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I have heard about John Dean’s new book and will be picking it up any day now. In the meantime, I got to thinking about his premise and how it jibs with my 54 years of observing the conservative mind-set.
And then this morning it occurred to me that I have never heard anyone in the Bush administration—or anywhere else for that matter--say we are trying to create a “conservative democracy” in Iraq. Nope. There simply is no such thing. Conservatism is by nature authoritarian and therefore totally incompatible with true democracy. Add religious fundamentalism into the mix and you have no chance at all of a free society.
No, this administration has repeatedly said it wants to install a “liberal democracy” in Iraq—complete with universal health care no less. The Bush administration is actually pinning all hopes of success on moderate and liberal secular Iraqis gaining and maintaining control (just so long as the eventual leadership are puppets in servitude to American business and geopolitical interests). The last thing they want is an Iranian-style conservative theocratic regime taking control of Iraq; and as any sensible person now residing in the U.S.A. can see first-hand, a conservative fundamentalist regime--even one in its infancy--can only erode democracy.
Who are the terrorists that attacked us on 9/11? Were they liberal or even moderate secular Arabs? Not even close. They were died-in-the-wool Islamic conservatives.
Was terrorist Tim McVeigh a flaming liberal? Hardly. He hated our "liberal" government.
When the old Soviet Union started to fall apart, it was the liberal faction there that supported a change to a more democratic form of government while the old, hard-line conservatives fought tooth-and-nail to maintain the authoritarian status quo.
To those with the conservative mind-set, the actual form of whatever government they live under and blindly support--whether it be leftwing socialist, communist, rightwing corporate fascism or a repressive theocratic dictatorship--is not really important. Rather it is the authoritarian and nationalistic ascepts of these types of governments that they find compelling. I have no doubt that if you could magically transform a contemporary U.S. rightwing conservative into a lifelong Russian citizen in the 1950s, he or she would be a hardline commie whom delights in informing on his or her “unpatriotic” neighbors and relatives---and then volunteers for the firing squad. I can just as easily visualize Ann Coulter in drab black pajamas, standing at a dais in a “re-education” camp, expounding the virtues of Mao’s Little Red Book to a captive audience as I can her curled up in bed tonight with her dog-eared copy of Mien Kempt. It is their nature. They just can’t help it.
And that nature not only requires authoritarianism of any flavor, but also a heaping helping of hate.
And who better to hate then the powerless? The American conservative delights in the plight of the poor and defenseless. They celebrate news reports of the deaths of Arab children and Katrina flood victims with equal amounts of glee and vitriol. Every illegal immigrant who dies of thirst in the desert and every gay man who succumbs to AIDs is gratefully thanked for the entertainment value they provided.
The only thing they despise more than the poor and powerless are liberals. Conservatives’ hate of liberalism--and by extension, liberal democracy--is so intense that they are easily manipulated to vote against their own best interests by those using their support to help consolidate most of the wealth and all of the power in this nation. The powerful will always have the ear of the right (as long as the powerful person doesn't also happen to be an admitted liberal) because they are what the right craves the most: authority figures. Conservative hate of the powerless is equal to their adulation of the powerful, for power is all they ultimately care about. So it is that if the powerful feel that environmental concerns, for example, may negatively affect their already considerable earning power, all they need do is falsely label all things environmental as liberal.
Which is nonsense to the sensible person, but that is all it takes to sway the American conservative. No amount of facts will ever sway them from that moment on. It is a done deal. Global warming is just part of some weird liberal “agenda” and always will be, and they will argue that point even as they stand in waist deep sea water in Times Square. And even if the occasional conservative would by that time admit that global warming was indeed occurring, they would surely have someone else to blame for why the problem was ignored. The “party of personal responsibility” has long since become the “whine fest of blame Clinton or anyone else but us.”
The politics of person destruction plays well with conservatives as well. Any charge against the “enemy,” no matter how nonsensical and no matter how often disproved (the smearing of McCain and his wife, the nonsense that was the trail of Clinton murder and rape victims, and the “Swiftboating” of Kerry are but a few examples) will be forever part their warped and hateful reality for facts have no place in the conservative mind-set. What is falsified today will be available for repeat tomorrow. This is why political discourse with the right has become so contentious. They will state their case, no matter how weak, and when faced with facts they resort to logical fallacies, and then finally to the time-tested tactic of the personal attack. Often, though, in obvious deference to time constraints, they conveniently skip the first two steps and go straight to the name-calling and threats....which is, after all, their forte.
In that aspect, it is hard not to notice that today’s American conservative processes extreme rage and harbors violent tendencies and fantasies toward anyone who opposes their embryonic authoritarian father figure (Bush) and/or is seen as an obstacle in their march to replace our liberal democracy with some combination of corporate fascism and theocracy. In an authoritarian dictatorship, the American right sees an outlet for its anger. They will realize another of their subconscious needs: personal power over the powerless, the power of life and death.
They will be able to, in “patriotic defense of the homeland,” legally live out their violent urges against their fellow citizen--or at least many of them seem to hope so. They will no longer be limited to empty internet threats. They seem to believe they will at long last be able to do what their Islamic counterparts do but they have only been able to fantasize about during long sweat-drenched, sleepless nights: kill people with whom they disagree with abandon and impunity. They have already completed the first step by dehumanizing the "ememy" (liberals, gays and the poor). All they need in order to "act-out" is the power.
This has brought us back to Islamic terrorists. The similarity between these two conservative factions is quite startling. If someday in the future, God forbid, both the Islamic and American conservative movements are successful, I wonder if it is not to far out of the realm of possibility that the U.S. and one or more newly formed Islamic fascist/theocratic nation could end up as close allies against the rest of the world?
As worldwide pariahs and security threats to the rest of the nations they may well be forced into such an unholy alliance one day. It certainly would be ironic.
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