It was naïve of me, no doubt, to believe as a kid that conservatives in America are supposed to preserve tradition, slow inevitable change to a pace the human mind can deal with, be the guardians of the national ethos and conserve resources with the spirit of enlightened frugality. It’s the way my mother and some of my older relatives thought about conservatism in the 1940s. Even then, though, conservatives saw poverty as a moral failure and really didn’t like foreigners very much, or people who didn’t look like white people.
They did, indeed, champion hard work but saw “labor” as the “enemy” and were miserly with wages, benefits and social safety nets, as if effort was enough to ensure success without good luck and the leg up of status, class and the “right” race and gender. Still, there seemed to be something honorable about their frugality and their belief in the virtue and practicality of work and saving. My late father-in-law was as honorable and as conservative a person I’ve known. We agreed about virtually nothing when it came to policy. But there wasn’t a crooked bone in his body. He was, in the best sense, an American gentleman — kind, respectful of women, hardworking, generous, neither a spendthrift nor a hoarder and a staunch Republican. He was a straight arrow and an environmentalist. He truly believed it was your duty to leave your camp site cleaner than when you found it.
So what happened to his political party? How did conservatives become aligned with a profligate, egomaniacal, misogynist gold-faucet jockey, a tax evader and grifter like Donald Trump, a man who thrives on bankruptcy, who doesn’t pay his bills, who stiffs contractors, who thinks environmentalism is a form of communism, who is a sexual predator and who is adored by white supremacists and bigots, a person who would flagrantly taunt and stalk and mock his female presidential opponent during a televised debate?
It has something to do, I know, with a combination of the entitlement of patriarchy, a political party that has shown itself to be generally anti-feminist, embracing a greed for power that is bonded in the psychology of self-righteousness, blaming the other, rationalization and sense of privilege that stimulates hypocrisy at every turn.
What could be more hypocritical than the posturing of a Reaganesque Gentleman Cowboy like the conservatives who run the Texas legislature, who recently created an abortion ban that is as deeply disrespectful of women, and as profoundly threatening and dangerous for them, as any misogynist law in America? And on top of that, these conservative gentlemen, the upright guardians of conservative American culture, authorized in that same law private citizens
becoming snoops, moral police, prying and spying on their neighbors and more than likely accusing them of being accessories to illegal abortions, all without probable cause. And to top it off, the conservative gentlemen on the Supreme Court refused to give the women of Texas a chance to contest the constitutionality of such law before it wreaks havoc on their private lives and reproductive health. So much for the gentlemanly respect for women.
Hypocrisy drives people crazy. Young people in particular find it maddening, especially when adults tell them not to do something then turn around and do it themselves. “Never hit or hurt or disrespect a woman,” is the cowboy gentleman’s code. But not when it comes to abortion in Texas.
Hypocrisy used to be hateful, and hypocrites used to be seen as reprehensible moral vagrants trading on their privilege while indulging their worst vices. But we don’t seem to mind much anymore. In fact, hypocrisy seems to be the dominant MO of a vast segment of our business and political leadership. Not all of it, but a troubling great swath of it.
Some pundits say it has to do with American “exceptionalism” and the arrogance it spawns. But virtually every nation thinks it’s the best. The Chinese do, so do the Russians; certainly the British and the French and the Brazilians do. No nation can live up to its own hype, especially if it’s so riddled with hypocrites that its national pride seems pointless.
Can a whole culture be without purpose? It can be if it’s become the victim of a class of parasites willing to say anything and do anything, damned be the consequences. We seem to be a culture that’s come to waste itself pursuing, as political scientist Richard Fox has said, “endless wars to achieve endless peace.” We’re a culture that allows whole cities to be nearly destroyed by flood and storms, like New Orleans, because we — and the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians and virtually everyone else in the industrial world — denied climate change and its dire predictions for so long that we’ve actually let them come true. We live in a culture in which a large minority of our people have been hoodwinked into believing, by arch hypocrites, that wearing masks and getting vaccinated in a deadly pandemic is an act of political coercion, a con game of “junk science” swindling them of their freedom.
We live in a culture that demonizes people from other cultures, that is still racist, practicing segregation in multiple gross and subtle ways, a culture of crippling poverty and obscene wealth, a culture in which poor people are lambasted for using food stamps and rich people are thought to be clever for evading taxes, a culture that boasts of its democratic form of government while working strenuously in some states to make it next to impossible for people of modest means to vote, a culture in which a class of charlatans with political power claim the validity of “alternative facts.”
Yes, we also live in a culture in which a still slim majority of us believe what Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg says that “our job is to take care of one another. To fight for a world where everyone is safe, is free, is whole. All of us. In this together.” But ours is the same culture in which a large minority apparently believe we should only take care of ourselves and let the devil take the hindmost, a world in which even good men, seemingly selfless servants of the people can offend, threaten, sexually molest and generally abuse their female associates and employees while supporting policies that further the cause of economic and environmental justice. Hypocrisy isn’t just the province of conservatives.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Even as you describe to a T the grotesque depths to which a large segment of our population has sunk in its racism, xenophobia, insatiable greed and attitudes towards women, you remind us that conservatism didn’t always mean this sort of criminality. Or at least not with the same unveiled intention. You make me think of decent relatives of my own, people I thought of as kind and considerate and–yes–harmless. I think it’s important to understand how we’ve changed, if we are ever to find our way back. The issues are so much clearer today, though. And the results of these attitudes so much more immediate and dangerous.
Your essay sums up the current state of American conservatism very well, especially in contrast, as you point out, to what Conservatism used to mean in American politics. I know of Republicans today who anguish over what their party has become, but unfortunately such people are in a distinct, and consequently nearly silent, minority. No wonder the 2-party system doesn’t work any more.
You nailed it! One Anthropological/historical note: We have known since the 1840’s that men who did not own land or have an education, or skill were prone to displacement and social rage. That made some sense in the antebellum South when black slaves DID “replace” poor landless whites (I refer to the book, “Masterless Men”). The stunning irony of Charlottesville and the tiki torch crowd of several years ago is that relatively well-off and well-dressed white guys now imagine themselves to be the victims. When I lived in Charlottesville in the late 1950’s, this same crowd wore jackets and cravats, mimicking the long gone Virginia’s Planter class of “Gentlemen” who once had full ownership/work and sexual “Dominion” over blacks, and Native Americans as slaves . Those cravat-wearing U. of Virginia student aspirers of my childhood generation did not achieve their dream of regaining human domination over blacks and minorities….and their grandsons are now full of rage. This malignant cultural and psychological reality is a considerable part of the current Republican party’s twisted values and world view.
The current Republican Party has begun to be taken over by what I fear will become “The Rise of the New Ku Klux Kracker Empire. “
Brilliant!! Thanks for saying this so beautifully.
I remember what a kind gentleman your father in law was and totally agree that he was the furthest thing from the current state of the far right. I know people like that today and I find my self afraid to find out if they have in fact, morphed into the monsters that would be willing to try and overthrow our government because a petulant baby can’t accept that he lost fair and square.
I’m scared for our country.
Just because you put on a cowboy hat, does not make you a cowboy.
Baby kisses and saying what they want to hear is old as the hills and still works.
There was a woman who voted buy putting the candidates picture in a frame. The one who looked best got her vote. In her case it was Nixon or Kennedy. Makes one wonder how may vote for looks vs content.
“Hypocrisy drives people crazy. ” Not enough people, unfortunately.
They did, indeed, champion hard work but saw “labor” as the “enemy”
-a good point I had never thought of.