What’s Wrong with America Part 2: Conservatives
I noted in Part 1 that liberals were anti-democratic, attempting to use an illusion of majority support to institute policies against majority opinion with a loveable underdog image. The following essay about conservatives might seem more positive. The reason for this is that conservatives use more straightforward tactics, making the
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Now, you are correct about the connection between technology and society, but it does not follow that the desire to implement certain goals that seem past-oriented with regards to one will automatically result in stagnation with regards to the other. Economic conservatives, in fact, would completely oppose the idea that some governmental or other body would have to approve any technological innovation before it entered society, that being the antithesis of their dream of a completely free capitalist market. As for the religious conservatives, they would also not introduce any such control over technology, preferring, instead, to simply legislate away any behavior they deem inappropriate. Of course, it is probably true that such legislating away behavior could never function because technological innovation results in too much pressure to change that behavior. But this does not mean that the attempt to legislate away certain behaviors will automatically result in less technological innovation, merely that as society inevitably changes, conservatives will continually adapt new laws in order to preserve the state in which they believe.
My argument here is not with your observation that a static society is, well, static. This is a tautology after all. But with the notion that stasis is what modern conservatives want. Sure, their ideals may be those in the past, but their ideals are still ideas, and not state-descriptions. Economic conservatives want a completely free market; it is hard to see how this promotes stagnation. Foreign policy conservatives want a mono-polar world with America as the only superpower, but it is hard to see how this would cause stagnation. They certainly don't long for a return of the Soviet Union, and the ever increasing research into armaments to maintain superpower status would not result in stagnation in at least one area. As for religious conservatives, even if they got their way with a return to old-fashioned family values, there would then be plenty of other issues for them to take up, such as the great social injustice and poverty that Jesus spoke against. Again, it is hard to see a tendency towards stagnation there. So you may be right that conservatism, in a dictionary sense, is a movement for stasis and stagnation, but in the sense of the modern political movement, that is simply not true. I, at least, don't see anyone marching under the banner of stasis.
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However, I would point out that the "free market" people are not economic conservatives, they are economic radicals and are usually Libertarians. They frequently have many traits of right-wing radicals such as racism and family values, but that is because the free-market crowd tends to attract the sort of people who grew up rich and stayed rich and thus believe that in a free market they would rule all the lesser people by dint of their "success." I'd promise an essay about these people, but they really don't make up much of America and have minimal influence on it. Ron Paul got just enough attention to cripple the hopes of this movement for the future, much like Ralph Nader did in 2000.
What you call religious conservatives are pretty much the only group that mostly fits the criteria for true conservativism. They are often so blind in their faith that they ignore all reason when making decisions, and would happily grind society to a halt. They suppress new technologies like cloning and stem cell research for no reason other than it makes them uncomfortable, and they attempt to legislate behavior. I refrained from naming religion in my essay, however, because the majority of religious people in general and Christians in particular are not conservatives, though the majority of conservatives are religious Christians.
Conservatives do not consciously advocate "stasis," because they do not see what they desire as such. They see it as change for the better. However, once they achieve this change, or more often a reversion, they will oppose further change by any means necessary. It has happened, and could again.
The Dark Ages were the epitome of conservativism, with the church and the lords stifling all change, social and technological, for hundreds of years in order to maintain their power, to the detriment of the entire population, which suffered through poverty for generations, then faced witch hunts, civil wars, and mass death when outside forces like trade and disease struck. Different parts of Europe saw different disasters due to different stimuli, but it was terrible for the people involved in every case.
More recently, conservatives in Japan attempted to apply the former glory of samurai and Bushido to modern war and technology, but lost the ideals of honor and duty inherent in that code. The result was WWII and atrocities in China that put Hitler to shame, followed by the shattering of the society when it proved incapable of conquering the world.
While liberals who were to reach their goals would naturally become conservatives to maintain their new society (see Lenin), a culture of liberalism is less prone to the sort of stagnation that becomes crippling, and this sort of rapid switch only works in already devastated nations--the same sort of nations that allow radicals to take power in the first place. If, however, conservatives take power through a gradual societal process, as in the above examples, they are usually able to maintain power until they are broken by outside forces, with devastating effects on the population. This is why conservatives in America are so dangerous--our society is too stable and too heterogeneous to be susceptible to radical reform, but a gradual slide toward conservativism could be even more dangerous. The polarization of America into Liberal vs. Conservative that is occurring makes this more likely to happen, because people tend to go radical conservative when threatened, not radical liberal, as proven by 9/11.
Perhaps I should add the word "radical," combine the two essays, and title it "What's Wrong with America: Radicals."
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I stand by my definition of economic conservatives because, although many of the most extreme of that branch certainly are radical, and most Libertarians are economic conservatives, not all economic conservatives are so extreme, but they certainly lean in that direction. Just as not all people who oppose abortion oppose it even in cases where the life of the mother is threatened, so not all economic conservatives support an absolutely free market, they simply want us to be closer than we currently are. Many of these people certainly call themselves conservatives, many vote Republicans. In fact the entire mantra of the "tax and spend Democrat" is a Republican appeal to economic conservatives.
I suspect that the Dark Ages were a time a little too complex to sum up under the heading of conservatism, at least as we currently understand it. There were probably numerous factors leading to the conditions in Europe at that time, and although they almost certainly were conservative in our current sense, it is not at all clear that conservatism was any sort of causal factor in the bringing about or maintaining of the Dark Ages. From what I've heard a much greater part in bringing about the Dark Ages is the land and tax structure of the disintegrating Roman Empire than anything else, but I'm no historian. Certainly conservatism as we understand it came about as a descriptive term to apply, perhaps, to the Dark Ages, a harkening back to old Feudal and Clerical power structures, but it seems misleading to suggest that modern conservatism is likely to bring us back to the Dark Ages, at least not without further argument about the causal relations involved.
The modern case of Japan is certainly more interesting, but you can't rely on simply the fact that both American and Japan have conservative movements in order to draw the parallel. You must show that there is something within the type of conservatism that America has that, if in power, would lead us down an equally disastrous path. You haven't provided such an argument. Honestly, if you did I probably don't know enough about that period in history to fully assess it, but I could at least tell whether it was minimally fleshed out enough for such an argument. You would have to show that there are enough similarities between the modern American conservatives and the old Japanese conservatives that they are likely to follow a similar path when in power, and that the current power structure is such that were they to come to power that they even could follow such a similar path. This would be interesting reading, and might do far more to shed light on what might be wrong with America than generalities based on vague labels which might or might not apply to actual political groups in the US.
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Second, it is not clear that opposition to that sort of medical research can really be generalized to a final opposition to all sorts of technological improvement. To do so essentially makes out the modern conservative to be essentially equivalent to a sort of neo-Amish who, if in power, would legally freeze technology where it is today, so that in the year 3000 they will still be living with 2008 tech. "You mean they still drive around in hybrid gas/electric cars and feel that cold-fusion is the work of the devil?" Perhaps your argument isn't so extreme as that, but that certainly seems to be its flavor, and I fail to see how it isn't just a sort of slippery-slope argument. At least you need to justify the generalization, showing how such a generalizing tendency is inherent within the conservative movement, such that if they were to take power, they would go as you say.
Now, I agree that a slow slide into a certain type of radical conservatism (which I would prefer to call if fascism) is a danger to America, but I don't see this danger coming from the religious conservatives, rather from the foreign policy conservatives, those who see America as having a right to rule in the world and who are willing to do anything to maintain that place of power, including suppress opposition to it at home. The environment that feeds this is the political outlook that says that collective security is more important than individual liberty. However, I hesitate to call this outlook purely conservative, for although in this guise it is mostly held by those on the political right, it is probably the case that a version of it also exists on the left. After all, what else is the laws to protect us from ourselves craze than but a more left leaning version of the same collective security over individual liberty drive? Perhaps that is the real, and real subtle because versions of it exist in both main political camps, ideological danger to America, those who desire individual liberty to such an extent that they neglect valid security concerns, and those who emphasize public security so much that they drown the individual. Of course, one person may be radical in different ways about different issues.
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