The movement that I refer to in the title of this post is the so-called Conservative Movement in the United States. But “conservative” is a misnomer. This movement is not really conservative at all. It would much better be described as the Fear-Greed Movement.
To call this movement conservative is to stand logic on its head. That is precisely the modus operandi of this movement – call everything by its opposite, in order to disguise their true intentions. They make a law designed to give corporate polluters free reign, and they call it the “
Clear skies Act”. They invade and destroy a country, kill 5% of its people, and torture large numbers of them, all in the interest of bringing “democracy and freedom” to that country. And they call their efforts to prevent the American people from bringing lawsuits against corporations that screw them “
tort reform”.
No, this movement is not conservative at all, in any traditional sense of the term.
I am conservative in many respects. I have always preferred saving my money to spending it on things that I don’t need. I am careful to limit my car driving miles because I’m worried about polluting our planet. I believe in the rule of law, as did the framers of our Constitution – and therefore I believe that when our leaders flagrantly violate our laws they should be punished for it. And I believe that diplomacy should always be pursued aggressively in order to avoid war, rather than resorting to war as the primary means of solving our problems. All of these are conservative principles in the true sense of the word. Yet, in large part because I believe in these things, in today’s world I am considered very much the polar opposite of a conservative. Such is the Orwellian framework built by today’s so-called “Conservative” Movement.
Unfortunately, to the extent that this movement has influenced the attitudes and actions of our country – and it
has done so to a very large extent – we have become a
country permeated with fear and driven by greed.
The national elections of 2006 and 2008, as well as public opinion polls on a variety of subjects, show that the influence of the Conservative Movement on the American people is beginning to wane. But we should not lose sight of the fact that it is far from gone, and may very well make a resurgence. Its attitudes still influence large numbers of Americans, and far too many of its policies are still in place. The Conservative Movement is still pervasive in the United States, and we have a very long way to go to get back on the right track. A crucial first step in doing that is recognizing the Conservative Movement for what it really is, and what it has done to our country.
PERMEATED BY FEARThere is voluminous evidence that this movement is permeated by fear and that this fear has driven much of U.S. policy: Obscene amounts of military spending; the highest incarceration rate in the world; discrimination against vulnerable minorities; inability to admit when they are wrong; and the spread of a phenomenon best described as “inverted quarantine”. Let’s consider some of this.
Obscene amounts of military spendingAccording to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the U.S.
spent $711 on its military in 2008, which amounted to nearly half of the military spending in the world:
When military spending is
examined in more detail, it turns out that it is really much greater than this, equaling more than the remainder of our national budget. Instead of the 20% of our national budget that we are commonly told military spending comprises, it comes to 54% when we add in such things as military spending outside of the Department of Defense, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and payment on the military portion of our national debt. And that doesn’t even include the “foreign aid” that we provide to other countries, which largely consists of military assistance.
Why on earth does one nation that comprises 5% of the world’s population need to spend as much or more on its military than the rest of the world combined, and more than it spends on everything else combined? What do we have to be so fearful about? If conservatives want to claim that the United States is “
the greatest force for good in the world”, then why can’t they work
with the other nations of the world to promote an international system of law and order, rather than drive our own country bankrupt in an attempt to attain an invulnerable military machine?
Americans tolerate and even embrace this situation only because they have been conditioned to so fear the rest of the world that they think obscene amounts of military spending is the only way to defend ourselves. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA)
explains the foolhardiness of this course of action:
I am working with a variety of thoughtful analysts to show how we can make very substantial cuts in the military budget without in any way diminishing the security we need… (Our) well-being is far more endangered by a proposal for substantial reductions in Medicare, Social Security or other important domestic areas than it would be by canceling weapons systems that have no justification from any threat we are likely to face… So those… who talk about the need for fiscal responsibility should be challenged to begin with the area where our spending has been the most irresponsible… our military budget. Both parties have for too long indulged the implicit notion that military spending is somehow irrelevant to reducing the deficit and have resisted applying to military spending the standards of efficiency that are applied to other programs. If we do not reduce the military budget, either we accustom ourselves to unending and increasing budget deficits, or we do severe harm to our ability to improve the quality of our lives through sensible public policy.
Chalmers Johnson, in “
The Sorrows of Empire”, explains the ultra-enthusiastic desire to lead
other people into war as the Chicken Hawk effect:
They often feel the need to display a warrior’s culture, which they take to mean iron-fisted ruthlessness, since they are innocent of genuine combat. This effect was particularly marked in the second Iraq War of 2003, when many ideologically committed civilians staffing the Department of Defense, without the experience of military service, no less of warfare, dictated strategies, force levels, and war aims to the generals and admirals. Older, experienced senior officers denigrated them as “chicken hawks”.
Obscene incarceration ratesJust as we lead the world by far in military spending, so do we lead the world by far in incarceration rates.
A report for 2005 showed an incarceration rate in the United States of 737 per 100,000 U.S. residents. That means that about 1% of all adults in our country were incarcerated at that time. Russia placed second in incarceration rate at 611 per 100,000. Incarceration rates per 100,000 for other industrialized democratic countries were far less than for the United States, including Australia (126), Canada (107), England/Wales (148), France (85) and Japan (62).
In June 1971, President Nixon
called for a “War on drugs”. Then, beginning in 1973, the
incarceration rate began a progressive increase, from 140 in 1972 to 742 in 2005, with an increase in the rate every single year.
How can conservatives claim the United States to be a beacon of freedom and democracy when it exhibits such obscene incarceration rates? Is our nation composed of such dangerous people that we really
need such high incarceration rates to protect us? Or is this generated solely by fear?
Two clues to the answer to this question (if it isn’t already obvious) come from an examination of role of drug possession offenses, and the racial composition of our prisoners.
This article indicates that from 1980 to 2000, while our population increased by only 21.5%, drug-related incarceration increased by 988%. During that time period, the percent of our state prisoners who were incarcerated for drug offenses rose from 6.5% to 20.9%.
I emphasize incarceration for drug offenses because these are generally victimless crimes, and therefore there is a great deal of arbitrariness with regard to whom the laws are applied. In 1998, 36% of all drug offense incarcerations were for mere possession, rather than for sale or manufacture. In 2003 there were over
750,000 marijuana arrests. More than 90% of these were for mere possession of marijuana – a “crime” for which there were more arrests than all violent crimes combined.
The racial composition of incarceration for drug crimes demonstrates the
racial bias of our drug laws and enforcement. Although white and black youth use and sell drugs at
approximately the same rate, black and Latino youths are arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned for drug offenses at much higher rates than are whites. The end result of this racial bias is that
in 2007 blacks were incarcerated at a rate of about six times that of whites, and one out of every 20 black men over the age of 18 in the United States were incarcerated.
Fear of homosexualsThe propensity of conservatives to fear homosexuals was most recently demonstrated by the passage of Proposition 8 in California, which attempted to outlaw same-sex marriage in that state.
In order to pass Proposition 8, the conservative elite mounted
a massive propaganda campaign to convince people that failure to pass it would mean the destruction of marriage as an institution. Among other types of disinformation, the Proposition 8 proponents claimed that if the measure failed, churches would be forced to perform gay marriage under threat of being disallowed to perform any marriages at all if they refused.
It is difficult to imagine how people could really believe that the legalization of gay marriage would pose a threat to marriage as an institution. Yet, that is what the Conservative Movement has led many Americans to believe, and that is a major reason why homosexuals in our country today lack many of the rights that other Americans have.
Fear of admitting wrongOur country, in the service of fear and greed, has done many terrible things in its history. I discussed these in a
recent post, in which I note numerous incidents of U.S. overthrow of sovereign governments, imperialism and genocide.
Yet, a major characteristic of the Conservative Movement our country is the insistence that we never admit to doing anything wrong. They imply that to do so is traitorous.
A good example that I have mentioned many times is when Senator Durbin received a barrage of indignation and outrage from conservatives because he had the temerity to expose on the floor of the U.S. Senate the torture of our detainees by our government.
This is just plain wrong. We can expect that our country will continue doing these things until it admits its wrongdoings of the past. I believe that a good definition of moral courage is the capacity to state things as they are rather than as you’d like them to be, even when it means admitting your own or your country’s past moral failings. This is something which today’s Conservative Movement has no stomach for whatsoever.
We have just experienced eight years of the most criminal presidential administration in our history.
Recent polls show that most Americans are willing to face up to this, either through criminal prosecutions (38%) or an independent panel (24%). In all likelihood, the use of an independent panel whose findings were publicized would prepare the ground for criminal prosecutions by spreading even more outrage throughout our country.
Yet, thus far there has been no serious talk by our government of criminal prosecutions of the Bush administration. It seems to me that the only thing holding them back is fear of the response by the Conservative Movement – which undoubtedly would be ugly.
Inverted quarantineAndrew Szasz, in his book, “
Shopping our Way to Safety – How we Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves”, discusses the concept of “inverted quarantine”, which fearful people use to protect themselves against the unknown masses of other people. He describes the history of inverted quarantine:
It was, first, a way of dealing with social threat… One can trace the practice back… to the earliest fixed human settlements where walls were put up around the perimeter to control who entered… and to the rise of significant social inequalities, which required ways to separate ruling elites from everyone else…
In the industrial cities of the 19th Century, wealthy elites relied on inverted quarantine methods to put distance between themselves and masses of urban poor and working people. It is telling that at the time the poor, the homeless, the unkempt, the desperate, and the unruly were referred to as “the dangerous classes”…
Szasz then takes us up to the present time and explains why this is not a good thing:
Millions living in gated communities, tens of millions living in exurbia, tens of millions drinking bottled water… it is a phenomenon that is likely to have consequences…People who engage in these kinds of behaviors… intend only to take care of themselves and their loved ones. They do not mean to have some kind of larger impact on the world.
This is all reflected in the Conservative Movement’s idea of “freedom”. Freedom to them means the freedom of corporations that accept government subsidies and other help to pollute our air and water at their will. It means, in short, the freedom of the wealthy and the powerful to do whatever they want, regardless of the consequences to other people.
DRIVEN BY GREEDIn a
post from 2007 I posited 5 pillars of George Bush’s Republican Party: Economic Royalists; militarists; propagandists/destroyers of our First Amendment rights; crooks; and, the gullible. To relate that post to this one, it might be worth while to condense those five groups into two: The gullible are those who are permeated with fear. The other four categories are the leaders of the Conservative Movement. Their motivations are driven by greed, and they use fear to drive the gullible into submission and to go out and vote for them and their causes.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt explained this group at his
1936 Democratic Convention speech:
Out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital … the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service…
The privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man…
And Al Gore, in his book, “
The Assault on Reason”, described the process whereby the conservative leaders provide themselves cover and manipulate the masses in the cause of their greed-driven movement:
While the economic royalists provide the financial support for (the Republican) coalition, a group of ultraconservative religious leaders (who actually are primarily politicians) provide manpower and voter turnout. They serve a special purpose with their constant efforts to cloak the right wing faction’s political agenda in religious camouflage. Many of them also have their own media outlets and are part of the propagandist wing of the coalition…
Let’s consider some of their strategy and tactics:
Demonizing “Big Government”The Conservative Movement finally began to recover from the astounding success of FDR’s New Deal, followed by the “
Greatest sustained economic boom in U.S history”, in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan. The predominant characteristic of the “
Reagan Revolution” was the demonizing of “Big Government”.
While this demonizing of “Big Government” was (and is) cloaked in ideological terms, in actuality it is primarily a big power play in the unending class warfare of the wealthy against everyone else.
It’s all really very simple. The elite leaders of the Conservative Movement (whom FDR referred to as “Economic Royalists”) hate more than anything when the American people arrange their government to provide the kind of benefits to themselves (the American people) that only government can provide. In other words, they hate it when government, recognizing their privileged position and the numerous advantages that they have derived from government action, regulates them to protect the American people against them, and taxes them to provide funds for needed government programs.
All of this, of course, cuts into their massive profits and wealth. Therefore, as the Reagan Revolution successfully propagandized the American people into believing that government is inherently their enemy, the New Deal was partially dismantled, and our country experienced nearly three decades of
skyrocketing income inequality and
wealth gap, culminating in perhaps the greatest income inequality we have ever experienced. Needles to say, the wealth created in the process has not even begun to “trickle down” to ordinary Americans, as was promised by the Reagan Revolutionaries.
That brings us to Bobby Jindal’s
highly disingenuous speech of February 24, in response to President Obama’s speech on his stimulus package. Jindal’s attacks on so-called “Big Government” were nothing but pure Conservative Movement gobbledygook. He actually blamed “Big Government” for the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina.
Did he forget that when the catastrophe occurred, the leader of the anti-Big Government Conservative Movement was “leading” our country? Did he forget that that “leader”, despite being warned about the consequences, had recently slashed government funding to rebuild the levees, which would have easily prevented the catastrophe? Did he forget that that “leader”, despite repeated warnings of what was happening, delayed federal emergency response by several days, as people died by the hundreds for want of government assistance? All of that information can be found in Dennis Kucinich’s
31st Article of Impeachment against George W. Bush.
No, I doubt that Bobby Jindal forgot all that. You just can’t judge
all government based on the actions of the
most negligent and incompetent government in U.S. history. If you do, you’re an idiot. If you know better, and yet pretend that negligent government is the same as
all government, then you’re extremely disingenuous. Take your pick.
ProfiteeringWith “Big Government” out of the way, the profiteers are free to go to work. Actually, it is worse than that. During the Bush administration, government repeatedly worked hand-in-glove with their friends in the private sector to ensure immense profits for their friends.
This is called fascism. One of many examples of this is the $ 8 billion that mysteriously “
disappeared” under the watchful supervision of Dick Cheney’s good friend, Halliburton.
In New OrleansAs a matter of fact, cronyism was in abundant evidence during the Bush administration’s response to Katrina as well. As with the Bush inflicted destruction of Iraq, the Bush inflicted destruction of New Orleans proved to be a bonanza of profit for its friends, while pretended government efforts at reconstruction went for naught. Instead of sending help, the Bush administration sent a privatized army of military police to keep order. Jeremy Scahill, in his book “
Blackwater – The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army”, describes some of the consequences of that:
The company (Blackwater USA) beat the federal government and most aid organizations to the scene as 150 heavily armed Blackwater troops dressed in full battle gear spread out into the chaos of New Orleans… All of them were heavily armed…. A possibly deadly incident involving hired guns underscored the dangers of private forces policing American streets… The security guard said their convoy came under fire from “black gangbangers”… The guard said he and his men were armed with AR-15s and Glocks and that they unleashed a barrage of bullets in the general direction of the alleged shooters on the overpass. “After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped.”
No charges were ever brought against Blackwater for the civilian deaths in Iraq
or in New Orleans.
The Military-Industrial-Congressional-Complex (MICC)I noted in the beginning of this post that the American people have for a long time been driven by fear to support budget breaking, unnecessary, and counter-productive increases in “defense” spending. What drives this humongous waste and destruction? President Eisenhower warned us in his
farewell address of January 1961 about this emerging problem:
We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions… We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience… We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications… In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
But Eisenhower didn’t provide either the first or the most urgent warning on this topic. In 1935, Major General Smedley Butler, the most decorated marine in U.S. history,
warned the American people of the dangers of war profiteering, while acknowledging his role in it:
I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service… and during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession… my mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups…
I helped in the raping of half-a-dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. (gives a list of examples in which he participated)…During those years, I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotion…
Unfortunately, this is an area in which the Conservative Movement has ingrained its attitudes into our nation’s consciousness, causing us to forget or to not take seriously enough the warnings of men like Butler and Eisenhower.
The Prison-Industrial ComplexAs with our military, profiteers abound in the prison industry as well. And as with our military, those profiteers have plenty of money to lobbyists to advance their cause. Tara Herivel and Paul Wright assiduously document this process in their book, “
Prison Profiteers – Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration”. From the book jacket:
Beginning with the owners of private prison companies and extending through a whole range of esoteric industries… to the U.S. military (which relies on prison labor) and the politicians, lawyers, and bankers who structure deals to build new prisons, “Prison Profiteers” introduces us to a motley group of perversely motivated interests and shows us how they both profit from and perpetrate mass incarceration.
It turns out that locking up 2.3 million people isn’t cheap… “Prison Profiteers” traces the flow of capital from public to private hands, reveals how monies designated for the public good end up in the pockets of enterprises dedicated to keeping prison cells filled, and challenges us to see incarceration through completely different eyes.
And it’s not just the prison industry itself that benefits from mass incarceration and its associated “War on Drugs”. The pharmaceutical industry benefits immensely from making cheap drugs with known medicinal benefits like marijuana illegal. The alcohol industry benefits greatly from having marijuana being illegal – for reasons that are too obvious to state. And perhaps most important of all is the danger that numerous
non-drug uses of the marijuana (hemp) plant pose to the profits of many American industries. These interests pay vast amounts of money to lobbyists to see that marijuana remains illegal and incarceration rates remain high.
CONCLUSIONThe fear that permeates the Conservative Movement and the greed that drives it are of course not benign phenomena. The Conservative Movement has in many respects insinuated their attitudes into our nation – not to the extent that they would like, but more than enough to do great harm to the rest of us.
For example, the fear that engenders such outrages as the war racket is to a large extent self-sustainable, by virtue of the following formula:
Fear => Violence => Resentment => Blowback => More fear => Etc.
This formula can be related to the Iraq War. We invaded that country based on the fear generated by the evidence that the
Bush administration manufactured. We also routinely tortured them, justifying that by the same fear. That caused great resentment in the Muslim world, which fueled the Iraq insurgency and
produced thousands of recruits for al Qaeda. That in turn produced more fear and keeps the military machine right on rolling.
After 36 long years of the Reagan Revolution (with some respite during the Clinton years), in which income inequality and the national debt ballooned to record levels, the American people began voting the representatives of the Conservative Movement out of office in 2006, and even more so in 2008.
But we still have the Military Industrial Complex and many of the attitudes that foster it. The same thing applies to the Prison Industrial Complex. And we are still stuck with so many other attitudes and policies from the Conservative Movement.
To put an end to the greed and fear generated excesses of the Conservative Movement, we first need to recognize it for what it is. Then we need to
take the money out of politics, so that our elected representatives will be subservient to the will of the American people rather than to the corporate interests that bankroll their campaigns. And then we need to demand that our government divorce itself from the greed and fear generated attitudes of the Conservative Movement.
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