfairly; Rush Limbaugh, who also makes his living saying unkind things about those with whom he disagrees, thought it unfair, as did his followers, when his addiction to OxyContin was reported, along with the dubious means he serviced his habit, despite his own attacks on others who use drugs. Similarly, Mr. Virtue, William Bennett, apparently found nothing ironic or contradictory in his preaching (and selling) virtue while being a compulsive gambler himself, and was angry when he was found out.
Conservatives Are Often Illogical, Inconsistent, and Contradictory
Many conservatives, particularly those who are clearly authoritarians, are not aware of their illogical, contradictory, and hypocritical thinking. If made cognizant of it, they either rationalize it away, neglect to care, or attack those who reveal their human weaknesses. Because such thinking seems to be a reality of contemporary conservatism, anyone who operates from a logical mind, or has an inclination for reasoned judgment, can have trouble with it. Social conservatives are especially susceptible to irrational beliefs, as a few examples will show.
Evangelical Christian conservatives speak of their belief in a “culture of life,” a concept drawn from the teaching of the Catholic Church that underlies the evangelicals’ opposition to abortion. But for the Catholic Church, the culture of life also means opposition to the death penalty, which evangelical Christian conservatives fully support and strongly encourage. They are untroubled by the inconsistency of their beliefs, and when this is pointed out they explain it away. The unborn are innocent while those being executed are not, yet the culture of life believes it is God’s wish to protect all life. As another example, social conservatives are deeply offended by atheists who want to remove the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, yet with great solemnity and earnestness they recite—as often as possible—that pledge and its words: “liberty and justice for all.” For all but atheists, they mean. Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited prayer in public schools, Christian conservatives have been up in arms, with the most vocal being Christians who believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Of course, those who truly know the Bible know that Jesus said, “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they
love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you (Matthew 6:5–7; emphasis added). So illogical is much of the biblically driven political thinking of evangelical Christian conservatives, for whom faith appears to trump reason, that theologians like Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong have written books with titles like Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (1991).
Jonah Goldberg, writing for the National Review, has acknowledged the contradictions within modern conservatism. Rather than finding them a problem, though, he deems them a virtue. “The beauty of the conservative movement,” he said, “is that we all understand and accept the permanence of contradiction” in thinking. One can envision George Orwell spinning in his grave in frustration at a remark like that, for it is pure “doublethink.” Goldberg noted in passing that Jesus was not a conservative, which is certainly true, and is another fact ignored by the religious right. It does not take a particularly close reading of the New Testament, or the teachings of Jesus, to appreciate that the term “politically conservative Christian” has an oxymoronic quality. This is why conservatives have had to invent terms like “compassionate conservatism.” But for those who believe that contradiction is a thing of beauty, the concept of compassionate conservatism will not tax credulity whatsoever.
Psychological Perspectives on Conservatism
Public criticism by conservatives greeted the work of New York University professor John T. Jost and his collaborators when they published a report entitled “Political Conservatism as Motivated Cognition.”[*][64] This study examines the psychology of political conservatism, basing its findings on a mass of data: forty-four years of studies by social scientists investigating conservatism, using eighty-eight different techniques and involving over twenty-two thousand participants.[65] Because its results are founded on empirical information drawn from experiments and testing—and conservatism views itself as grounded in empirical thinking—the negative reaction seemed out of place. Indeed, conservative commentators devoted little serious attention to the study, rejecting its conclusions based on a press release.[66]