If you’re a conservative in the US, you cannot be a Republican anymore.
The function of conservatives in every society is to maintain and preserve that society. Other forces attempt to change or improve or reform or destroy; conservatives hold the line against the forces of change in order to maintain and preserve.
If conservatism works well, it acts as a buffer that allows for gradual change. It prevents change that is so disruptive to a society or the people in it that the society or elements of it are destroyed. Whether being conservative or not is the ‘right’ stance to take at a given moment depends on circumstances just like everything does. But it’s a necessary part of human nature and social functioning. It’s a cast of mind that attempts to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Republicans in the US abandoned conservatism a long time ago. Maybe they abandoned it during the Reagan years; certainly they had abandoned it by the time they were castigating the first President Bush for not being radical enough. They had definitively abandoned it by the time they were impeaching President Clinton.
Today’s Republicans have left conservatism so far behind in the rearview mirror that their only response to seeing it in front of them is pure rage. Today’s Republicans hate the US as it exists and as it has existed since World War II with a white hot fury that makes them want to destroy it.
That might be an exaggeration – but it isn’t.
Attempting to overthrow the government on a certain January 6th is pure and simple an attempt to destroy the country as it exists.
You could say it wasn’t Republicans per se who tried to overthrow the government of the United States – except that it was. And still is.
In the intervening years, Republicans and the right wing of United States politics have attempted to destroy conservatism and all the certainty and stability that conservatism cherishes and seeks to defend. They’ve made stunning attempts to enforce changes that make a mockery of any concept other than that of radicalism and maybe theocracy.
Nothing could be more un-American and unconservative than attempts to overturn the Constitution and establish a theocracy in the US, unless I suppose you want unending civil strife, which may be what the so-called conservatives want.
But let’s move away from the generalizations and talk about some specifics. Let’s talk, for example, about abortion.
A true conservative would not have voted to overturn Roe v. Wade because, as every lawyer knows, Roe v. Wade was settled precedent. Overturning it was a radical, shockingly radical, move by any court. Overturning it was a judicial decision – but in no way a judicious decision.
Tossing aside precedent in the law is like overturning the rule of law itself, which is kind of what Republicans are attempting to do altogether – destroy the rule of law.
For Supreme Court justices to undermine the very foundation of their existence is shocking in and of itself.
But beyond that, the legal edifice arising from Roe v. Wade was vast and settled as well, and the fact that a relative few radicals were against it doesn’t change that. People’s lives were affected by the existing law, and they could make their decisions accordingly.
Kudos to the radicals for their persistence and commitment to uprooting all that, but that persistence and commitment is anything but conservative. It’s not even historical! Or Biblical. Or anything else for that matter.
But then Samuel Alito, who wrote the opinion and carefully tried to rely on history to back up his arguments, has never claimed to be a conservative, nor is he one. He’s a religious extremist. And extremism, by its nature, can’t be conservative. People who start out conservative can become extremist, but once you’ve crossed the river into extremism, you’ve left the balmy valley of conservatism behind.
The essence of extremism, which is what the Republican party has become the standard-bearer for, is to stop letting things restrain you. Laws stop restraining you. Norms stop restraining you. Common sense and history stop restraining you. Truth stops restraining you.
And if you’re a Supreme Court Justice, precedent stops restraining you. And that sets a very dangerous, uh, precedent. It essentially means that the Supreme Court feels entitled to make up, on the basis of personal feeling, any interpretation of any law or the Constitution without regard to what everyone else in the country (meaning those, ahem, who are actually affected by the rulings) understand normal English words and laws to mean.
Justices and prospective justices can lie without fear of anything because they have removed all internal restraints against their own power.
Anything or anyone that recognizes no restraints on its own power is by definition a tyrant.
We have, in the current Republican party, the party of tyrants.
The idea of course behind overturning Roe v. Wade was that average ‘conservatives’ in the populace would come along for the ride. That the people to whom Trump (who appointed the people who overturned precedent) were tyrants themselves and would embrace tyranny in their name.
That might be true. Trump tends to have good instincts about the people he’s appealing to, which is not the same as respecting those he’s appealing to. But he understands them to a certain degree and leverages that understanding for his own purposes. That’s partly why Trump fans are fans, because he is a tyrant in their own name.
That doesn’t mean they’re not lying when they say they trust him more than they trust their own families. They don’t trust him at all. If they trusted him, they would have gotten the COVID-19 vaccine he went to a great deal of trouble to facilitate and urged his supporters to take. But they didn’t get vaccinated and some of them died for it, because no they don’t trust Trump any more than they trust anything else. You can die of paranoia just like anything else and sometimes people do.
At any rate, the siren song of the Republican party is ‘come along, come along, come along, believe our lies, believe our lies, believe our lies.’ And while that may not quite be as well-written a song as your average Taylor Swift tune, it’s the kind of song that endures and others build on.
So what’s a true conservative to do with today’s Republican party?
I suppose the obvious choices are either to lie about being a true conservative who doesn’t break what’s not already broken – or to get out.
It’s not really possible to get elected in the parts of America where people actually live as a modern Republican – a true-blue not-in-the-least-conservative-dyed-in-the-wool-tyrant-lacking-all-restraint Republican. Because normal people (who are not natural tyrants) don’t want to come along, ride the boat of extremism over the Rapids of Ruin and crash into the rocks of Ultimate Despair. Or something like that.
In the US, more people tend to identify as Democrats than Republicans precisely due to this association of Republicans with extremism. This is no way indicates that Democrats are deeply popular (although they are more than popular than Republicans in terms of the popular vote), but that fewer people are willing to identify with either party. The percentage of people identifying as independents or non-affiliated keeps growing.
The American constitutional system was designed partly to uh, restrain, extremists and keep them from getting the upper hand. Scarily enough, however, the Republicans and their extremist supporters are doing everything they can to destroy the American constitutional system. Precisely because the American system, as well as the innate American character, stands in the way of their extremist agenda.
The deal with extremists, though, is that they are absolutely, positively not ‘live and let live’ types. Whether extremism starts on the left or on the right, it eventually ends up in the same bossy place – which is that everyone has to do everything the way the extremist thinks they ought to. This business of trying to make everyone do things the same way, worship exactly the same god in exactly the same way (um, Taliban) is an affront to human nature – which makes the current Republican agenda an affront to human nature.
Which, in its own way, makes the Republican agenda very old news indeed. For as long as people have been people, people have hated people. Ancient tribes hated other ancient tribes and resented the hell out of difficult people in their own tribes. Grudges, petty resentments, jealousies, envies, ambitions, misunderstandings, cruelty, and passive aggression – these things weren’t invented yesterday.
And since living with other people is so difficult for all of us – requiring endless compromise, thought, tolerance of ambiguity, adaptability, forgiveness, empathy, and goodwill – there have always been people who think they can relieve themselves of the torture of real relationships by imposing some kind of a fantasy of order on them.
There are always people who think the world would be so much better if it was something entirely different.
The world is not something entirely different, though. People are people. They are never going to be something entirely different from what they are, no matter how much you wish they would be.
It’s a fantasy. The Republican agenda of radical change is based on a complete fantasy. Trump may be a colorful tour guide full of fascinating and incomprehensible anecdotes about the funhouse he wants us all to live in while we worship him – but this long bad trip is still just a trip.
The Republican agenda is a hallucination. A hallucination in which the climate doesn’t change, people neither need nor want any kind of freedom, queer people don’t exist, capitalism brings out the best in human nature, and billionaires have everyone else’s interests at heart but their own.
You have to be trippin’ to believe any of it.
And conservatives, by their nature, don’t go trippin’ or trippin’ out or try to sell everyone on a magical ride through fantasy worlds. They just don’t. That’s not conservative. That’s desperate.
Today’s Republicans are desperate.
Desperate in every way. Upset and turmoil are their brand. Upset and turmoil are their brand because upset and turmoil dog their supporters every day of their lives.
Upset and turmoil dog their supporters every day because the world economy has changed significantly in the past 15 or 16 years. Since the Great Recession, wealth has become significantly more concentrated in the hands of the richest few. This has affected Republican supporters to a degree that is rarely, if ever, discussed in ‘mainstream’ media.
Although Republicans are the standard bearers in the US for the rightward shift this degree of economic dislocation has caused – the rightward shift is a worldwide phenomenon. To give just one example: the ultra-Orthodox population in Israel is now about 13% of the population – and is projected to be about 21% of the population by 2042. Ultra-Orthodox anything are by their nature extreme. You don’t become ‘ultra’ unless you are willing to go to extremes.
The growth in extremism also by its nature creates resentment and anger in the rest of the population that is doing the heavy lifting for society. The extremists are angry because they’re extremists and they wouldn’t be extremist if they were okay with reality.
Everyone else becomes angry too – because they start to see the extremists making inroads and essentially getting special privileges no one else gets. The extremists get to tell people how many children they are going to have and when. But the regular folks don’t seem to get to tell the extremists squat – not even shut up!
Meanwhile, extremists in a population give up on performing the basic functions that keep a society going. For example, they become unfit for military service because they have ceased to believe in basic institutional norms and thus don’t have the underlying integrity needed to serve their country.
Extremists (whether originating from the left or right side of the political spectrum) also by their nature find it more difficult to stay in the workforce, again because they don’t accept the norms of the rest of society.
The problem is gerontocracy.
In the US, the problem isn’t exactly young Republicans not participating in the workforce because they’re too radicalized. The problem is almost the opposite. Gerontocracy. A whole bunch of retired old farts becoming more and more radical as the actual economic conditions become less and less like the economic conditions they grew up with.
Millennials, as a generation, are simply worse off economically then their parents were. Younger people also don’t have the rights or freedoms now older generations had. To go back to abortion, young women in many parts of the country no longer have the option to terminate a pregnancy. That essentially means that any hope that young woman had of getting ahead economically under difficult circumstances has just been terminated instead.
To put it bluntly, abortion restrictions are part of a poverty agenda pushed by Republican extremists who have no respect either for the way things are – or for how they used to be. They want to fundamentally change the country to make poverty an overriding norm.
This is not necessarily stupid if you want a theocracy or a more ‘godly’ nation. Deeply poor, uneducated, and rural peoples have a tendency toward greater acceptance of not just theocracy but dictators and hard-right bossy types. A greater acceptance than affluent city types for sure.
So destroying the fabric of a nation so that affluent city types cease to exist – while all classes except the billionaire or theocrat class are pushed toward grinding poverty – that might seem like a deeply wonderful magical fantasy to a true not-conservative theocrat, make-America-more-godly type.
Now I’m not saying that every single Republican is some sort of theocrat wanna-be intent on destroying the United States the founding fathers thought so hard to craft. Except that I am.
You may think you’re an elected Republican who is not really about destroying America but preserving it, but you’re lying to yourself. You’re lying to everyone else as well if you try to act like you’ll hold the line on radical change. You won’t. You haven’t.
The GOP has been pushing for abortion restrictions, and it doesn’t make any difference that their constituents are not in favor of these restrictions. It doesn’t matter that an entire nation was in full-throttle ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mode when it comes to abortion, the GOP caved and caved hard to a hard-core minority.
And they knew what they were doing. They were doing what the left has done in the past – pushed social change through despite the consequences to individuals. The Republicans got Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court because they had no respect whatsoever for:
- The United States of America
- The Constitution of the United States of America
- Justice
- Political norms
- Fair play
- Their constituents
- Themselves
- Anything else.
That’s a lot of disrespect. But disrespect is, again, a core element of what extremism is all about. It comes from a profound disrespect for the people, and institutions, and society they live in. It comes from a sense of profound disillusionment.
GOP voters have every right to be disillusioned.
There are more than plenty of things to be disillusioned with these days.
But that disillusionment in no way makes a GOP lie-based fantasy world justified. Or helpful.
Right now, there’s a general election coming up on November 5. And primaries before that. And conventions and so on. That seems good. Elections are what democracy is all about.
What’s not so good is that the visions of people running for elected office are so vastly different from each other. That’s a problem because the visions that regular people not running for office have is not nearly as different.
Regular people envision things like inflation not bugging them, schools and streets being relatively pleasant where they live, not being embroiled in wars, economic conditions not keeping them up at night. Regular people want to buy things at a good price and be grateful for what they have and who they associate with.
This is not what people running for office want. People running for office want to tear down their opponents. People running for office want to tear down their opponents because hatred motivates people to vote.
GOP candidates want voters to hate the blue states and the people in them.
They want voters to hate the blue states and the people in them because the electoral college means that if you can turn a state ‘red’ on the national level then you can win the presidency. It becomes about states – not about people.
It isn’t as though Democrats are above or against this kind of thing. They’d be all in if they thought it would help them. In fact, they used to be all in on demographic hatred, encouraging what they thought would be a coalition of ‘minorities’ to hate the ‘majority white folks’ on the idea that this would sweep them inexorably toward electoral victory forevermore.
It was an unconscionable strategy, one for which the Democrats have been paying. But it followed an unconscionable strategy by the Republicans to demonize people who were not Republican or religious in the way they approved of. Republicans weaponized religion. Democrats weaponized race. Pick the good guy in that unholy contest. You can’t.
So then it comes down to issues. Like immigration (or the aforementioned abortion). The conservative view on immigration would be like the conservative view on abortion: don’t change the system too drastically.
Is that the right position? I don’t know. But the GOP position is not the conservative position. The Republican position is a position that’s in vogue all throughout Europe: the flail-about coming up with increasingly extreme and bizarre ways to supposedly deal with a problem that you’re not dealing with at all.
Bizarre and extreme are not conservative.
If we’re gonna be brutally honest here, imitating the Europeans is not conservative either. Europe’s electoral systems are quite different and Europe tends to sway back and forth between extremes. The fact that the GOP is more European than either the Democrats or even the Europeans – wow how the party has abandoned what used to be its principles.
The irony of course, of the Republican and European repudiation of immigration is that the current levels of immigration and emigration are not exactly an accident. They’ve been steadily fed by Republican and rightwing policies as though they wanted to sprinkle Miracle-Gro all over immigration so that it would miraculously grow to truly alarming levels – everywhere.
The reason Republicans couldn’t get immigration reform done is that immigration benefits big business by providing cheap (and even underage) labor that boosts profits. And big business and profits have been more important than people in Republican orthodoxy since the Reagan era – because business has been seen as the magical savior that will solve all problems.
How the Christian religion gets mixed up in this orthodoxy is another irony. The savior in Christianity is supposed to be – Christ. Not big business. Not capitalism. Christ.
Christ, as Paul tells us, was the very model of humility and selflessness. If Christians are to follow the teachings of the Bible, they should exemplify the tendency to be humble and to avoid false pride. It’s more than obvious that Christians who identify with the Republican party are the opposite. Meek? Nope. Modest – hell no. Lacking arrogance – oh god no. Not prideful – spits drink.
Arrogance and selfishness
It’s like the entire lot of them read Philippians 2 and made a very conscious effort to adopt a mindset that is completely opposite – one of arrogance and selfishness.
Christ and his early followers showed enormous courage and risked their lives – for others. The Republican religious right has neither the enormous courage or willingness to risk their lives for others. It is in fact not willing to do anything to protect others – not even wear a tiny little mask.
In fact, the calling card of the Republicans and the theocrats who provide their driving force is an unwillingness to do anything to protect society itself or the other people who comprise it. I will admit that such people may indeed be willing to risk their lives for the benefit of their own delusions. Indeed a considerable number (in the hundreds of thousands perhaps) actually died because they risked their lives to oppose the vaccine against COVID-19 or any other other measures to reduce its deadliness.
This willingness to risk their lives for essentially nothing was cruel to their families and loved ones and not so much an act of courage as an act of fear. In other words, these were people so frightened by the virus that they literally had to pretend it posed no dangers in order to cope.
Now i’m not saying all these people are aware of their own fears. Or even that they’re aware of how far they have strayed from the roots of the religion they claim to espouse. Well maybe the word ‘strayed’ isn’t exactly right. Many of these people have never been within spitting distance of the Christianity described by Paul in the New Testament. Some of them may never have been on the same continent as the spiritual geography laid out by the early Church.
Part of humility and selflessness and the Christian attitude espoused in the Bible involves the willingness to lose. The willingness to put in the effort and graciously accept the consequences. When Paul was in chains and writing Philippians, he was not shouting that it wasn’t fair and that he really didn’t deserve to be there. He accepted his fate not just with humility but with grace because he had God’s grace to buoy him.
Today’s Republicans are exactly and completely the opposite. Which of course makes it all the more infuriating when one of them decides to tell Dolly Parton how not Christian she is! Ahem!
It is more than obvious to the majority of people that it is beyond time to get pretty fed up with today’s Republicans. The perilous question that hangs over the nation though – is how exactly to do that and exert the will of the people once again?
Discover more from Get Pretty Fed Up
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.