Today’s modern conservatives are emphatic they are right in all things. Their ideology, theology, philosophy, morality, and all other activity is at the highest end of the spectrum of human goodness. All problems in the world are the result of liberals’ moral depravity, and the inability of liberals to come to the same conclusions as conservatives. If this portrayal were accurate, conservatism would be a movement that all rational people of goodwill would want to join. If everything today’s conservative movement says about itself is accurate, then I ask myself, what is stopping me from joining it?
I am certainly what most conservatives would call a liberal. Conservatives would label me a liberal, not because I embrace some radical leftist ideology or philosophy, because I do not, but rather because I disagree with most of their beliefs and conclusions. I have examined their arguments, checked the facts and data that could and should support their positions, and I find them invariably wanting, lacking in any real substance, and generally devoid of truth or intellectual honesty.
If I thought for a second conservatism was the “real deal”, I would become a conservative. When Ronald Reagan was elected to his first term as president, I voted for him. While I have since come to appreciate Jimmy Carter’s strength as a leader, at the time he disappointed me. Reagan offered a vision of renewed American strength and prestige, which in the wake of the Iran hostage crisis felt greatly diminished. He championed what appeared to be new and innovative economic ideas, supporting the “Supply Side Economics” espoused by economist Arthur Laffer. When you cut the taxes of the wealthy, they invest and create jobs, and everyone prospers. We had been weakening ourselves by letting government get too big, and take too much fuel from the great engine of the free market and its inexorable laws, which, according to conservatives, operate on approximately the same plane as gravity and thermodynamics. At the time it sounded pretty good to a much younger, less experienced version of me. Sign me up, Mr. Reagan, I’m on board.
I grew up in western Pennsylvania, and until 1979 I was employed in the steel industry. When the economy faltered in the late seventies I was laid off from my steelworker job, so I decided it was time to find another way to make a living. Reagan was making bold promises about retraining all the displaced steelworkers, since the domestic steel industry was one of the biggest casualties of the economic malaise that set in after the first great “oil crisis” of the 1970’s. I was excited by Reagan’s promise. This was going to be great! I was certainly one of the displaced steelworkers Reagan was talking about, so as far as I was concerned, this promise was made directly to me. I enrolled in a two year Associate degree program at a local technical college, and I was fully expecting the fulfillment of Reagan’s promise. However, when I applied for financial aid, I was denied because I had made too much money in the previous year, the last year I was a full time steelworker. Fortunately, I had parents who were willing and able to help me past this hurdle. Imbued with optimism and hope for the future, I thought, “Oh well, I will get that aid next year!” Surely unemployment benefits wouldn’t provide enough income to disqualify me. However, by the second year of my degree program, out of necessity I had moved back to my parent’s home. When I applied for financial aid the following year, I couldn’t qualify unless my parents sold their home. Thanks to a lifetime of hard work my parent’s house was paid for, and they had achieved part of the American Dream. In order for me to get help with my education, part of their dream had to die. This experience served as the harbinger to a long string of disappointments in conservative promises.
When Mr. Reagan started cutting taxes for the wealthy, I was optimistic. This was going to fuel economic growth. As a newly retrained worker, with updated and in-demand skills, I was anxious for the economy to rebound under the new supply side policies. When I did my income taxes next, I was unpleasantly surprised to find out Reagan, with the help of Congress, had eliminated the deduction for credit card interest. As a well-trained American consumer, encouraged by the master manipulators of Madison Avenue and Wall Street, I had started to use a credit card for some purchases. Part of the appeal of spending in that manner was the classic “buy now, pay later” ethos of the American Baby Boom, allowing us to make larger purchases sooner, and take a tax deduction for the interest paid on the balances. Reagan had given large tax breaks to upper income earners, but he didn’t publicize the fact that, at least in part, he was making up for any potential revenue shortfall through this clever little sleight of hand. Ronald Reagan was letting me, now unemployed and working hard to get back into the work force, pick up part of the tab for tax breaks to millionaires. Who, after all, used credit cards most, and paid interest? Certainly not the wealthy Reagan was giving the big breaks to. It was about this time I started to realize perhaps conservative promises should receive closer scrutiny.
Conservatives have a real problem with truthfulness, although they abound with “truthiness” (nod to Stephen Colbert). Listen to a conservative debate, and you will hear sophistry at its finest. They speak in talking points, trying to sound like they have a cogent argument, as long as you don’t examine their talking points too closely. What I find most disturbing in modern conservatism is that, overall, they just don’t seem to give a damn about being honest. If you present opposing facts, they deny them, even if there is overwhelming evidence to support them. I think many who classify themselves as conservatives just blindly believe what they are told by Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh’s disciples proudly proclaim themselves “Ditto Heads”. They accept conservative dogma as unquestionable truth, while their minds are apparently incapable of considering any proposition, no matter how well documented and supported, if the proposition came from a “lefty liberal”, which is, of course, code in the right wing echo chamber for anyone who doesn’t agree with conservative dogma.
Nowhere is the conservatives’ cavalier disregard for truth more manifest than in those emails that show up in your inbox from time to time, forwarded by some right wing relative or acquaintance, who either assumes you will agree with it, or hopes it will change your mind about whomever or whatever is the subject of the email’s “revelation”. I recall one email in particular I received during the 2008 presidential campaign season. The email was forwarded by a very vocal conservative acquaintance, and it arrived in early October, just ahead of the election. The subject of this email was, not surprisingly, Barack Obama. The email claimed that during an appearance on the Sunday morning political talk show “Meet the Press” aired on September 7, 2008, Obama was part of a discussion panel that also included retired USAF General Bill Ginn. The email alleged that the general confronted Obama about why he did not follow protocol during the national anthem when the flag was displayed. Senator Obama was then alleged to have responded with, ‘As I’ve said about the flag pin, I don’t want to be perceived as taking sides. There are a lot of people in the world to whom the American flag is a symbol of oppression. And the anthem itself conveys a war-like message. You know, the bombs bursting in air and all. It should be swapped for something less parochial and less bellicose. I like the song “I’d Like To Teach the World To Sing.” If that were our anthem, then I might salute it’.
After reading this email, I wanted to know if this exchange really took place, because this would certainly change my views of Obama as a viable candidate. I went to Google and started to do a few basic searches. First, I determined USAF General Bill Ginn was, in fact, actually a retired USAF General. Next I went to the web site for Meet the Press, and on Sunday, September 7, 2008, when this exchange allegedly took place, neither Senator Barack Obama nor retired USAF General Bill Ginn were on the program. So in a matter of about 5 minutes I determined this email was a complete fabrication. Think about how many “conservatives” believed it, and then forwarded it without ever checking its accuracy. This sort of willful ignorance to facts and truth, combined with a blind acceptance of whatever fits their world view, is endemic among the Fox News crowd. As I get older I am continually baffled by the large number of people who don’t seem to care about something being true or false, as long as it conforms to their bias. I don’t see this type of email circulated by liberals in order damage the image or reputation of conservatives with lies and distortions. Of course, if you pay any attention to much of what conservatives say, it isn’t necessary to fabricate things to discredit them. They do it quite nicely by themselves.
The seemingly unquenchable thirst for falsity, farce and sham in today’s conservatism renders it unacceptable to any intellectually honest person. Supply side economics does not work. There is no economic data to support it as anything other than a conduit for a larger share of the nation’s wealth to be redistributed to the few. How ironic that conservatives do in fact support the redistribution of wealth through tax policy, as long as it redistributes upward. American workers, who are more productive than ever, receive a steadily diminishing share of the economic pie. Conservatives decry the decline of the family while they pursue economic policies that necessitate both parents be in the work force to achieve a reasonable standard of living. America is the only western democracy that does not support paid family leave for the birth of a child, even though in American companies that have implemented it, it’s proven to be a non-factor. The average American family stands one major illness away from financial ruin, while conservatives try over and over to repeal “Obama Care”, a program based on policy ideas that originated in conservative think tanks. Yet conservatives can offer nothing to replace it. The conservatives who took control of our congress in January, 2015, have already been pushing for more tax breaks for corporations and the very wealthy, attempting to gut regulations on our capricious financial industry intended to prevent them from creating another financial meltdown like 2008. Yet these same conservatives are incapable of supporting an increase in the minimum wage in order to make it a livable wage for low income earners. These conservative howl about the increased number of people receiving food stamp assistance. A close examination of the largest number of these recipients shows they are working people who do not make enough money to feed their families without this assistance. Conservatives deny climate change, falsely portraying that a controversy exists among scientists, when 97% of credentialed climate scientists agree it is both real and cause by human action. When you consider the 97% in agreement, compared with 3% who disagree, this hardly seems to constitute a great controversy.
Former Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater discovered that if you tell a big enough lie, and repeat it often enough, people will accept it as truth. Atwater, who was George H. W. Bush’s campaign manager in his successful presidential bid, was the creator of the “Willie Horton” attack ad. This ad was used to distort Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis’s overall record on “crime” as governor of Massachusetts, and it helped Bush overcome Dukakis’s 17 point lead. Atwater is the godfather of Republican “dirty tricks”, what President Bill Clinton so aptly dubbed the “politics of personal destruction”. Among Atwater’s creations is the now often used (by Republicans) “push poll”, in which a campaign worker calls pretending to be conducting a non-partisan “election survey”. Once the person agrees to answer a few questions for this “research poll”, they are asked a series of leading questions that attack a political opponent, distorting and misrepresenting their position on issues in the form of a “poll question”. Lee Atwater died at the age of 42 of a rare form of brain cancer. I find it interesting that modern conservative political tactics emerged from such a diseased mind.
This post could continue at great length if I were to cite more of the outrageous lies and distortions used by conservatives in order to persuade the gullible to vote for candidates who hold conservative political positions. It isn’t difficult to find the lies, distortions, and inaccuracies in conservative arguments. A little bit of Google can expose a great deal of conservative subterfuge. I have a lot of trouble wrapping my mind around people being so willing to be lied to. If a conservative was dealing in many other contexts outside politics, I don’t believe they would find dishonesty so acceptable. If they were told a new car they purchased was going to get 35 miles per gallon, and then found afterward it only got 20 MPG, they would conclude they had been lied to. If they went to the appliance store and negotiated a new refrigerator for $500, and then received a bill for the appliance showing it costing $700, I am certain a little outrage would be present. Why then, when they cross the threshold into the body politic, are they so willing to be lied to? The only thing conservatives seems to be conserving is the truth, because they certainly don’t seem inclined to use it.