Alien nation, part deux
As has happened more than once, Tim’s comment on an earlier article has prompted me to put pen to paper. You may remember that I said how George Bush the elder came out with the damndest thing, something you’d hardly expect a decent man like that to say. And I said it’s amazing how even your friends can shock you like that, but that conservatism does that to people.
So Tim asked, facetiously, if President George H. W. Bush was a personal friend. And I’ll answer him now: no, but that’s because we’ve never had an occasion to meet. Unlike his son, where the consensus is that he’s cold, dull, and kinda creepy, the elder Bush seldom met anyone he didn’t like and who didn’t like him right back. It’s been said that if George H. W. Bush could have met all the voters personally, he’d have won in a landslide.
And Tim asked if I was making any claims about inevitable connections between conservatism and theism. No, but in this article I’m definitely talking about a connection, the connection between conservatism and evil. I’m pointing out that the conservative ideology contains some poisonous ideas, and that it’s dangerous folly to trust someone who’s exposed to those ideas every day — even if that person is you — not to pick some of them up.
I suspect Tim is having a hard time believing such people and such ideas exist. So let me show him (and you) something a neighbor of mine said not quite a month ago on a USENET newsgroup:
If I’ve read once, I’ve read a thousand that liberals bristle when
accused of not being patriotic. They may well have a point because the
justification for such a reaction is that many have died and still are
dying to protect our rights to dissent. But, while I have no problem
with the fact they it is indeed their right as a U.S. citizen, I have
to question their patriotism since is implies a deep devotion and love
for our country.
There it is, the oldest lie in the conservative book: the other side hates America. That’s the kind of poison that’s out there floating through the airwaves that conservatives plug into. And this is not some noxious professional ideologue, this is one of my neighbors.
Here’s another: I wrote an email to a friend who’s either conscientious or enviably connected, because he can find all the funny stuff that’s floating around on the net, and he passes it along to his friends. I wrote him about one of those things he’d sent along that attributed some improbable and scurulous remarks and actions to people in the political mainstream (i.e., “libruls”). I showed him the Snopes reference that showed it was just right-wing propaganda, and he was kind enough to retract it to all the folks he sent it to.
In short, he was a kind, honorable man. He’s as far from a redneck as can be: a retired dentist who lives in a big city in the North and is a fan of jazz. And yet during our correspondence, he said two things, seemingly out of the blue: that I must not have served in the military and that he didn’t hold much with socialism.
As I say, a good man. Yet he never questioned that everyone on the other side fell into this bizarre stereotype. I wrote back to say that, while I didn’t serve, I’ve been working for the past 15 years and more helping make sure our young people in the services come home safely after accomplishing their mission, and that I too thought socialism was crap. He wrote back to ask my address so he could send me a CD he’d burned, and I managed to get his address and reciprocated, but I’m pretty sure he thought, “jeez, I’m talking to a real human being here.”
The notion that everybody to the left of Willis Carto must be against the military, that there’s no difference between being a Democrat and being a socialist, and that only true blue conservatives really love this country is the stock in trade of the professional hatemongers on the right, and I’m here to tell you they’ve done their job! Their poison has pervaded conservative thought, and you’ll have a hard time finding conservatives who, when pressed, wouldn’t admit they at least allowed that those things were possible. It is a poison that underlies every single conservative thought, and there’s no better word for it than evil.
Nobody ever came to conservatism with the idea that their neighbors were unpatriotic. But dwell a while in the conservative tents, and you’ll tolerate others saying so. Dwell a little longer, and you accept that it might be true. A little longer, and you’ll say it yourself. And travel too far down the path with conservatives and the words “welfare recipient” will paint a picture in your mind that most people (including you) would call disgraceful. To claim this poison comes from anywhere but other conservatives is to say that conservatives gather together because of their bigotry and because they want to believe their neighbors are no better than traitors.
I think it’s misplaced tolerance to fail to give a subculture like that the name it’s earned over and over. There are folks who’d like to pick up this conservative tenet or that one, and who believe they’ll be able to remain morally aloof from the evil that undelies conservatism. I think those people are fooling themselves. Conservatism as it’s practiced in this country, here and now, is a political sickness, it’s contagious, and it’s dangerous.