jannotes

The paper Conservatism and Motivated Social Cognition (Jost et al., 2003) is the landmark on the psychology of conservatism. It primarily notes temperamental personality variables that tend to fit in with conservatism. If, as I believe, fear is the master emotion of all animals, then conservatism is inherent in all of us. Political conservatism is specifically about how one believes we should be governed, and the authoritarian paradigm fits well in the fear box because of its tendency to promote certainty (i.e., lack of fear). Other related traits include group exclusiveness and dominance (xenophobia), intolerance of ambiguity, avoidance of uncertainty, need for clear structure, closure, aggression: these all are deeply fear based traits. I would think that most of the center of the bell curve holds these traits fairly strongly. George Lakoff makes an important point in pointing out that most of us are what he calls biconceptual, meaning that we all have liberal and conservative tendencies in different domains of our lives, and those can conflict within our own political leanings. There are religious conservatives who are politically liberal; one may be a fiscal conservative but a social liberal; few of us are without these conflicting domains. But here is something we should keep in mind. There are also people who, especially nowadays, are called conservatives, usually radical conservatives, who I believe don’t have those fear based motives: the libertarians. They believe in a totally emasculated government that has no power over its citizens except in handling violent crime. It’s other function is border defense. These people believe in absolute individual freedom, especially from any intrusion of responsibility towards the nation or its citizens (like all absolutes, it can only lead to paradox and logical invalidity). The virtue of selfishness is their moral code and restrictions on financial gain is for them the greatest of all injustices, something that brings out in them hatred and aggression like nothing else can. They understand freedom as so absolute, that any violence done to another can only be that other person’s fault since they should have been prepared and “taken the responsibility” in advance to prevent it. Ron Paul preaches this: we have no responsibility to help others out, we have no responsibility to our government after the army and police are paid for; all social or financial status is one’s own doing, or at least one’s moral responsibility to undo it. They pray to the alter of St. Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman is their God. Friedman stated unequivocally that the most egregious thing a government can do to a person is to put any restraints a person’s ability to make money; this, he said, would lead to the collapse of civilization. Those who don’t have the capital, in Ayn Rand’s words, (i.e., working people) are merely parasites. We call these people conservatives; I don’t know if that is what Jost et al. are describing. They are describing the little people whose temperaments find them desiring the leadership of these elites, who bring them into the fold with promises of group dominance, certainty, unambiguous conditions, a homogeneous culture, aggression towards those who are other, etc. Religion is used as is a sense of class warfare, not against wealth but educational level and life-style. The Koch brothers, who are clandestine, secretive and totally committed to the all out war they are waging (note the tapes that Mother Jones published) are at the forefront of this. Chris Christie, by the way, is in league with them, so all of his supposed independence and forthrightness is a sham. He attended the secret meeting secretly which tells us all we need to know about him. The message that is obvious in their actions and is explicit in their words is one of all out destruction of the US government. When reading The Shock Doctrine, we understand that the Friedman-John Galt revolution is no joke, and brutal psychopaths such as Pinochet and the Argentine , Uruguayan , and Brazilian dictatorships were specifically brought about for the sake of implanting Friedman’s Utopian Millennium of Market Culture (not just economy); this has all the earmarks of the same violent imposition of the perfect human world that the most doctrinaire Marxists attempted. This is what is going on, and to call it conservatism is to stretch things a bit, since conservatism is an attempt to maintain the status quo. I would add that in judging the rank and file Tea Partiers, they shouldn’t be demonized. They are ignorant and totally under the thumb of a cynical cartel of brutal and determined elites. Note how easily they were brought into a rage by the supposed destruction of Medicare and Social Security that Obama’s Health Care bill was going to cause. That more than anything else, along with the general xenophobic and theocratic mood it was wrapped in, brought us this wonderful bunch of representatives, and brought the Kochs and their minions closer to their goal of utter destruction of the power of the US Government. This is not political conservatism, it is sedition. Finally, even though we see the TP’s as “insane,” we should really ditch that trope. Irrational is not insane. It is the human condition. They are generally people like ourselves who are easily led into their nonsense by charlatans. Stalin fooled a few brilliant ones (Sartre and much of the 1940s Left) as did Hitler (Heidegger and Heisenberg come to mind), so we can expect the less brilliant to be even more pliant. I’m not sure combatting them with hateful rhetoric (as opposed to strong, censorious rhetoric) is in our best interest, especially for our own moral state.