Conservatives and reactionaries

“Robin’s thesis is that claims like Oakeshott’s about conservatism (and also, those of Hayek about classical liberalism) are nothing more than a mask for attempts to resist, and where possible, roll back the claims of the working class against their rulers.”

I think that this is broadly wrong. Well, perhaps it is true about particular conservative writers, whom I don’t know enough about individually to judge. But I don’t think that’s the most important part of the situation. The most important part is that a near majority, or perhaps a majority, of the working class is more or less conservative — whether you take the meaning of conservative to be “holding on to past social arrangements” or whether you take it’s more radical version — and it’s not because they’re fooled. They really do value rolling back benefits for others more than they value getting those same benefits themselves.

The “they are fooled by elites” argument is functionally very similar to the good old false consciousness bit, and I think it similarly fails. Talk to any conservative working class person. You’ll get racism, envy, distrust of change, resentment at people who try to change things for the better (i.e. “elites”), desire to roll things back to an imaginary good old days when lesser people knew their place etc etc and it isn’t all coming from Fox News. Maybe the conservative intellectuals try to sugar-coat it. But they aren’t creating it.

“The slut should have picked his quarry more carefully!”
Roared the victor in a mocking baritone growl, as he wiped his
dripping blade on the prostrate form, and returned it to its
scabbard.

Rich P –

I think it’s broadly true of conservative writers and intellectuals in general – Kirk and Buckley in the past, pick anyone form the right today.

I also think what you say about working class conservatives is also correct, and completely consistent with what I said above.

an adult –

Sure, in the USSR Stalinsm was the status quo.

Happy new year!
JzB

But, Bruce, there was a specific claim made … that intellectual conservatives make claims about conservatism that are nothing more than a “mask for attempts to resist, and where possible, roll back the claims of the working class against their rulers.” That’s an implicit truth claim, isn’t it? — that conservatism really is about rolling back the claims of the working class against rulers. I don’t think that it is. Conservatism is mostly about part of the working class wanting to roll back the claims of the “working class”. If that sounds confused, it’s because the whole idea of the monolithic working class draws on leftist ideas that themselves are hopelessly confused and unable to explain the failure of the left without a lot of special pleading.

You can’t offer a cover for a false idea. If someone like Oakeshott says that conservatism is X, and you think that X is really a cover for Y… that makes no sense if Y is really not true.

“Remove yourself Sirrah, the wench belongs to me;” Blabbered
a drunken soldier, too far consumed by the influences of his
virile brew to take note of the superior size of his adversary.
Grignr lithly bounded from the startled female, his face lit
up to an ashen red ferocity, and eyes locked in a searing feral
blaze toward the swaying soldier.

Rich, who and where are these conservative working class people you are talking to? The attitudes of working class people–if you are using it in any of the standard ways–varies tremendously by region, by ethnicity, by race, by gender, by type of work, etc., etc.

I don’t think the fact that working class whites can be racist and homophobic (to the same degree that upper-middle professionals and pretty much all other white people are) shows anything with respect to this particular issue.

There’s a deep, deep distrust of corporations bubbling under the surface even in the Tea Party. But the Tea Party’s real constituency is white middle-managers or currently economically displaced middle-managers. And sometimes what they are angry about or who they are angry at (e.g., immigrants) is full-on confused and false. So I wouldn’t say they are being fooled by elites. But some people are simply looking for convenient scapegoats and damning fundamental features of the system they still hope has the winning ticket is not going to make sense. But when people’s factual beliefs are so far outside the real explanation for their problems then that itself needs to be explained.

We all take what’s at hand to account for the world. Working class people do this and their accounts and commitments will vary considerably depending on their milieu. People in coastal urban areas, Chicago, Detroit, DC, working class or not, tend to have a markedly different outlook than people in Arkansas or Idaho and a different frame of reference to explain their social and political reality.

I’m a bit puzzled by the reference to Burke. I would have thought him a clear example of a conservative who was not a radical reactionary by any means.

“Rich, who and where are these conservative working class people you are talking to? The attitudes of working class people—if you are using it in any of the standard ways—varies tremendously by region, by ethnicity, by race, by gender, by type of work, etc., etc.”

Yes, I agree. I wasn’t arguing against the idea of a monolithic working class in order to say that people were all the same in some different way.

I’ll try to write what I meant in a different way. Conservatism is popular. I don’t mean that it equates to populism — you have have more or less left-wing or right-wing populisms — I mean that in most democratic societies, a near majority of people will vote for it. The standard left explanation for this is that people are fooled — that they have to be, because conservatism is about the elite rolling back the claims of the working class, so when people vote for conservatism they are voting against their own interests. I don’t think they are fooled. They simply have different primary motivations than economic ones. Those vary, but one common one is that the person voting conservative is more motivated by denying benefits to others than they are by receiving them, even if they need them.

So this “conservation is a mask over elite rollback” is a kind of self-serving idea for left of center people. Sure, elites use conservatism to their ends — just as they use liberalism. But they are unable to fool such large percentages of people for so long unless those people wanted to be “fooled”. Casting conservatism as something sourced to and for elites is a way of not thinking about it.

John Quiggin asks why Michael Oakeshott, in 1956, did not approve of trades unions as being essentially conservative and familiar institutions, embodying the preference for actual present benefits over utopian projects. Well, some were, mostly. Others weren’t. Seen from Australia, all British trades unions may seem the same, close up they aren’t. Even in 1956 the rather important Electrician’s Trade Union was controlled by a Communist conspiracy, not revealed till the great ballot-rigging scandal of 1961; Fred Kite, in I’m All Right Jack (1959), was a caricature based on a certain amount of reality (as, I hasten to add, were the incompetent bosses in the same film).

And the later development of (one aspect of) British trades unions, into their 1960s/70s form, was a logical consequence of the 1950s aspects. I do not think anyone with actual experience of the great strikes of the later period could possibly believe that Derek Robinson, Arthur Scargill, or Mick “We will not be constitutionalised out of a strike” McGahey were people who ” preferred the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss”. So I wouldn’t blame Oakeshott for thinking of trades unions (many of their leaders, if not most of their members) as unconservative.

=== Chris@2:30 PM
You don’t think “sure, take away my paycheck and my right to unionize, as long as you keep the gays in their place and protect me from the scary brown people” is a form of being fooled? They didn’t decide on their own to value showy distraction issues above the ones that actually affect their lives; or, at least, in the presence of so much propaganda, I would be reluctant to jump to the conclusion that they independently decided to think exactly what the propaganda was telling them to think! ===

I’m not usually a big fan of Rich P’s posts, but I think you are dismissing his argument here a bit too easily; in particular you are assuming that the propaganda and manipulation came first whereas it is at least equally possible that the propaganda was fashioned to exploit existing internal belief structures. My work in the industrial world over the last 20 years has taken me into the semi-rural and rural areas surrounding US city regions (and a few in the UK as well) where I usually spend a fair amount of time with the peoples that Rich describes, and I can’t agree that their attitudes on certain subjects were created by Fox New or Karl Rove. Exploited and amplified, perhaps, but not created.

Cranky

Rich P wrote: but one common one is that the person voting conservative is more motivated by denying benefits to others than they are by receiving them, even if they need them.

There are two sides to this:

1) tall poppy syndrome (allegedly common in egalitarian societies such as Australia and Minnesota)

2) one that is less easily summarized, but which is well captured by an alleged Serbian folk tale that I recall hearing shortly after the end of the Balkan wars to explain behavior there:

A peasant found a lamp with a genie that promised him one wish, with the proviso that whatever the peasant received, his neighbor would receive double. After a moment’s thought, the peasant said, “Take away one of my eyes.”

It seems to me that it should be easy to construct just-so stories explaining (and unifying) both attitudes on the basis of the kind of hierarchies common among social primates (and as someone with a layman’s interest in primatology this suits my inclination). The tall poppy syndrome, especially, should be easy to fit into the relatively unstable hierarchies characteristic of males in these societies. So when we are railing against either of these traits, it seems to me that we are railing against our primate brains (in contrast with both our lizard and our human ones).[3]

Lot’s of “alleged” above, but it’s New Year’s Day, and I can’t be bothered to google enough to track down citations, and I don’t want to make out-and-out unsupported assertions, so I use the rhetorical equivalent of scare-quotes, the scare-allegedly.

I’ve been thinking about reading Robin’s book, but I seem to remember having read several of the individual pieces already, so I put it off. I coincidentally had just downloaded Shari Berman’s book (the one discussed here at CT a while back) right before reading her critical review of Robin, and (although some of the other criticisms of the book seem to me to get at features I found annoying in the essay’s I’ve read) I thought she was off-track and mostly agreed with Robin’s response to her.

In the US, there is a lot of smoke and fog around the idea that (for example) “Reagan was not a real conservative, he was a radical,” usually voiced by people who called themselves liberals, Democrats, etc. This seems to have meant something like, “the Burkean center of the country is actually a bit further to the left than e.g. Reagan would wish it to be.” (Rather than, for example, something like, “in the US the institutions and groups that are usually considered conservative are actually a bit further to the left than e.g. Reagan and his supporters are.”) But lately, for some reason, I’ve been questioning whether this was really the case (not least because some of those from whom I heard it were, in retrospect, probably on a mugged-by-reality path toward neoconservatism by then already).

You don’t need to look very deeply to understand why conservatism is popular. Nostalgia is popular, the familiar is more desired than change often even if the familiar sucks. Conservatism (the mental temperament) is all over the place, even among people who think they have a radical mindset if they are talking about things that will effect their own lives. Talk to professors about almost anything that would effect their own lives or their own privileges–the disappearance of a favorite restaurant, having to change offices after ten years, whether or not tenure is a broadly useful social construct–and you’ll see a streak of conservative thinking a mile wide and justifications which sound exactly like they come from a conservative temperament.

So I think the thesis of the first paragraph and much of the post is wrong. Interestingly I agree completely with the second paragraph, which is a different thing entirely: “I’d put this more broadly – conservatism (and, it’s opposites, progressivism radicalism) are, in essence ideas about process, but the most people active in politics are more concerned about pursuing particular goals than about the way they get there.”

But this is broadly true about politics and maybe even thinking in general: people decide first and justify the decision later–that is why it is so hard to get people to change their mind.

A peasant found a lamp with a genie that promised him one wish, with the proviso that whatever the peasant received, his neighbor would receive double. After a moment’s thought, the peasant said, “Take away one of my eyes.”

The way I heard it, it was specifically the wisher’s worst enemy who would receive double, and he wished to be beaten half to death. But isn’t the point of the story (in either version) to mock the folly of vindictiveness? Surely, the audience isn’t being invited to follow his example.

I guess if your point is just “stupidity springs eternal”, then sure, it does. But it doesn’t have to become so endemic in society that it undermines any attempt at collective action generally, or support for the needy specifically. Several existing societies demonstrate that. Others have a toxic culture of divisiveness that keeps the working class struggling against each other and not trying to improve their condition vis-a-vis the upper class. Fixed and immovable characteristics of the primate brain can’t explain those differences.

in particular you are assuming that the propaganda and manipulation came first whereas it is at least equally possible that the propaganda was fashioned to exploit existing internal belief structures.

Aren’t “came first” and “existing” rather slippery concepts in this context? Elites have been practicing divide-and-conquer on the lower classes for thousands of years. All of their subjects grow up in the environment of that kind of history — either in a society where divisiveness is the norm, or one where the effort has failed or even been abandoned. Their “existing” belief structures are going to be a product of their childhood and upbringing.

(sorry for the bad formatting – I swear it looked better in the comments window!)

Eyeing a slender female crouched alone at a nearby bench,
Grignr advanced wishing to wholesomely occupy his time. The
flickering torches cast weird shafts of luminescence dancing over
the half naked harlot of his choice, her stringy orchid twines of
hair swaying gracefully over the lithe opaque nose, as she raised
a half drained mug to her pale red lips.

If I am remembering correctly, Walker was going to exempt police and firefighters from the “death to unions” law. The cops and firefighters came out in Madison, none the less. Yes, there is false consciousness. But people are actually quite complex. Having just spent a week with the upper middle classes, I’d say the working class is often more complex. Working people have all kinds of ideas, which come from the mass media, pop culture, their own local culture and traditions. Minnesota Iron Rangers tend to be pro-union, pro-gun and anti-abortion, due to a history of union struggle, a hunting culture and a lot of Catholic ethnic groups. I don’t see this as consistent, but I am not a Ranger.

#30 A fellow I know ran for the position Ontario Member of Provincial Parliament a couple of times, and won at least once. He said that his experience of campaigning–of meeting people on their door-step and selling them his political wares, as it were–was that they wanted to be lied to. Insisted upon it, in fact. It was all about what you could do for them; what actually needed to be done to right the ship of state was typically not up for discussion. If he had told him THAT, he would have never have won. Is this the false conciousness you speak of? I should say that the party he served was broadly speaking progressive in nature.

Every Republican voter who thinks that only spending on Other People’s programs was going to be cut (such as programs enabling ‘young bucks’ to buy t-bone steaks, or to drive Cadillacs) has false consciousness.

Nah, I don’t think this sort of resistance to a liberal welfare state is either false consciousness or manifestation of conservatism. Where there is a perception that people are free riding and getting something for nothing, people will get angry, and that’s natural. The sentiment “he who does not work shall not eat” has been shared by such luminaries (who could hardly be characterized as conservative) as Paul the Apostle and Vladimir Lenin.

There is a problem with top-down redistributive liberalism, in that it creates the illusion that, first, people get what they deserve, and then a part of what they rightfully own it taken from them and given to some free riders. The tension is intrinsic, what can you do.

I think we can consistently combine JazzBumpa @1
” Much of conservatism rises from the function of the cerebral cortex, and displays a lack of empathy for other humans, an overt hostility to intelligence and sophistication, and an utter inability to learn from mistakes”
and an adult@4
“The conservatives in the USSR were Stalinists”
to reach the conclusion
“Politicians we deeply disagree with, who committed crime after crime, are/were conservatives.”
This may not be the most useful of political insights. It would seem to suggest that Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, Kim I/II/III are/were conservatives. I’m not sure it tells us much useful about conservatives in relatively free liberal societies, or liberals in relatively free conservative societies.

JazzBumpa @1
” Much of conservatism rises from the function of the cerebral cortex”.
I hate to inject a little pedantic, paralytic scientific accuracy into a fine, free-flowing political dialogue, but this is not the ultimate condemnation you seem to think it is.

The cerebral cortex is generally understood by neurobiologists to be, as per the American Heritage Science Dictionary, “responsible for higher functions of the nervous system, including voluntary muscle activity and learning, language, and memory”. Any intelligent conservative would happily agree that learning, language and memory are of course fundamental bases of the conservative world-view, which does indeed arise from the higher functions of the nervous system.

I hope you would concede that learning, language, memory and the higher nervous system do have something to do with the non-conservative approaches also.

I hesitate to put words into your mouth, but are you perhaps thinking (or should you have been thinking) of the basal ganglia? Though that doubtless influences conservative and non-conservative thought alike.

I don’t think this definition of “conservative” in terms of process explains neocons or “Eurabia” fearmongers very well, because these all embrace liberalism at least in process terms–they claim they are defending liberal societies from anti-liberal ideology. Geert Wilders is conservative on taxes and govt regulation, but promotes better pay for teachers and police, and has at least been consistent in his defense of LGBT rights. I’m aware of at least isolated cases of elective affinity between LGBT activists and neocons in the US, too (e.g. Dan Savage’s infamous support for the invasion of Iraq), and neocons are very well-represented in the Democratic party, and probably would be more so if the invasion of Iraq hadn’t become such a defining issue for the left in the US.

Or to put it in more general terms, how do we explain which innovations become canonized by conservatives as a status quo in need of defending against the “cultural marxist” barbarian hordes, and which ones don’t?

The plutocrats and all of Occupy would be very surprised that

“the ruling class has mostly been losing ground. First, the aristocracy was forced to share power with the bourgeoisie, and, then for most of the 20th century, the working class gained ground against the power of capital.”

“I would be reluctant to jump to the conclusion that they independently decided to think exactly what the propaganda was telling them to think”

Cranky Observer basically answered this already: the racism / authoritarianism / etc came first, the propaganda later. The propaganda certainly coordinates it and gives conservatives talking points, but it doesn’t create it. As for “Elites have been practicing divide-and-conquer on the lower classes for thousands of years” … that’s a degree of reification of “elites” and “lower classes” that’s even worse than the standard one.

As for false consciousness meaning that right-wing union members are surprised when their union goes … maybe. Maybe they just didn’t think about it much because their union wasn’t the most important thing to them. It’s like the popularity of Social Security. People will say that polls show that Social Security in the U.S. is very popular. And sure, if you ask someone in the abstract whether they like getting it, they may well say yes. But if you change the poll question and ask if they’d like to get it as long as poor black people get it too, the same person might well say no, assuming that you could somehow get an honest poll. The same goes with the right-wingers in unions. Were they really surprised? Of course some of them were, given human variation. But was this the most important factor? I don’t think that people are that stupid; I think that most of them are happy to complain about losing their unions as long as people they hate lose theirs too.

= = = = = marcel@5:02
A peasant found a lamp with a genie that promised him one wish, with the proviso that whatever the peasant received, his neighbor would receive double. After a moment’s thought, the peasant said, “Take away one of my eyes.” = = = = =

= = = chris@6:05
The way I heard it, it was specifically the wisher’s worst enemy who would receive double, and he wished to be beaten half to death. But isn’t the point of the story (in either version) to mock the folly of vindictiveness? Surely, the audience isn’t being invited to follow his example. = = =

And yet for the last two years we have been assured by A-list political analysts (e.g. Ezra Klein) that legislation or executive action to address the mortgage / foreclosure crisis is “impossible” because “the politics are toxic”. What does “toxic” mean in this context other than ‘we would rather see the economy crash than see a person we consider undeserving get his mortgage modified’?

Cranky

Stephen @ 44

You’re right. I got the brain structure nomenclature wrong. I was referring to the reptilian brain, whatever it is properly called, and specifically excluding the limbic and neo-cortex regions.

Of course I recognize that all three brain regions and their functions are used by all people. I was going after which functions dominates in critical situations. Instinctive reactions arise in the reptile brain, which is devoid of empathy and learning ability. If we can agree that conservative thought and world-view is characteristically more hierarchical, more rigid, more compulsive, more territorial and bellicose, more typically concerned with things than with people, more prone to exploitation, and more responsive to knee-jerk fear-mongering and xenophobia as compared to progressive thought, then we can agree that conservatives are relatively more engaged with their reptile brains when these issues are prominent.

I’m thinking specifically of the Republican party in the U.S. since the early 90’s as an extreme case, but I’ll suggest the the list in the previous paragraph holds more or less true for conservative thought in general.

Thanks for the response, and for pointing out my error.
JzB

“Or, if I may be self-referential, so long as their neighbors lost twice as much as they did!”

Sorry, marcel, I should have acknowledged that you wrote basically the same thing earlier. But a whole lot of people have already said what I’m saying: I remember Brad Delong, for instance, writing a while back about his talk to some Tea Party activists and how they were saying that they had lost their jobs so unionized people should lose theirs. Does ressentiment count as false consciousness?

I’m active in my local Occupy branch… and it’s interesting to see how people treat “We are the 99%”. I mean, it’s a great slogan. But some people seem to think that it’s a poll result, and it isn’t. In the relatively small town that I’m in, we don’t have the luxury of having actual stereotype 1%ers to drink champagne and scoff from a balcony somewhere. The conflicts are basically within the putative 99%. And I don’t see how their consciousness is false while ours is true: that depends on a leftist analysis that has done nothing but fail. If we’re talking about people maximizing their happiness rather than some kind of economic quantity, the right-wingers in police unions may well really be a lot happier with no union and making less money but with greater freedom to bully people.

Apropos 2 of Chris’s points:

1) Not everyone can be on top of one-sided relationships, by definition.

Well, in Lake Wobegon…

2) Material things have gotten cheaper and more available for everyone, but how many plutocrats have even one servant anymore? (I suppose you could think of things like landscaping services as a kind of timeshared servants, but that still pales in comparison to having a full-time gardener on staff—let alone the kind of estate where you actually need one.)

This calls to mind what was perhaps boniest mot attributed to Joseph Schumpeter: A servant is worth a thousand gadgets.[1]

[1] I say “attributed” because only one site that appears near the top of a search on his quotations lists it; nevertheless, I maintain it to be “his” best bon mot.[2]

[2] In D-squared’s near complete abandonment of any (obvious?) public presence in the blogosphere, someone must maintain his standards with regard to footnotes. It is the least that I can do, since I cannot sustain his simultaneously high levels of snark and average insight and analysis.

“While I agree that the reactionary “conservatism” of the US fits this pretty well, I think if we replace “working class” with “labor” and “their rulers” with “capital”, it becomes exactly right.”

That seems awfully convenient in terms of denying responsibility to a large swath of the voting population. Well, it denies responsibility in exchange for making them out to be fools. But what about the left-liberals, and the moderate left elsewhere? Someone willing to make the same kind of analysis as I’ve made could say that liberals in the U.S. are happy to have foreign kids die in drone attacks as long as they get to keep rights and privileges enjoyed by the middle class — or really, while not happy, they are happy to complain just like the right-wing cop who lost his union complained. Where is the labor vs capital? Capital is heavily invested in the military-industrial complex, which wants to keep making those drones and having wars. But one of the things I remember learning from the environmental movement is that when it comes to bad societal projects, labor and capital often want the same thing.

One of the problems trying to categorize people as liberal or conservative, is that at some point, the definition becomes so murky, it breaks down.
To me, it would be scary to have a conservative who met all the parameters, and had not an inkling of liberal in him.
The biggest disconnect I can find is conservative Christians who believe that their financial success is determined 99% from their efforts.
Don Levit

Shelly: I would hardly classify Maddow as far left in the context of the 20th and 21st centuries. The term is usually used to describe people like the Gang of Four in China. I would also submit that Madam Mao et al were far worse than Limbaugh. While there have been some awful far right wing regimes I can not see that they are morally any worse than Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and some other left wing dictatorships. And yes I do think Stalin and Mao were as bad if not worse than Hitler. You can defend Stalin on this relative basis like Zizek all you want, but I don’t think it holds any water.

J Otto Pohl–

“Far left” in a country like the US would mean someone like Ralph Nader or going further, anyone who would call himself or herself a democratic socialist. On foreign policy issues it would mean someone who uses a phrase like “American imperialism”, though there are also some conservatives (Andrew Bacevich and Ron Paul) who would probably use that term, so they also have to have very liberal positions on domestic issues to qualify. Maddow, from what I’ve seen of her, isn’t “far left”.

Considering someone like Stalin or Mao “far left” suggests we need to use that two dimensional scale one occasionally sees online to describe someone’s political ideology. Stalin and Mao were left but more importantly, like Hitler they also ranked very high on the authoritarian scale.

Chris@53: Servants? More than you might think. Robert Frank’s Richistan is appalling and fascinating research about how the wealthiest strata live. His subjects, both the people in the very highest tiers and those who cater to their needs and wants, have a fair amount to say about their part of the world as experiencing a long enjoyable rise from the dark egalitarian depths of the ’50s. I read this book right after one of Krugman’s, and found the contrasting takes on the Great Compression and time since then really intriguing, along with horrifying and a variety of other adjectives.

Early on, there’s a whole section about businesses that train people for a variety of domestic service roles, and it’s apparently quite a growth industry. So while most of us have no servants, and even those near the top are more likely to have folks like cleaning services coming in on fixed schedules or for specific occasions, there’s a spreading band of for-true full-time servants up there at the top.

If folks are interested, here’s Alex Gourevitch’s response to Lilla’s review in Jacobin.

@ #2…Quiggin oversimplifies Robin’s thesis, which is that conservatism is the reaction of people who are losing status, power, and position to other, upstart people.

This could be economic elites losing control of the workplace to unions….or it could be working-class men losing their traditional position in the home to advances in feminism.

Rich Puchalsky@72 ” They don’t really think that they know better than scientists do what the atmosphere is doing. Instead, they hate liberals (in the U.S. context), and the propaganda furnishes them with ways in which to express hate.”

Right idea, wrong extreme. Conservatives (from a US centric view) simply believe that Liberals are wrong. The Reagan quote sums it up best “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.”

Extending your global warming denialism example, conservatives know the global warming Scientist have a better understanding of global warming physics, they question the accuracy of the theory. Appeal to experts fails to convince conservatives (check out gun control topics if your interrested why) and this is generaly the clincher for liberals. This leads conservatives to check for standard signs of lying: EG refusal to show proof, steps to conclusion, actions that disagree with stated belief, how does it match with history, etc. None of these arguements are convincing to the US liberal, but they are proof possitive to a US conservative that some one somewhere is lying to them.

If you want to understand a US conservatives a view point, just assume they believe that you as a libarl are smart, honest, and wrong.

“That seems awfully convenient in terms of denying responsibility to a large swath of the voting population. Well, it denies responsibility in exchange for making them out to be fools.”

You’ll have to explain what ‘responsibility’ you mean in this context. As I was responding to the claim that “conservatism” is in fact a cover for “reaction”, am I denying that “a large swath of the voting population” is responsible for this cover? Or are they “fools” for not seeing that it is? Perhaps said voters prefer to mislabel as conservative their reactionary opposition to, say, reproductive freedom, because it makes them feel better about supporting statist policies without admitting it.

I congratulate Geoffrey (at 33) for taking the time and trouble to argue his Newt Gingrich-supporting friend out of at least one false belief. Maybe ultimately it will be the educational function of Occupy which will have the most profound effects. They seem to be very concerned about their libraries of reference works.

Back in the sixties, we had teach-ins…

@72 Deep down, they know what they’re doing. In the U.S. context, if global warming was admitted to be a real problem…

“Deep down” is doing a lot of work here. Just how deep down is their knowledge that global warming is real? How deep can it get before we can say that it’s not there at all?

@56 If we’re talking about people maximizing their happiness rather than some kind of economic quantity, the right-wingers in police unions may well really be a lot happier with no union and making less money but with greater freedom to bully people.

I think this is spot on, and I would take it to a higher level of generalization: what conservatives fear, and what they know deep down, is that in a world with much less violence, they will become irrelevant and less valued.

We make a mistake, to regard “conservative” as a philosophy, and not, any of several sets of (psychological) attitudes cum worldviews.

We make another mistake, if we do not distinguish leaders from followers. Politically, we have a lot to fear from the combination of leaders oriented toward social dominance, with authoritarian followers. The latter are suspicious of leaders, and their motivations and hidden agendas, but can be terrible at discerning fraudsters.

Authoritarian followers are inclined to some, shall we say, illiberal views. But, they also care about fairness, and are pretty egalitarian.

A program like Social Security will always be a target for those oriented toward social dominance, because it interferes with the ability of financial capital to have its predatory way. On the other hand, authoritarian followers are likely to regard Social Security very favorably.

The contempt and hostility that many American liberals and progressives feel for authoritarian followers is a significant handicap in political competition for votes. Historically, big-city machine politics, trade and industrial unions, fraternal organizations, religion and ethnic identity, and even white supremacy, put a lot of authoritarian followers into the Democratic Party.

Winning a significant fraction of authoritarian followers for liberal or progressive causes, with “populist” appeals (the kind of appeals that work with authoritarian followers), is a sine qua non of successful progressive or socialist politics. If we are waiting for everyone to be educated into being a liberal, we will be waiting a long, long time.

We make a mistake, to regard “conservative” as a philosophy, and not, any of several sets of (psychological) attitudes cum worldviews.

Bruce, would you disagree with Nietzsche that _every_ philosophy is in fact a “set of (psychological) attitudes cum worldviews”?

“We make a mistake, to regard “conservative” as a philosophy, and not, any of several sets of (psychological) attitudes cum worldviews.”

It’s safe to say, given your language, that you’re making make the same mistake about liberalism. Im happy to see my liberalism it as an attitude, and to leave it at that.

an adult @ 85

I do not, in fact, think “liberal” in the American sense is ever anything more than any of several sets of attitudes. Sorry to have given any other impression.

Take global warming denialism, for instance. I don’t think that most denialists are actually fooled. They don’t really think that they know better than scientists do what the atmosphere is doing. Instead, they hate liberals (in the U.S. context), and the propaganda furnishes them with ways in which to express hate. Deep down, they know what they’re doing.

What’s the evidence for this? I’m even having a hard time thinking of what could be evidence for this. I should say that I have some sympathy for the anti-false consciousness view, given what it sometimes seem to imply. But I think given geo’s (@61) formulation, it’s exactly right. The above, on the other hand, seems problematic in precisely the way the false consciousness view sometimes does: by attributing some sort of “deep psychology” that isn’t (or may not be) in any way transparent to the agent.

Bruce Wilder @ 81

We have been waiting a long time. We will be waiting a long time. I’m not certain that we should be concerned about the length of the wait. What I get from Nietszche is that thinking one’s own thoughts doesn’t violate any Urprinzip worthy of the name. What I get from Marx is that it does no good pretending that we aren’t what the world we’ve been born into has made us.

Somewhere in between the two, it seems to me, is as much freedom of action — and freedom from guilt — as any sane person could want. Which, I think, is what makes effective political action conceivable, even when the means to that end seem for the moment to escape us.

It’s certainly interesting the way some things can be defined as a deficit increasing a debt that will need to be repaid, while others are a cost that is justified by preventing a catastrophe. Without there actually being any functional difference between the two situations.

On the other hand, I heard the other day that someone had estimated the net value of the earth’s atmosphere to be 4.94 quadrillion dollars. Which strikes me as some kind of fundamental category error.

I really do think a pretty substantial fraction of conservatives do believe their own rhetoric regarding global warming (or other liberal/conservative issues). They keep entering into projects which are meant to overturn the current science (i.e. expose the lying bastards once and for all), and being disappointed as their new principle investigator becoms a turncoat. Most of the population doesn’t understand that science -at least in the ideal, is a good faith attempt to ascertain the truth about nature. Most of the population is entirely familar with bought and paid for experts (particularly in the legal system), whose job is to make a convincing case for their clients. So the default mode of thinking tends towards the conspiratorial.

Then we have Secular Animist’s claim that conservative think tanks merely pick up and amplify pre-esiting thought patterns. In one sense it is a tautology, they do “market research” to see what memes are sellable to a substantial segment of the population, then open up a campaign to market them to the population. Now many people may have weak agreement with many of these memes, but that doesn’t mean they might not also weakly hold other contradictory memes. By reinforcing the desired memes, they become strengthened, and the contradictory ones weakened. Thus over time the cemter of mass of the target’s cognition can be moved. So it is correct that the themes are not just implanted from out of the blue, but the entire directed process is designed to make fundamental changes in attitudes over a long period of time. In some rather crude way, this resembles breeding. A breeder cannot create a phenotype out of whole cloth. But, if he creates substantial selection pressure and has sufficient time and patience, he can effect dramatic change.

Bob Altemeyer essentially claims that “conservatives” are “authoritarians” in his “The Authoritarians”:

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

Still I’m hesitant to try to pigeonhole “conservatives” into some sort of genomic designation. My experience has been that there are plenty of liberals that can exhibit the same sorts of cognitive dissonance, dogmatism, unreasoning, etc. if the topic is right and/or they support a specific candidate (ie: they sound just like conservatives, just spouting so-called “liberal” topics). For instance, if one reads the comments at Balloon Juice, one often sees Obama supporters who “drank the Obama cool aid” in the same way that Tea Party-ers “drank the Beck cool aid” (they will give no quarter, no matter what the logic).

In short, there’s something a bit “notice the conservative’s brow” about this that leaves me uncomfortable, though certainly I have been tempted to try to draw broad differences myself.

I think the thing that most detracts from any thesis that “conservatives are X and liberals are Y” is that often the difference between why one becomes a conservative and another a liberal is what household or religion they grew up with. Politics is at least as much about identity (tribalism, nurturing) as any “nature”.

Sadly I think for most, regardless of which side of the political spectrum, conservative vs. liberal is merely a costume to be worn, with little actual import. Certainly there are many that actually understand and have internally confirmed their beliefs, but far more (the everyman as it were) belong to one side or the other because, well, that’s what dad was (or like in my case, what dad wasn’t).

Actually in my rush to write this out I’m mischaracterizing Altemeyer’s thesis – Altemeyer’s thesis is far more nuanced. Basically he’s saying (if I remember correctly) that those things we often identify negatively with conservatives can be categorized as “authoritarianism”. While such characteristics may be more prevalent in conservatives, it is hardly limited to conservatives and thus we find the same symptoms say in “Stalinism”, which is supposedly a “liberal” or “leftist” endeavor.

The ultimate point being that it isn’t really conservatives that suck, but authoritarians and while one may be found more on one side than the other (particularly today), ultimately the problem is authoritarianism, not necessarily a specific political worldview.

This also helps avoid the “notice the conservative brow” problem and explains why being a liberal has not been an antidote to being an asshole throughout history.

Like Corey, I’m mostly just learning from the back and forth here. One thing I’m learning is that, much as I used to joke that I am at heart some kind of anarchist, I think I really am, no joke. Let me put it this way. I think the classic notion of “false consciousness” has real explanatory power, but only so long as we all remain alert to the fact that each and every one of us has false consciousness (from the point of view of some unknowable god-term or god-position). Which is why we must listen to one another, most of all to those with whom we are inclined to disagree (especially when those who think differently from us are not speaking from a position of unaccountable authority/power). False consciousness can become, after all, just another authoritarian bludgeon. Perhaps we should be like good teachers, who not only take seriously where their students are “coming from” but actively enjoy the experience of learning from their students, however less learned and critically astute those students in many ways may be.

99: But however you parse it, the question is, how did the *right* get its batteries charged by what should’ve been so discreditable to Wall Street and the elites?

It seems like the national center got shifted right after Carter and the Reagan-Bush years, and liberals have been playing catch-up ever since. And that was the legacy of the Nixon realignment.

From Corey Robin link above: “We must develop an argument that the market is a source of constraint and government an instrument of freedom. Without a strong government hand in the economy, men and women are at the mercy of their employer, who has the power to determine not only their wages, benefits and hours but also their lives and those of their families, on and off the job.”

Bob Black: “Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade.” (link)

“There is more freedom in any moderately deStalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. ” (link)

Bob Black is kind of interesting — but the point of this is that there’s a reason why American left-liberalism hasn’t taken this turn. Balancing one hierarchy against another is firmly in the American political tradition of division of powers and so on, but it’s an inherently dicey thing to do. For one thing, it requires the two sources of power being set against each other — government and business, in this case — actually have different interests. Do they?

Or perhaps a strong left theory of kind could animate this “government hand in the economy” that would protect people. There isn’t one. As has been demonstrated here, people are still falling back on the remnants of analytical Marxism.

Without trust that government power is going to be used in this way, trust that Obama’s first term helped to destroy, what a distrust of business control gets you is basically anarchism… the animating spirit of OWS. That’s really where we’re going that I can see, and it’s not really compatible with left-liberalism.

All this talk about false consciousness, but I’m pretty sure, according to the marxist doctrine (that owns the term), both American conservatism and American liberalism are manifestations of false consciousness. Not to mention that the doctrine, just like Rich’s bad white people, has a great contempt for the lumpen proletariat.

Lee A. Arnold,
I’m not sure how your comment fits in the discussion, but it is unusual to read something substantial that I agree 100% with. Very well said.

the term “lumpen proletariat” — which marxist doctrine doctrine also “owns”* — isn’t exactly contempt-free

generally the flaw in the notion of “false consciousness” is simply that the people deploying it believe they have a clever little formula by virtue of which they can never be mistaken, least of all about situations they never before encountered (of course people who don’t deploy it also often believe this)

*great petty-bourgeois communist formulation there, henri

“I think that marxist theory of false consciousness is different from indoctrination from above, and really is the idea that prolets don‘t have the cultural tools to build a counterculture of their own, and thus see the world from bourgoise eyes. Thus they naturally don‘t see themselves as a class and as a consequence resort to identity politics (in other words false consciousness refers exactly to the kind of natural assholeness that Rich P. says is the opposite of false consciousness).”

I agree that this thread hasn’t really been using the phrase “false consciousness” in its classic Marxist formulation. I was arguing against the fooled-from-above idea, for instance in geo’s comment @ 61. But the classic false consciousness argument has always appeared to me to be part of an apparatus that justifies acting in the name of the working class without the actual agreement of any substantial part of it, because the people in it can’t even know what they really want. In other words, it’s part of the authoritarian leftism that people uneasily fall back on whenever they insist that the working class means labor and that labor really has one true interest which can be derived from some books written in the 19th century.

The trek to Gorzom was forced upon Grignr when the soldiers
of Crin were leashed upon him by a faithless concubine he had
wooed. His scandalous activities throughout the Simarian city
had unleashed throngs of havoc and uproar among it’s refined
patricians, leading them to tack a heavy reward over his head.

“To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”

I wish conservatives preferred facts to mysteries, but today’s American conservatives seem to prefer fiction over all else.

And I wish the impact of conservatives only pertained to the American domestic labor front. But that, sadly, is not true.

[Saddam Hussein’s WMD; waterboarding is information gathering, not torture; Obama got Osama only because of info Bush/Cheney et al gathered by using torture; the prison guards at Abu Ghraib were themselves responsible for degrading prisoners, not following protocol established by the VP of the US, the invisible hand is all we need to regulate greed out of the financial sector; etc. and so on.]

The current delusional version of American conservatism has had a profound and dangerous impact on global events. In looking at the choices the GOP is offering for president, they are obviously content to continue down that path.

Reason #110, Sorry, I came late to this discussion. I was responding to the interview with Corey Robin in John Quiggin’s first link.

Do you suppose that if we just replaced “the problem of false consciousness” with “the problem of false beliefs,” then perhaps we could just get on with figuring out why so many people believe things that are false and support policies that are harmful to them?

Sorry, last post crossed paths with 122.

cheers,
js.

“perhaps we could just get on with figuring out why so many people believe things that are false and support policies that are harmful to them”

Taking these in reverse order: why are you so sure that people support policies that are harmful to them? I mean, I’m sure that some do. But why should we assume that this is the main thing going on? Can you really say that some conservative working-class person is harming himself when he votes for the party that will take away his health care? Maybe he’s really so distressed by the idea of those icky gay people that this is less harmful to him, from his point of view. Weren’t people right here on this blog writing things like “Oh, I don’t support Obama killing foreign kids, but he’s the lesser evil”? What you seem to be saying is that only you, and people with your sense of values, get to decide what harm is, and what someone should make their decisions on the basis of.

Of course I agree with you, broadly — someone should feel harmed when they get sick because they have no health care, and they should not feel harmed by the public existence of gay people. But if people want to have an evil value system, then they can have one. It doesn’t mean that they are “supporting policies that are harmful to them” unless you are the judge and jury of what’s harmful to them, and you aren’t.

Next, why do they believe things that are false? Well, in many cases they do, but in the majority, I’d say, they don’t really believe them. John Quiggin linked back to an agnotology discussion. Do people really believe that Obama is Kenyan and can’t be President? Maybe some crazy people do. But this being a matter of fact, and not one of values, you have to be pretty crazy to really believe this. I don’t think that most of the people who say that they believe it really believe it.

I haven’t read the book, but it seems to me to be not about conservatism, but about the political right. These are not the same. There are some conservatives who are centrist or even centre-left. On the other hand, there are plenty of non-conservatives on the right wing, including many liberals. After all, there must be a reason why conservative and liberal parties form bourgeois/bürgerliche coalitions against the social democratic left in many countries. But if you’re looking for ‘liberalism’ in the index, you’re re-directed to ‘left’!

If, as Quiggin argues, the main feature of modern-day reactionaries is trying to turn back the welfare state, liberals, at least in Europe, are as complicit as conservatives. After all, how much less reactionary are people like Clegg, Rutte, Westerwelle and Björklund in this regard compared to Cameron, Balkenende, Merkel and Reinfeldt? So it looks like liberalism is almost as reactionary as conservatism, and often more reactionary than Christian democracy.

Then again, the phrase ‘Christian Democrat(ic)’ is nowhere to be found in the book. Modern non-US conservatives like Cameron, Harper, Merkel, Sarkozy and Howard are completely absent, and these heads of government of major countries must be at least as significant as the former governor of a small US state, who even gets named in the title. So it looks like it’s a history of American conservatism, masquerading as a general, unifying history of all varities of conservatism past and present. Or perhaps “(western) conservatism globally until the mid-20th century, then an exclusive focus on the USA.” And there is nothing wrong with that, but a book that has an extensive coverage of 18th and 19th century European conservatism – Burke is named in the title too – could perhaps have continued its coverage of non-US strains of the ideology up to the present as well.

I don’t know how you distinguish “false consciousness” from stupid or ignorant. Many actual voters have bizarre ideas about politics, because they just do not pay much attention, and do not have the education understand much of what they do pay attention to. This is hardly only a problem on the right or left; it’s arguably most acute in the “center”.

The libertarian/anarchist argument that government/authority cannot be trusted, and therefore the only “practical” politics is to minimize government, can be seen as a semi-rational response to the difficulty of “controlling” elites from the bottom.

I have a basic understanding of how insurance works. So, when I advocate, say, for single-payer, universal health insurance, I do so, from what I think is an informed perspective, and with a well-founded belief that single-payer is the framework most likely to result in a moderate-cost, efficient system. I have no great depth of expertise, but most people have a less economically sophisticated understanding. And, when it comes to any particular policy proposal, my general outlook isn’t really of much help. How would I evaluate Obamacare — a huge bundle of policies and programs, phased in, tentatively, over several years? I don’t have any way to evaluate it. Not really. I am just as suspicious as some Ron Paul groupie, and probably as ignorant, when it comes right down to it, with relation to health care. In terms of what I personally pay, for an individual policy, I note that Obama is screwing me, to benefit giant corporate insurers, which fits in with my view of Obama as a subsidiary of Goldman, Sachs; Obama has done nothing to contain costs or rein in the power of financial corporations — there’s news you can’t use.

It does seem to me that the political problem of constraining and controlling elites is a constant, but it is a constant enveloped in a particular, swirling fog, at any one place and time.

Because it is a fog, there can be two broadly different versions of “conservative”. One actively wants to remove the constraints on the elite, and on elite power. Another may just be confused, or repelled by the prospect of struggle and violence. Upthread, it has been suggested that some among the 99% may feel that they benefit from hierarchy. It is possible that some would simply prefer peace and what they know, to what may well turn out to be worse.

bianca @131

I really don’t understand this comment at all.

It seems to me that if “the vital center” now implies calling oneself “conservative,” in a politics where it’s admitted everyone is either a conservative or a liberal, something has gone wrong.

Who says the “vital center” implies calling oneself conservative? Hartman’s point (I skimmed down to that paragraph in his post) would rather seem to be that the “vital center” was a facile rhetorical device to carve out a certain position in between perceived ‘extremes’.

it also seems to me wrong if calling oneself a “liberal” now implies the next word is “Republican”
This is even more bizarre. So-called liberal Republicans are virtually extinct. Make that extinct, period. Charles Percy and Mark Hatfield both died last year. That was it, basically. There are no more “liberal Republicans” AFAIK.

it seems to me wrong to call oneself a “conservative Marxist” and actively promote Marxist texts while remaining safely conservative in all one’s other dealings.
Who calls himself or herself a ‘conservative Marxist’?

LFC,
If I understand Hartman’s post, Mark Lilla (whose review Hartman is considering) is trying to define “conservatism” that encompasses “the vital center.”

I was really only serious about the first point, the one not in parentheses, but regarding the first two points generally, I had in mind Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America, which I remember basically as an apologetic for the New Deal. I read it in high school as trying to persuade the right to evolve and embrace more left-wing ideas, but I suppose it might be read as trying to persuade the left to embrace a more “classical” liberalism. For the third, I had in mind the scattered “leftist” blogger out there who seems interested mainly in leftist attacks on things the right also attacks, for the same reasons.

Schlesinger was not a conservative. He was an anti-Communist, pro-Cold War, pro-New Deal liberal.

True. But so was Lionel Trilling–at the time–now he’s considered a neoconservative. So was Irving Kristol–at the time–we know who he is. Leo Strauss defended “liberalism” repeatedly. Schlesinger might be the only “anti-Communist, pro-Cold War, pro-New Deal liberal” left. And I’m not ruling out the existence of people who feel the term “liberal” was hijacked, prefer the “European” definition of the term, and resent not being able to identify themselves publicly as such, though I wouldn’t pin this on them without their consent or admission.

When Betty Ford died last summer, here’s how she was remembered in the NY Times:

“Few first ladies have been as popular as Betty Ford, and it was her frankness and lack of pretense that made her so. She spoke often in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, endorsed legalized abortion, discussed premarital sex and revealed that she intended to share a bed with her husband in the White House.”

In 2012, we’ve lost the ability to even imagine the spouse of any GOP president publicly advocating any of those things, except, perhaps, the intention to share a bed with her husband, because that is, after all, the duty of any Christian bride. And in the eyes of the GOP, this is a Christian nation, with little room for other religions – or the Constitution’s insistence on the separation of church and state, for that matter.

As a somewhat conservative libertarian, I think all I’d ask, after reading over 130 comments, is some greater recognition, (In keeping with paragraph 2 of comment 130.) that plutocrats aren’t the only ‘crats’, and when you try to increase the power of government to deal with plutocrats, you’re increasing the power of another set of crats. And maybe some conservatives are just more afraid of those crats, than the ones you fear.

After all, my supervisor may issue more orders to me than the government, but if I don’t do what he says, all he’s going to do is stop paying me. The government might throw me in a deep, dark hole, or even kill me. Is it irrational to prefer to be subject to the former, rather than the latter, power?

Who’s suffering from the false consciousness here, if you really think you’re going to increase liberty by increasing government?

@141: No objections. I definitely do not want to claim that voters who are not exclusively motivated by their own interests suffer from false consciousness. But something like that comes into play when they have a strong preference for decision makers who care about their particular interests and still habitually vote for those who act against most of their (even quite fundamental) interests. If they vote for them just because they hate most of the things (largely unconnected to their interests) the other candidates seem to stand for, the case is different. Just like you, I don’t want pompous and quite abstract false consciousness theories to be applied to every wrong or unreasonable attitude. But neither does geo, I guess.

This post exists in weird counterpoint to the nearby post on the ECB. Why don’t [many] people trust the government? Because it has the power to screw things up more deeply than your foreman. The plutocrats might work together with the bureaucrats and the technocrats to screw things over in a very comprehensive way. Your foreman can have you fired, but the bureaucrat can throw you in jail or have you killed and the technocrat can invoke mumbly jumbly pseudo-science to destroy your whole industry. This by the way is where global warming denialism gets easy play–technocrats have cried wolf too many times on too many trivial issues and backed their rhetoric with pseudo-science. So when similiar people (or sometimes the exact same ones) want to upend your whole life with similar sounding justifications that they used the last hundred times they wanted you to [ban booze, change your whole diet, change big parts of it back because they were just kidding about margarine being better than butter, vastly change how you raise children, change it back again because it didn’t work, not smoke on the sidewalk outside your office building, pretend that coddling criminals will stop crime, etc. etc.] lots of people are going to resist out reflex *even if you really are finally right this time*.

For a bunch of people, lots of government intervention ends up looking like over-active busy-bodys getting around trying to over-rule every last decision you might want to make–for your own good of course.

Now I’m describing a feeling that gets channeled politically. Sometimes it gets channeled in a helpful way (to curb government excesses). Sometimes it gets channeled in an unhelpful way (to break down perfectly useful government interventions). But that is true of all sorts of feelings that get channeled politically. Liberals and radicals have other feelings that get channeled politically in ways that end up leading to incomprehensible results. (See the ECB for the Europe project–which has tended to be opposed by conservatives in Europe–though that is a complicated thing, or see the fact that radicals can tend to destroy even useful institutions and then fail to replace them with even-as-useful institutions).

People just aren’t as rational as we like to pretend. Conservatives have an impulse–I don’t like change. They often have an additional impulse–I like the way things used to be. In a good world these impulses would be leavened by an admission that sometimes things get better with change and that sometimes the risk is worth taking. But conservatives are human, just like liberals and radicals. So for the most part they end up acting on their core impulses rather than. The person whose core impulse is to change the world to better suit their vision will tend to try to do so, and won’t pay proper attention to evidence presented that their changes may suck. The person whose core impulse is to not change will tend to try to do so, and won’t pay proper attention to evidence presented that the change is good, or that change can’t be avoided.

One of the big problems in this discussion is that conservatives are NOT some sort of mysterious creature that you have no hope of understanding. They are a lot like you. Which should probably be scary.

LFC @ 137
Fair enough. Though Wikipedia is suggestive of an anti-left purge in the creation of the ADA, but on the other hand, that’s certainly not applicable to its recent leaders, and the first book I picked up that mentions the ADA puts its founding well before the Wallace presidential candidacy debacle and Reuther’s purge of the CIO.

The reassignment of apparently originally left or popular/ist ideas to the right does bother me a little bit. It would be nice if more left-leaning people could find it in them to simply embrace the ideas they find interesting, regardless of who now “owns” those ideas’ originators. The right should be happy to share, after all, ideas that support their own point of view. Ideas really shouldn’t be partisan, should they? (But far off-topic.)

After all, my supervisor may issue more orders to me than the government, but if I don’t do what he says, all he’s going to do is stop paying me.

And, if you are outside the 1%, stop access to health care for you and your family. There are hundreds of documented cases of the path ‘Boss takes dislike to something someone said -> sacks them-> their child dies’. Certainly many more than the hundred or so a year killed by the routine functioning of the legal and homeland security systems.

The figure of 45,000 has been calculated as the total excess for excess deaths amongst the uninsured. No-one really knows as no-one bothers counting, but it almost certainly overlaps with the scale of things that in a different form would get called state atrocities or civil war. You’d have to go to ‘genocide’ or ‘holocaust’ before you would be overstating it.

It is certainly interesting that that is true, and nevertheless widely ignored, to the point where people will state the opposite without any thought of being contradicted. I suppose even that is not really false consciousness. Some is just the valid self-interest of the 1%, who have no need to fear poverty, or indeed pretty much anyone without a navy. The rest is simple Stockholm syndrome; those whose lives literally depend on the good opinion of someone in the same room will naturally come to identify with them, adopt their goals as their own.

The Tea party can get a lot of people out chanting; so can the North Korean government. That what the power of life and death _does_ to people.

Conservatives have an impulse—I don’t like change.

I’m not sure this thread, or anyone else, has done a good job pinpointing exactly what the core conservative impulse is. But it’s safe to rule out “I don’t like change” or “I don’t like concentrated power”. Their favorite institution, the marketplace, accelerates both of those. Even if every single issue position they take is sincere, their stated reason for packaging all those issues up into a single ideology is not.

Perhaps attempts to find the “core impulse” of liberalism/progressivism would run into similar problems. But that doesn’t seem to be as much of a problem for their arguments. The left makes arguments for environmental protection, social tolerance, and egalitarian economic reforms, but doesn’t generally try to make a single argument that applies to all three of those issues.

Your definition of liberal runs very much counter to what passes for left around here. So if you’re right about liberalism, you still have problems not only with the right, but also the left. (See especially paternalism–feminism anti-porn crusades, progressive anti-smoker crusades, everyone’s anti-drug crusades).

‘Schlesinger might be the only “anti-Communist, pro-Cold War, pro-New Deal liberal” left. ‘

True of most of the ex-Trots from CCNY, but organization like DSA (Michael Harrington, Irving Howe) and SDUSA (a lot of the AFL-CIO union leaders like Lane Kirkland) would fit that bill with differing levels of Cold Warriorhood. Not to mention Max Shachtman.

Sock Puppet of Great Satan @154
I’m beginning to be sorry I engaged on this tangential issue at all. But Harrington was well to Schlesinger’s left (esp. on domestic/economic issues but also int’l). That’s obvious. Ditto (with some additional nuances) for Howe. Yes, I know about their famous fight with the New Left in the ’60s (which Harrington later regretted). It doesn’t change the point.

Here’s a pessimistic view that might harmonize much of the above disagreement:

* The ‘false consciousness’ view is right in saying working-class conservatives really do see the world through misinformation propagated by elite conservatives. (Rich P. is wrong to suggest that deep down they don’t believe their own bullshit.)

* Rich P. is right that working-class conservatives embrace a value system of spite and resentment, opposing undeserved help for the hated poor at all costs. (Hopeful liberals are wrong to think that deep down we all share the same values.)

* So, even if working-class conservatives were disabused of all their illusions, or even if they had never been taken in by conservative misinformation in the first place, they would still be the same sort of ‘poor people don’t deserve help, criminals don’t deserve rehabilitation‘ conservatives, all because of their value system.

In other words, the propaganda really does work, but it’s not the major factor: values matter more than information.

John Quiggin remarks that “Robin’s thesis is that claims like Oakeshott’s about conservatism (and also, those of Hayek about classical liberalism) are nothing more than a mask for attempts to resist, and where possible, roll back the claims of the working class against their rulers.”

That seems like a broadly accurate summary of the book. Close-up observation of so-called “conservatism” in America, however, suggests a far more radical agenda. To wit, what goes by the name “conservatism” in America in 2012 appears more in line with the Stalinist effort to create the “New Soviet Man.” The essential goal of the various ideological purges by the USSR was to destroy rationality itself as a value — facts (such as the decline of the Soviet Union’s population after Stalin’s systematic starvation of the kulaks) were not facts if they proved politically inconvenient. The Stalinist purges were attempts to teach the Soviet citizens a form of doublethink according to which the ideological needs of the party trumped facts + logic. Only ideology mattered: observed reality had to be warped and twisted by the individual citizen to fit whatever requirements were set by the party.

Likwise, we see with so-called “conservatism” in America a systematic attack on the basic concept of critical skeptical thinking and a massive effort to discredit facts + logic as a way of dealing with the world. Consider, by way of example, the Republican party’s uniform position of global warming denial and evolution denial. These facts have been established by scientific experiment about as well as any facts possibly can be — yet the Republicans blithely deny them, and regard an acceptance of these documented facts as a litmus test the failure of which requires expulsion from the ranks of conservatives.

Likewise, the anti-abortion mania, the frenzy about gay marriage, and so on, up to and including fantastical pseudoscience like The Bell Curve (neither of whose authors is an expert in population genetics; Charles Murray is a political scientist, and has no degree or experience whatsoever in any of the hard sciences, such as statistics or genetics) or Ron Paul’s bizarre the-U.S.-government-created-AIDs newsletter articles.

These kinds of descents into delusion pseudoscience are not rare or exceptional in the Republican party. From Ronald Reagan’s eager embrace of the absurd Star Wars missile ‘defense’ boondoggle to enthusiastic Republican funding for crackpot Pentagon R&D programs like the “hafnium bomb”, anti-rationalism and crackpot pseudoscience seem to form a central pillar of modern conservative thought.

So from the perspective of someone living in America, dealing with so-called “conservatism” as merely a form of class struggle greatly understates the rift. Conservatives appear to have drifted off into a rapture-index adam-and-eve-riding-dinosaurs fantasy world, while the non-conservatives in America have chosen to remain in the “reality based community.” This sounds more like the difference between pyschotic hallucination and skeptical critical thinking than like a class struggle, at least from my point of view.

” And, if you look at the actual conditions at the time that advance was halted, they had a lot more to do with the failure of Keynesian demand management, which rendered the rightwing critique of social democracy more plausible (though still, in the end, false) than with the racial resentments that Rich seems to be obsessed with, or even with “downward envy” more generally.”

I’m speaking from a U.S. context, and as per Nixonland, it’s important not to underestimate how much racism still matters. And the U.S. never really had social democracy.

But the last few comments have portrayed the U.S. as some unique land of right-wing working-class nutballism. Is that really worse than what’s supposedly going on in Europe? JQ writes:

“Those making the decisions are conservative political leaders (Merkozy) and the ultra-neoliberal ECB. The left has been defeated, at least for the moment, and is now being forced to seek an alternative strategy under unpromising circumstances. After all, it’s not as though things are significantly better in the UK except as regards monetary policy.”

“The left has been defeated” seemingly without even the need for propagandistic intervention among the 99% — just by the elites doing it directly, or with a bit of minimal propaganda about austerity. Holding my skepticism at bay for a moment, that’s a pathetic showing for the left. I’d almost rather have people manipulated by elemental fears and resentments than have them fooled into direct belief in austerity, or so helpless that they can’t do anything even a purportedly much closer to 99% vs 1% situation. It might lead to some kind of lecture about how people should have known better about the Euro and the loss of democratic control, except for the inconvenient fact that the UK is essentially in the same place.

But it’s certainly an explanatory problem for people who want to blame the whole thing on the elites and deny the significance of conservative popular involvement. Why has the left in Europe been so extraordinarily easy to defeat?

It seems weird to talk about false consciousness style problems in the US context, where it is at least plausible that Rush Limbaugh and the like really are causing the problem and then step directly to a discussion of Europe. There isn’t any regular crazy-maker with even a tenth of the reach of Rush Limbaugh much less Rush Limbaugh plus all his US imitators to be found in Europe. So it seems to me that if Europe is having the same problem, it casts serious doubts on the thesis.

“Or take the problem of a certain prominent linguistics professor whose name will cause a troll descent, at admitting to Cambodian genocides ”

That unnamed linguist started off saying in 1977 that the human rights record of Pol Pot was “gruesome” , admitting that it could be worse, but obviously not convinced, and ended up using the term “genocide” by 1980 or so. It’s all rather similar to the debate over how many people died during the Iraq War (even the range of numbers is in the same ballpark), though I’m not saying that because the high numbers turned out to be true in Cambodia necessarily means they are correct in Iraq. And if I’d said that about Cambodia in 1979 then that would make me a terrible Pol Pot apologist.

That unnamed linguist started off saying in 1977 that the human rights record of Pol Pot was “gruesome” , admitting that it could be worse, but obviously not convinced, and ended up using the term “genocide” by 1980 or so.

Sebastian has never been one to let the facts get in the way of a good false equivalence.

Uncle Kvetch–

Well, he does say Republicans in the US are worse at the moment, so I’ll take that. In the grand scheme of things it is true that lefties have made fools of themselves endorsing Stalin or Mao or other leftist dictators, so I can’t disagree with his point that both left and right sometimes have this problem with letting ideology come before facts, even if I think the right is more guilty of this most of the time.

“Contra Mr. Puchalsky’s claims about “deep down,” my own father disbelieves anthropogenic climate change because only God can change the weather.”

Yeah… I agree that that’s probably the weakest part of what I’ve been saying. I think that David @ 165 is probably right in that it doesn’t really matter to figure out whether people really believe or just claim to really believe in these things.

Rich Puchalsky @164 asks: …the last few comments have portrayed the U.S. as some unique land of right-wing working-class nutballism. Is that really worse than what’s supposedly going on in Europe?

How many Creation museums do you see in Europe featuring Adam and Eve riding dinosaurs?

How much money did France or Germany or the Netherlands spend spend on orbital missile “defense” programs?

65% of the American population believes in the literal existence of the Devil among them (perhaps lurking behind the local Dairy Queen, or possibly a nearby Tast-E-Freeze outlet). What percentage of Europeans literally believe that an actual creature with cloven hooves and horns and a pointed tail lurks among their population?

One of the most illuminating quotes from a conservative I’ve heard is this one:

“You know, it’s so honest,” Sister Dorothy told Hoffman after reading it, “but sometimes Satan cloaks himself in truth.”

It Takes A Nation Of Millions (Of Nutballs) To Hold Us Back.

I didn’t mean that Europe could compete with us in terms of Creation museums. Just that we, at least, have a reason for our failure beyond having social democratic parties that don’t present any alternative for us. At least when I go to an Occupy demonstration I can count on some 20-something guy to yell “Go back to Cuba” out of his car or some decidedly non-wealthy-looking person to ask why I don’t just do what it takes to get rich. Better that than to be, I don’t know, denouncing the ECB and having everyone else say “Yes, we too also sanely detest the ECB! There is nothing we can do, though, for some reason.” Depressing.

Just to clear up, this:

“But the last few comments have portrayed the U.S. as some unique land of right-wing working-class nutballism” (Rcih P)

isnt unrelated to this

“I’ll concede that lots of people on the Left, including me, expected progressive outcomes from a closer union,”(John Q)

You cant remove the EU (ECB) from its component parts. ‘Europes’ response is what it was always going to be, a reaction to political pressures at home and short sighted miscalculations of the national interest. Parts of ‘Europes’ extreme(but competetive) right are far more worrying than the Tea Party. (This might be the wrong thread, so feel free to ignore, but the conversations drifted this way)

I think Rich is on the right track with this:
“Better that than to be, I don’t know, denouncing the ECB and having everyone else say “Yes, we too also sanely detest the ECB! There is nothing we can do, though, for some reason.” Depressing.”

Except It’s too much. Its difficult for Americans to understand the restrictions put on peripheral Eurozone countries at the minute.

John Quiggin at #166: “The left [in the UK] started in a very weak position, with New Labour and its equivalents having conceded a lot of ground to market liberalism, and therefore unable to formulate a consistent defence of social democracy once the immediate crisis had passed. ”

I would quibble with “conceded”, rather New Labour embraced market liberalism and was seduced by the trappings of wealth and power, at last they could be players rather than campaigners!

It’s not relevant to economics, but remember how Tony Blair responded to some criticisms of the absence of any attempt on his part to prevent the illegal and immoral wars started by GW Bush, he said something along the lines of “you’re assuming that I don’t agree with what he wants to do”. Blair might have had his heart in the right place in wanting a nice country for kids and to improve the lot of the poor, but he wanted that with the trappings of wealth and power for his elite.

In the UK Coalition Government, it is increasingly apparent that Nick Clegg (the leader of the minority Liberal Democrats) is really a rich toff Conservative in most of his attitudes. He and David Cameron get on well because they’re both from the same privileged backgrounds of inherited wealth and never had to do an honest day’s work in their life. But the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, is another career politician who just does it for fun, not because he has deeply held beliefs derived from bitter life experience, he’s just part of the family trade.