Conservatives, Barely. Maybe. But I Doubt It.

[Iris]

Fred examines the kind of self-proclaimed "conservative" that has come to be emblematic of the political Right in contrast to the conservatism of his Granddad and my parents.

---------------------------------------------------
Conservatives, Barely. Maybe. But I Doubt It.
A Question of Semantics
Fred Reed, December 13, 2008


I am trying to understand conservatives. The word has got to mean something, unless of course it doesn’t. For years I thought it meant someone like my grandfather, a professor of mathematics at a small college in the South. He embodied courtesy, respect for learning, personal responsibility, compassion for those in the town who found themselves in distress, dignity, a love of the language, a morality opposed to promiscuity and bastardy, and a quiet Christianity having nothing in common with the cruelty and hostility of today’s unlettered evangelicals. I thought it a pretty decent package, though I had problems with the part about avoiding promiscuity.

Over my years of writing this column, I have received a great deal of mail from people, entirely male so far as I can remember, calling themselves "conservatives," yet having nothing in common with granddad. (I use quotation marks, though I will omit them in what follows as being annoying, because there are many people who regard themselves as conservatives but are decent people.)

These email conservatives are a specific type of person, characterized by:
(1) Hostility to other groups...
(2) A view of life as conflict, struggle, and war...
(3) Subclinical paranoia...
(4) An obsession with profits and economic growth for their own sake...
(5) A lack of esthetic sensitivity...For them, everything is raw material for making a buck...
(6) A lack of empathy...
[[snip]]
Whatever the wisdom in a particular case, I believe that most of politics can be explained by friction between those who have the above-mentioned traits, and those who don’t. Emotion determines policy, and the mind provides a window dressing of plausibility.
[[[snip]]]
I have noticed that women are scarce among this group. They by nature do care. I have never heard a woman talk about the need for a pre-emptive nuclear strike against China. Many men do, all of the type who call themselves conservative.

What happens of course is that conscienceless, amoral men dress themselves in whatever ideology suits their purposes. Stalin was no more a socialist than he was the Tooth Fairy. However, since socialism requires that the state control the economy, it appeals to dictators. Thus the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. "Free enterprise" appeals to those who want no interference with their rapine, who want to run sweatshops, starve sharecroppers, and make billions on subprime mortgages. Same people, different scaffolding.

Read more here: http://www.fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm

[rumike]

Thanks for that, Iris. Wonderful. He point a nice, fine point on what I've been thinking for years.

[Iris]

Thanks, Mike. I thought it was well done. I don't understand today's conservatives as being conservative -- and I don't think conservatism, the way my parents believed in and practiced it, is a bad thing. The country needs some.

[Panache]

Many of these characteristics described in the article, perhaps nearly all of them, have nothing, really, to do with conservativism, they are psycho-social diseases that flourish within tribes. Neither conservativism nor liberalism have any real relationship with such diseases, either of them are continuum through which any of the full range of emotions and actions can be expressed.

As continuum, conservatism nor liberalism -- in what seems to many are polarities -- are vast thresholds which dynamics are inflected towards either retaining vitality until a threshold or momentum is reached for conservavtism, or a magnanimity expands in all directions while anchored into cardinal human principles as in liberalism. These two don't really contradict each other, exept to petrified or petrifying dogmatic minds inanimating themselves.

The terms "liberal" and "conservative" as they are commonly used today to demarcate two social or political camps are nothing more than names that, when properly applied, do not really mean anything, they're just like "Betty Crocker" or "Mrs Paulings" in food commerce: no one of either name has had or currently has anything to do with the branding names.

So, the diseases mentioned in this article are diseases of mind, not the broad practical realms of conservative or liberal. I've seen huge volumes of people in either camp behave as described. Identifying value, emotional or behavior trends within a camp may be valuable and such sentiments, while escalating, will indicate a growing unhealthiness within, and perhaps causitive of a camps values and ideology, though such behaviors, sentiments and values are not the sole behavior patterns of conservation nor liberality.

[Cherry Kelly]

A columnists writes controversial articles to stir the masses. I would highly question all these "supposed" letters he received from those claiming to be conservatives with these types of attributes.

Now if he did were those spoofs - fake writers to him? Totally possible.

As Panache noted -sounds more like "they are psycho-social diseases that flourish within tribes". In other words have nothing to do with what conservatism is about.

I am moderately conservative, or so I've been told. I see nothing in that list that is even remotely conservative.

[Psychicwolf]

I agree with Panache. The broad sweeping brushes that both political parties and the media use are part and parcel of a phenomonon called "framing".

"A frame in social theory consists of a schema of interpretation—that is, a collection of stereotypes—that individuals rely on to understand and respond to events.[1][page # needed]

To clarify: When one seeks to explain an event, the understanding often depends on the frame referred to. If a friend rapidly closes and opens an eye, we will respond very differently depending on whether we attribute this to a purely "physical" frame (s/he blinked) or to a social frame (s/he winked).

Though the former might result from a speck of dust (resulting in an involuntary and not particularly meaningful reaction), the latter would imply a voluntary and meaningful action (to convey humor to an accomplice, for example). Observers will read events seen as purely physical or within a frame of "nature" differently than those seen as occurring with social frames. But we do not look at an event and then "apply" a frame to it. Rather, individuals constantly project into the world around them the interpretive frames that allow them to make sense of it; we only shift frames (or realize that we have habitually applied a frame) when incongruity calls for a frame-shift. In other words, we only become aware of the frames that we always already use when something forces us to replace one frame with another.[2][3]

Framing, a term used in media studies, sociology and psychology, refers to the social construction of a social phenomenon by mass media sources or specific political or social movements or organizations. It is an inevitable process of selective influence over the individual's perception of the meanings attributed to words or phrases. A frame defines the packaging of an element of rhetoric in such a way as to encourage certain interpretations and to discourage others."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_%2 ... ciences%29

Our lazy media and overemphasis on image as opposed to ideas, along with the increase and tolerance for psychological/intellectual weakness on the part of the general population has made this the way we view each other, ideas and our politics. Back in the days of our parents and grandparents, if they could read, they received alot of their information from relatively unbiased news sources and gave some thought to issues. The days of instant media and the drive by media personalities (as opposed to news journalists) to come up with the most sensational coverage of events and politics has lead to a lazy and intolerant citizenry, who look for articles and coverage of events that fit the "frame" of their worldview.

There are wackadoodle conservatives and wackadoodle liberals and they serve no purpose in "news" or "political thought" other than the continuation of sensationalism and division of this country. But most of their poison doesn't come from what they "think"... they don't think. They spew what they have been fed by self-serving media pundits who have created simplistic "framing" of ideas. It makes for intellectual laziness and leads to ineffective governance.