In our political culture conservatism and being a rightist have been conflated. They are quite different things, and I think we would all benefit from clarity that would come by making the distinction. The true conservative is an honorable person deserving our respect; the rightist is a thuggish goon worthy only of our contempt. I've been on something of a crusade to delink the two. (It's a theme found throughout many posts, but see, for instance, here.) To be a true, principled conservative means to conserve that which has been hard won by fighting off the forces that continually threaten to pull us back into a more primitive stage of social development. Those threats come from both the left and the right, but in our country at this moment the greater threat comes from the right.
The New Deal, for instance, delivered us from the primitivism of 19th Century, bare-knuckled capitalism and its Social Darwinist ideology. The GOP ideology since Reagan has not been conservative–it has been bent on regressing us back to the 19th Century, and as I've argued here and here, Libertarianism is the new Social Darwinism that provides its ideological justification. A true conservative would fight tooth and nail to preserve the New Deal social infrastructure against those who seek to dismantle it.
The GOP and Libertarianism have very little to do with true conservatism. They are symptomatic of a drift within our political culture toward the authoritarian right. They provide the cover for the mentality that is ok for the strong to dominate the weak. For insofar as Libertarianism advocates removing regulatory constraints and canceling the redistributory effects of the tax code, it allows for the already rich and powerful to do as they please, and mostly they please to dominate the weak. It does so in the name of freedom, but it's the freedom that exists in the jungle, where the government doesn't interfere with the most powerful predators doing their thing. In the jungle only the powerful are truly free. Libertarianism is a neo-primitivist ideology that too many people buy into because of its "free-to-choose" and "let-the-market-decide" principles without really understanding its consequences.
The GOP has become the party of the authoritarian right, and the basic spirit of the right is that "might makes right." Libertarianism is useful for hiding the ugly truth of this underlying spirit. The Republicans have become the front organization for a regressive, primitive, power-justifies-anything political ideology that appeals that which is fearful and primitive in the human psyche. No matter how intellectually sophisticated his rationale, a rightist sees everything in eat-or-be-eaten terms. He is someone who thinks his survival is threatened on every front. He thinks anyone who doesn't think with his adrenaline-soaked brain is a naive, unpatriotic wimp who deserves to be crushed, and no dirty trick is too low. Unpatriotic because he doesn't understand the threat that the homeland faces within and without and which must be defended against no matter what the cost. No attitude could be more destructive to democratic ideals and the rule of law. No attitude could be more conducive to our regressing into an authoritarian state. And no administration has been so blatant in my lifetime in its goal to regress us there than this Cheney/Bush regime.
Joe Conason echoes this in a piece about Jim Webb's historical novel The Emperor's General in which he lays out how a military commission was nothing but a kangaroo court in the prosecution of Admiral Yamahita after Japan's defeat. His main point is the following:
The true meaning of conservatism — to defend and uphold the Constitution, as liberals and conservatives have sworn to do for the past two centuries — will be tested in January 2007. That is when the Senate Judiciary Committee is likely to consider a bill introduced this week by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., titled the Effective Terrorists Prosecution Act, which would restore many of the rights and liberties abrogated by the Military Commissions Act. According to Dodd's office, his new bill would, among other things, restore habeas corpus protections to detainees, bar testimony obtained through torture, authorize due process for appeals, limit presidential authority to interpret the Geneva Conventions, and redefine the meaning of "unlawful enemy combatants."
Whether Dodd and future Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy can move that restorative legislation through the Senate remains to be seen. The Military Commissions Act passed with 65 votes last September, and most of the senators who approved it, including a dozen Democrats, will be in Congress next year. But should Webb remain true to his convictions, Dodd and Leahy will at least have a tough, eloquent and credible new comrade — "conservative" or not.
That last sentence refers to Webb, who the more I learn about him, the more I like.
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