The Conservative Agenda

July 1 2004
Counterbias.com
Frank Wallis

Conservatives have no use for such liberal concepts as progress, equality, social justice, or democracy. It is a curious piggish greed which prompts them to take actions and invent ideologies to preserve the power status quo and maintain authority for themselves at any cost. The fundamental question of why conservatives lust for power is beyond the scope of this essay, but one must at least posit that the answer is to be found in biology, genetics, and ultimately nature. Conservatives are human after all, and within the human psyche there are different strata of motivations for behavior, perhaps fundamentally chemical and inherited. Among conservatives the basest motivations of survival and domination receive their fullest and most blatant expression. For the conservative, power becomes an addictive drug, and the addict cannot slake his lust for it.

Conservatives express their lust for control in three major areas: 1) the lust for military control, 2) the lust for economic control, 3) the lust for religious control. Politics, defined as "Who gets what, when, and where," is the connection between all three. A true conservative politician must have dominion over each of the primary lusts. The most successful dictators have arrogated to themselves control over all three.

The first power lust is that of the military. Lust for military dominion can only be slaked through violence and intimidation. Beautiful uniforms, polished weapons, submissive and courteous behavior amongst the warriors to the chain of command, all mask the terror of military purpose -- to kill people and force the survivors to admit another master. The conservative believes that the military is the foundation of government in the real world. For a liberal democrat such a supposition is dangerous, for it places the warrior over the citizen, the organized slayers over the people. Liberals believe the people are the foundation of government, and the military is the servant of the people.

The second power lust is about money. Money is power. But money is only economic power measured in digits. The generation of money is the work of capitalism, and the people who operate and direct capitalism are a small percentage of the human race. Today the directors of the economy sit on the boards of corporations. They want more money. The corporate power has insinuated itself in government through registered and unregistered lobbyists at both the state and national levels. These lobbyists are old hands in government and the corporation, and it should astonish no one that it is they who actually write the laws that pass through government to enrich themselves. The corporate power is extremely hostile to regulation. Conservatives are the corporate power incarnate. They will gladly use any slogans and words to deceive the people. Liberal democrats seek to limit the damage done to everyday people at the hands of anonymous corporate swindlers, polluters, and criminals. They accomplish this through the judiciary and with regulations. There is a tension between the conservatives who seek no limits on their lust for money and the people who wish to be protected against avarice.

Religion is the third power lust. The trend in any religion is total domination of thought and action in both the individual and society. This can happen through missionary zeal, but success can only be achieved through political alliance. The Saxons were not converted to Roman Catholicism in the ninth century on the basis of clever speeches by Christian missionaries. They were converted by the sword when Charlemagne invaded their country and killed off the warrior class, giving the survivors the option of death or baptism into the true religion. One often wonders why the Christian god is so weak and powerless that he requires humans to do the converting for him. The Muslim god achieved the most amazing success in the seventh century when Arabs rode across the great Sand Belt slaying all those who failed to recognize the truth of Islam. The greatest ally of conservatives throughout history has been religion. The best check against conservative religious tyranny has been liberal democratic government.

Conservatives like to think of themselves as the permanent party of government. Most of the time they are correct. However, if conservatives had no competition the human race would still be living in the bush. Without a vision of progress 10,000 years ago there would have been no reason to take that first step toward farming crops and abandoning the hunter gatherer mode of existence. At each step in human progress the conservatives have always been there to seize control of economic assets and retard progress. The Egyptian cultivator classes were beaten into supporting a priest class with Pharaoh at the top. Religion propped up the land owning, land hoarding aristocracy. Such was the case throughout the world until the industrial revolution freed humans from the tyranny of aristocratic rule in the 18th and 19th centuries, at least in western Europe.

The greatest progress in human history has taken place against the conservatives over the last two hundred years, when middle class urban professionals and business people accumulated more capital than the land owning aristocracy. However, the new middle class rulers of Europe and North America used the same tricks as their defeated aristocratic opponents. Religion and the military soon enough propped up the new economic power and fed off of its success, creating a new conservative class. In the United States, the biggest conflict between ag-aristos and mercantile democrats took place in 1860-65, when the southern agrarian slave power betrayed the nation and dared raise its hand against the northern industrial power. Confederates used the slogan of states rights to mask the only right they cared about: the right to buy, sell, and own Africans. They were defeated, and their treason put down.

Sadly, some political aspects of the ante-bellum slave south continue today. Ironically, it is the party of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, which furnishes a home to a conservative ideal that threatens to take us back to a world in which the hat and the whip were the chief symbols of social domination. The Republicans wish to guide America to traditional values, such as the courtesy of tipping one's hat to a superior. The higher the social rank, the less likely one ever has of being forced by tradition to remove the hat. Our social superiors are also the only ones allowed to hold the whip. The velvet gloved whip hand of the conservative still wields the instruments of domination. Today the instrument is not a bull whip, it is the corporate prospectus and the platinum credit card.

Conservatives in America have a ready-made model for society. Nothing new needs to be invented. An unregulated economy, state established Christianity, continual military campaigns against foreigners. Their model is the pre-1860 South, where a small group of white Protestant men owned everything and everybody. The entire populace, including African slaves and poor white people, were allowed to live in filth, ignorance, and poverty, while a little group of white men tipped the hat and cracked the whip. For liberals that is the vision of hell on earth.

As an addendum to this essay, take a look at the liberal progressive measures in western civilization which have been opposed and resisted by conservatives, sometimes with force of arms and violence:

· abolition of slavery

· abolition of child labor

· trades unions and labor unions

· fair labor standards and practices

· employee safety on the job

· abolition of established state religion

· abolition of the special privileges of the priesthood

· freedom from religious tests for public office

· voting rights for women

· voting rights for persons of African ancestry

· voting rights for adults who don't own real estate

· minimum wage

· social security

· Medicare

· Medicaid

· universal health insurance

· equal rights for women

· right of women to obtain a divorce

· right of women to own and inherit property

· right of women to gain custody of children

· a woman's right to control her own body

· military service for women

· military service for homosexuals

· right of consensual sex among adults

· right to buy, sell, and use birth control

· every law protecting clean air, water, soil, and food

· regulation of the cancer causing tobacco industry

· government health inspection of meat and poultry

· right of citizens to sue for damages against corporations and the government

· automobile safety, e.g., seat belts, air bags, non-exploding gas tanks, etc.

· prohibition of cartels, monopolies, and industry trusts

· regulation of banking, insurance, and investing to protect consumers

· balanced federal government budgets

· freedom to buy, rent, or lease housing in the neighborhood of one's choice

· the right of habeas corpus (suspended in 2001 with the USA Patriot Act)

· connecting human rights with foreign policy

I challenge anyone to review this list, which is probably not complete, and disagree that this conservative record of opposition to liberal progress is both abysmal and an affront to humanity.

"Successful societies limit the power of the state and the power of the military, so that governments respond to the will of the people, and not the will of an elite." - George W. Bush (Speech at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, 6 Nov. 2003) Such is the brazen imposture of the true conservative, to take credit for liberal progress over the past two hundred years, and pretend that he actually believes in placing limits on the military industrial complex. The escape valve in this comment is the word "limit", which can mean everything or nothing. The amazing irony is the last part of the comment, about an elite ruling class. Bush is at the apex of the conservative ruling class, and if they cannot fool the people with slick propaganda, then they will settle for bending the government to their own agenda. The true conservative protests that he hates big government, and then does all he can to make sure that he owns and controls it.

Frank Wallis runs Powerskeptic.net, a website "questioning authority and those who abuse power". He has a PhD in history from the University of Illinois.