What is a Conservative?

Although for a long time I managed to stay away from it, the recent scandal over the Pledge of Allegiance has brought to the front of my mind the battle between conservatives and liberals. In conservative circles, "liberal" is used as a general term of abuse, a word for someone who has such dangerously wrongheaded opinions that one wonders whether they have malicious intent. To some, liberals may be simply evil people bent on leading the nation into some kind of sin: witness the commentaries on the American Taliban John Walker Lindh that blamed the liberal California environment for Lindh's corruption. Clearly, this makes very little sense objectively speaking; how does it follow that one who is raised in a permissive environment tolerant of all manner of lifestyles, bizarre religious creeds, and ethnic groups will join, as a direct consequence of the liberal environment, a group committed to the systematic oppression of women, etc. -- in essense a group committed to everything the liberals hate? This is the kind of thing that leads most liberals to assume that conservatives are not evil, but simply stupid.

The debate usually remains at that level: conservatives point out that liberals are leading our nation ever deeper into perdition, while the liberals become visibly frustrated with the abject stupidity of their opponents (the best example of this is Al Gore in the presidential debates). As a consequence, both "liberal" and "conservative" are not very useful terms as they are commonly deployed. We need to step back and take a look at the more literal meaning of the terms. I will focus on "conservative" in this essay.

To conserve means to keep something the way it is. In the case of the Pledge "debate," the conservative reaction is fairly plain: "Why do we need to change the Pledge? What harm has it done? It's been like that forever and no one had a problem before!" This is superficial conservatism, and to the credit of conservatives, the natural human reaction is to resist change. Clearly, however, conservatives do not resist every change; very seldom do you hear a conservative say, "Why do we need to get rid of affirmative action? What harm has it done? It's been like that forever..." or "Why do we need to get rid of the estate tax?" or "Why do we need to change laws on abortion?" or "Why do we need to cut welfare programs or privatize Social Security?"

In some areas, conservatives can even appear to be in favor of radical change. George W. Bush, the very model of conservatism in action, has taken unprecedented moves to increase executive powers. He insists that the nation is "at war" when Congress has sole authority to declare war and has not done so. He favors depriving certain American citizens of their constitutional rights to a free trial at the sole discretion of the executive branch, due to our country's engagement in said war. He favors drilling for oil in a region of the earth that has never been subject to significant human exploitation. He withdrew the United States from the treaty that has maintained the balance of nuclear power for much of his adult life. He wants to completely revamp the Social Security system that has been the most important government service for the better part of a century. I could continue, but it is clear that on the surface, conservatism is not content to let things be. This is completely natural, because change is an inevitable part of life, and the kind of superficial conservatism illustrated in the Pledge controversy would quickly prove to be utterly impractical if applied in a serious way to political and economic policy.

Clearly, though, conservatives only favor changes of a certain kind. Anyone who follows political debates closely for even a very short period of time will be able to predict with considerable accuracy what the conservative response will be. This shows us that beneath its sometimes confusing surface, conservatism has a fairly simple and flexible set of principles which can be applied to virtually any situation. They are as follows:

Locate those who have the most political and economic power.
Determine what political plan will allow those people to continue to have free exercise of that power.
Use any means necessary to implement that plan.

In the case of the Pledge of Allegiance scandal, the superficially conservative action coincides with the more properly conservative action, so I will use that as an example. Even though it is intentionally vague, it is fairly certain that the words "under God" are meant to refer to the Christian God. This is because Christians have long held the most political power in America and continue to do so, no matter what Cal Thomas thinks. The removal of the words "under God" is an affront to the political power of Christians and must therefore be unequivocally condemned in order to maintain the low-level status quo.

Again, in the case of affirmative action, the logic behind the conservative position is fairly straightforward. Whites have long held overwhelming political power in America, and affirmative action programs don't simply increase the power of minorites, but actively take away power from whites. Because of affirmative action, fewer positions of prestige and power are available to whites (even if the overall effect of the policy has been negligible), even though whites are "more qualified." The trick is that if the whites are in power, they will always be able to decide what consitutes "more qualified" and will therefore be able to keep the black man down in a way that seems to be based on "objective standards." The only way to circumvent this and give minorities genuine power is to come up with some way to keep the whites from constantly stacking the deck, which is what affirmative action tries to do. As such, it must be opposed.

Thus we can see the conservative rhetoric of the evils of liberalism for what it really is: an emotionally loaded way of saying, "We had it first!" They are able to paint liberals as evil because the very success of the people the conservatives support (white Christian Americans) is a proof of the righteousness of their cause. Even though classic Puritanism led a relatively short life in America, this idea of prosperity and power as proof of God's election remains with us to this very day: "God is on our side because we are righteous, and we can tell this because we are in power. Therefore, anyone else who wants to try to take our power away from us is the enemy of God." Think about that the next time you recite the Pledge of Allegiance -- think about what "one nation under God" really means.

So conservatism looks pretty bad. In fact, I may have just alienated some of my readers. Don't worry: my next installment will show how liberalism is just as bad, if not worse.