Babylon Has Fallen

It has been expedient for three decades of GOP image-manipulators--Chuck Colson, Donald Segretti, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove--to portray American politics as two competing ideologies, liberalism vs. conservatism. Propaganda and mass marketing are best served by simplification: Us and them. Good and evil. Heroes and villains. "If you're not with us, you're against us." Subtlety, nuance and inference are inevitably lost in a message aimed at the lowest common denominator of, say, television viewers. (Whose taste is altogether suspect anyway if they're entertained by such benighted drivel as 'Survivor.') There is undeniable power in the childish simplicity of strict, polar opposites...except that in this case, as is the standard state of affairs with rightwing machinations, This particular allegation is absolutely unsullied by any hint of truth.

Political thought, like pretty much all human thought on nearly ANY given subject, has no clear delineations; everything is a matter of degrees. It can best be thought of as a spectrum, complex and inter-related. In a rainbow, for example, at what exact point does blue become green? Show me. Conservatism and liberalism are not opposites, although they ARE very different. This concept may be simple, but this distinction is crucial to understanding the kabuki dance between Democrats and Republicans down through the decades as well as the anti-American face of conservatism itself.

Not terribly long ago, I happened across a piece which helped me crystallize my own thinking on the matter. An astute blogger who calls himself Yashwata says this:

There isn’t a choice between conservative and liberal philosophies. This is because conservatism is not a philosophy. Let me explain.

Liberalism is a philosophy. Liberalism defines the general welfare—Bentham’s “greatest happiness for the greatest number”—as the center and purpose of all decision-making; and proceeds from there to consider how best to organize and govern the society.

Conservatism is not a philosophy. It is a pattern of behavior. The conservative works toward wealth and power for himself and his friends. All decisions are made on this basis. But when speaking about his decisions, he describes them in liberal terms. He claims to be motivated by concern for the general public. He claims to be working for the general good. Asked to describe the difference between himself and a liberal, he will say that very broadly they have similar goals; their differences come down to how they propose to get there. But this is not true. Conservative decisions are not designed to benefit the general public, only the plutocrats and power-brokers. Conservatism is not a different technique for serving the public; it is a technique for fleecing the public.

Therefore, public servants cannot and do not choose to adopt either a liberal or a conservative philosophy. They choose either to care about their community or to only pretend to care. They choose to tell the truth, or to lie.

So-called “conservatives” are liars. They pretend that there is a conservative approach to solving community problems, which can be contrasted with the liberal approach. But the conservative approach to helping the community does not exist. Conservative methods do not help the community, because they are not intended to. The conservative approach is not to care about community problems. Therefore, as soon as a conservative starts telling you how he’s going to help you, he’s already lied to you twice. The second time was when he said that he thought his plan would help you—he doesn’t think so. The first time was just before that, when he said that he wants to help you. He doesn’t.

I'd say that pretty much nails it...and I'll be referring back to Yashwata's insights in subsequent "Deconstructing Republicanism" postings.

For now, however, I need to demonstrate the very discrepancies existing between Republicans and conservatives, which are very different kinds of critters. The callous, frosty heart of what we know to be conservatism is a calculated regression to pre-Enlightenment thinking. Its prime ingredients are ignorance, intolerance and greed; its goal is the continued entrenchment of a minority class of ruling elites over a vast majority of servant/slaves who do all the work and pay all taxes necessary to sustain the system. That's the long and the short of it, folks, and anything else you may encounter along the way are mere trimmings and trappings designed to keep you from noticing its utterly inimical and un-American nature. In an October 2008 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, author Thomas Frank said this:

Historically speaking, conservatism is a movement organized and funded by society's most powerful members; politically speaking, it lusts for [legislation] that will benefit those same fortunate folks at the top.

If you remember nothing else about this screed, remember THAT.

Actually, this conservative bent harks back to pre-history when humans were hunter-gatherers, roving bands of 150 or less where we must enter into the field of anthropology. It's really not so hard to understand because we can observe "conservative" behavior in animals, in the so-called alpha males who define not just territorial boundaries, but behaviors expected in their in-group, the herd. They lead by virtue of strength or size or bellicosity and establish a clear separation between in-group and out-group; in-group is nurtured, protected while outsiders are expelled or fought. This is one inevitable consequence of the prehistoric heritage of our species dating from the time when we were rootless nomads before cities existed. Think Cro-Magnon. It's simply survival tactics adopted to cope with an often hostile world.

So this fundamentalist/fascist response to circumstances is absolutely natural, ancient and almost instinctual. It is also rooted in that evolutionary past, woefully inadequate for the task of adapting to nuance and flexibility in the modern world of the 21st century. Conservatives--and, in fact, ALL fundamentalist permutations--are throwbacks, clinging desperately to a few simplistic teachings too small and too specialized to accommodate the complex demands of today, even as they pretend honesty and nobility. This is something which must be kept in mind as we witness the behavior of those who would insist, in this day and age, on being called by that name.

Let us now move forward in time some tens of thousands of years to the founding of our country. It must be remembered that early on, Approximately 16% of American colonists didn't want to break with England. That may seem strange now, as the tyranny and abuses of power wrought by Great Britain's monarch seem all too obvious in hindsight, but it's unfortunately true. They were known as British Empire Loyalists and one of their leaders was Joseph Galloway, a man with sympathies toward the crown who grew to be an active Tory, known in England as 'the king's party.' He was Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly and a delegate to the First Continental Congress convened in the autumn of 1774, where he tried mightily to avert the break with King George by submitting a Plan of Union. Before it could be decided upon, however, Paul Revere rode into town bearing the Suffolk Resolves from several Boston-area communities...and Galloway's Plan of Union died a-borning.

It should be clear, then, from this chain of events that even before there was a United States of America, conservative Joseph Galloway, and others like him, opposed the very concept. That first Continental Congress drafted a Declaration of Rights addressed to George III which, as a sop to Galloway's Assembly, conceded the right of the British Parliament to regulate colonial trade, an incredibly awful idea which never had time to be implemented. By the coming of Continental Congress 2.0, convened in May of 1775--bigger and better in every way--the fledgling colonies had a shooting war on their hands in Lexington and Concord. Washington was appointed Commander in Chief of the newly formed army and on July 8, 1775, the Congress issued a Declaration setting forth the need to take up arms against the redcoats and the Revolutionary War was on.

This is a nearly perfect example of what is wrong with conservatism as a whole: If these closed-minded reactionaries had gotten their way, we'd be a monarchy now, under the thumb of Great Britain, with our money denominated in pounds instead of dollars. Oh, conservatives do love their royalty!

The central precept of conservatism, can easily be seen 6000 years in the ancient Egyptians; their Pharaohs claimed to BE gods with the inherent right to rule. Medieval sovereigns claimed to be DESCENDANTS of gods, via the Divine Right of Kings, with--you guessed it!--the inherent right to rule. Is it any wonder that the Catholic Church even to this day seeks to convince its followers that the Pope is related via direct succession to St. Peter the apostle, supposedly the first of the line? "Thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it." (Matthew 16:13-19)

So much for the nonsense of conservatism...

The Republican Party ostensibly had its beginnings in the conflict over slavery that preceded the Civil War. It had nothing to do with moral outrage or anything so high-minded; opposition to that odious practice was largely feigned and many of its opponents were essentially foursquare supporters of state capitalism. Look at the economics of the thing! Southern states had this vast supply of labor which only had to be fed, housed and clothed. Their crops--cotton, tobacco, sweet potatoes, etc.--could be produced in enormous quantities and at minimal cost. Of course they didn't want competition!

The infamous Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, which would have permitted slavery in the two newest territories if people there voted for it, was seen as a threat to continued Southern domination. Anti-slavery meetings all over the Northern States roundly condemned the bill. True abolitionists, vehement in their righteous indignation, wanted no part of an EXPANSION of slavery, for crying in church; they wanted to stamp it out altogether! On February 28, 1854, Alvan E. Bovay, a leading member of the Whig political party, held his own conclave in Ripon, Wisconsin, where a resolution surfaced that would bring a new party into existence if Congress passed the hated bill. This was the nascent GOP, already prepared to cozy up to business interests...like Southern plantation owners...and help them get the legislation they wanted.

Bovay called a second meeting in Ripon on March 20th, after Kansas-Nebraska cleared the Senate. The delegates were livid.

On July 6, 1854, at a party gathering in Jackson, Michigan, final details were hammered out and the name "Republican" was formally adopted. They continued their anti-slavery rhetoric in public, even though abolition of it was the LAST thing they wanted. I find it singularly ironic that they came into being speaking out against the enslavement of Black people...yet remained unabashedly prejudiced, the party of racial backlash according to Paul Krugman, who makes his case with brevity and irrefutable logic. Republican debates about "free soil"--that vile Kansas-Nebraska Bill--never quite got around to addressing the obvious evils of slavery, merely their intention to keep the "inferior" Negroes out of the new territories...which would be reserved for whites.

Their first presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, was a public relations construct. They marketed him to the public as a "rail-splitter," a sterling example of The Common Man...another steaming load of balderdash from a party who also made consummate exploitation of media their specialty from the very first. The Lincoln of 1860 was also a former Whig, a party which advocated "consolidated sovereignties" and which carried water consistently for wealthy elites.

This so-called "Party of Lincoln" was, at the time, no such thing. Surprise, surprise. Lincoln was only moderately against the established institution of slavery; he was more concerned about other issues. During his first Inaugural address on March 4, 1861, Abe Lincoln said this:

I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

The circumstances of Southern secession rather forced his hand on the sticky subject. Don't get me wrong: Lincoln was a GREAT man...and one whom we sorely needed at the time. On January 1, 1863, he did the right thing and issued the Emancipation Proclamation which declared freedom for slaves in the 11 states of the Confederacy then in rebellion. It turned the tide of the Civil War, allowing Blacks to join and serve in the Union armed forces.

One chief component of that early GOP was the so-called "nativists" formerly of the American Party. Their violent vigilantes, known as Wide-Awakes, performed lynchings as well as torching churches in Boston and Philadelphia. Lincoln was grateful for their support. The truth is, he stood less AGAINST slavery than he stood FOR a unified mercantilist empire and however he got there was just a-okay with him. Abe's intention to snuff out the Jeffersonian federalist system of states' rights, was finally accomplished by the War Between the States and, in gratitude, he funneled money to like-minded newspapers and cultivated local leaders with whom he was ideologically aligned.

Note: The South possessed a primarily agrarian economy. The North did some farming, but their economy, thanks to the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, was rapidly moving toward mechanization...and therein lurked another type of slavery, an undeclared and elaborately ignored commercial wage slavery. The advent of powered machinery made it possible for one man to do the work of a dozen or more, so plants and shops rapidly supplanted domestic/cottage industries.

Those early mills, mines and factories were poorly-lit--no electric lights until the 1880's!--hot, noisy and grimy. Runaway corporate greed compelled men, women and even children to labor 12 or 14 hours a day, six days a week, under oppressive conditions for beggars' wages. This was the heyday of the company store, the wildcat strike and the bloody beginnings of union organizing...often accompanied by violence. Four years before the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx, the following appeared in The Awl, a shoemakers' newspaper in Lynn, Massachusetts:

The division of society into the producing and the non-producing classes and the fact of the unequal distribution of value between the two, introduces us at once to another distinction--that of capital and labor...labor now becomes a commodity...Antagonism and opposition is introduced in the community; capital and labor stand opposed.

The Civil War did nothing for THESE slaves and, afterwards, those suckfish and corporate idolators had found themselves a toehold, by golly! They rightly perceived that the class distinctions in which they so fervently believed were now indeed present here in the New World...not by birth or entitlement, but through the ineffably vulgar standard or mere money. Well, they'd take it any way they could get it. The Republican Party, previously an aggregation of bean-counters and button-sorters, fell headlong into the cheap-labor ideology and sincerely began to perceive themselves as the enablers of capitalists.

You see, English kings had originally granted charters to the British East India Company, the Hudson Bay Company and even American colonies. These charters allowed them and their cronies to control property and commerce while reaping dividends for DOING NOTHING. (The royal charter of Maryland, to cite just one example, required--completely against common sense, mind you!--that all of the colony's exports were to be shipped to or through Great Britain.) So it was that the colonists weren't merely revolting against a tax on tea; laborers, small farmers, artisans, seamstresses, mechanics and many others among the landed gentry actively feared corporations.

While the ragtag American army was routing the redcoats, their local leaders took action to rein in these chartered corporations. After the successful revolution, then, they were determined to keep investment and production decisions both local and democratic. They believed wholeheartedly that corporations were neither inevitable nor always even appropriate. Colonists argued that under the Constitution, no business was eligible for special treatment. They were convinced that once corporations amassed wealth, they would use their status to control jobs, buy off the press and dominate elections and the courts. It's hard to believe that our ancestors could have been so prescient even before the turn of the 19th Century!

Early corporate charters were issued on the public's behalf and, for nearly 100 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, citizen vigilance and activism forced state legislators to keep corporations on a short leash; few charters were granted and, when they were, the decision rested with the prospective communities. Incorporated businesses were legally prohibited from actions that locals and legislators deemed hurtful. Charters were limited and citizen authority clauses dictated the rules for issuing stock, shareholder voting, transparency of records and paying of dividends. Interlocking directorates were altogether outlawed. Charters were often entirely revoked at the whim of state and municipal government; t'was a MUCH different world back then.

Following the Civil War, however, the prevailing mood changed. "Let the good times roll" became the order of the day and Republican politicians and judges made themselves readily available to the fiscal persuasions of the financiers as well as the financial empires that were making fabulously rich men of Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and the like.

The final turning point arrived with a ruling made by the Republican-dominated Supreme Court--but during the Democratic administration of Grover Cleveland--in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. In a decision unparalleled in its jugheadedness, the High Court declared that a private corporation--a consummate legal fiction!--was, in fact, a "natural person" under the US Constitution. (Sixty years later, Justice William O. Douglas declared there had been "no history, logic or reason given to support that view." But WE know what the reason was, don't we?) This judicial double-think meant simply that the "criminal prosecution of persons" under the 14th Amendment could not be undertaken without due process and huge corporations, flush with cash, were allowed to compete on so-called equal terms with neighborhood 'Mom & Pop' stores and even individuals! The outcome could have been predictable to a blind man.

From Taking Care of Business ©1993, Richard L. Grossman and Frank T. Adams:

Within just a few decades, appointed [Can you say "activist?"] judges had redefined the "common good" to mean the corporate use of humans and the Earth for maximum production and profit--no matter what was manufactured, who was hurt or what was destroyed.

There's your distinction, then: Conservatives did and do believe in social hierarchy for its own sake, while Republicans attach class division to the utterly artificial criterion of wealth...and their own ruthless, relentless pursuit of same has no connection to conservatism by any stretch of the imagination. It is as insidious as it is grotesque.

And here we'll end things for the time being because Part IV of Deconstructing Republicanism, "The Rightwing Manifesto," will tackle the psychology..and the pathology...of the radical right as we know them today.

Please join me then.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

 •    •    •    •    •    •    •    •    •    •