By Matt Landry
When asked how such a longtime Republican as myself came to vote Democratic in this year’s election, I had to stop and think a while. I grew up in a general liberal milieu, having attended Catholic schools from Kindergarten through college, and carried this stance into adulthood without giving it much thought.
Serving in the military for four years exposed me to many divergent schools of thought, from fundamentalism to atheism on the religious side, and from socialism to populism on the political side. For the most part, I avoided extremes, finding most arguments to have some strands of sense embedded in them.
It wasn’t until the Carter years before the charisma of the Kennedy administration began to wear thin, and I switched to the Republican banner, but Trump’s china-shop smashing only enhanced Hillary’s appeal. Even so, I wasn’t too concerned when he won, thinking maybe a savvy businessman is exactly what we needed.
By now it’s obvious that that’s exactly what we didn’t get. Under the guise of the traditional banner, we had elected a surly populist, enthusiastically appealing to a dystopian populace.
In all these twists and turns, I found myself recognizing that I had never actually articulated what sort of values I really followed. As a longtime reader of the Economist magazine, which considers itself ‘conservative,’ what choices was I making? More importantly, where did I fall among the possibilities?
The Economist is typically labelled ‘socially liberal and financially conservative’. As they describe the political spectrum,
“Both reject the Utopian impulse to find a government solution for every wrong. Both resist state planning and high taxes. The conservative inclination to police morals is offset by an impulse to guard free speech and to promote freedom and democracy around the world.” As such they can balance each other as “Conservatives temper liberal zeal while liberals puncture conservative complacency.”
Such high minded descriptions, alas, have been overcome by recent events. It’s obvious that the past four years have upset any civilized accommodation. Political opposites have become ‘demons’ which deserve not only our disapproval but our outright hatred. Worse yet, the wider the gap, the more supporters of each wing are pushed from the center, threatening the very equilibrium in which traditional institutions have been historically found. The social bindings of church, family, tradition and local institutions themselves are becoming riven by the centrifugal forces created by today’s whirlwinds.
What is labelled ‘Republican’ today has ceased to resemble the conservative side of the social dyad by which democracy has progressed so well over the past two hundred years. It is no accident, as documented by Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress”, that human welfare has advanced globally by nine discrete measures over this same time frame. In his book, “Open” he notes that such progress isn’t unique to today, but historically has never managed to spread beyond single appearances across the globe. He also notes that the signs of the decay that insured the failure of such earlier societies can be found today.
Today’s Republicans, in their attitudes of distrust of science and the free press, systemic racism, fear of the immigrant and a systemic discontent which belies a general welfare, undermine those features of democracy which underpin Norberg’s two hundred years of social improvement.
What has been labelled historically as ‘conservatism’, emerging in the optimistic terms of the Enlightenment, has been replaced by a surly and pessimistic populism. How else could this social phenomena today be described? People who are well off, secure, and comfortable are quick to cite the ‘carnage’ inflicted in society by ‘socialists’.
As Marc Ambinder points out in a recent post,
“the physical pleasure that the brain’s reward system, which is linked to the brain’s disgust system, doles out means that the more yucky the other side appears to be, the better we feel about ourselves.”
The need for indignation thus emerges as a leading driver of opinion.
As the Economist reports, an objective view of world affairs is seldom on display. As an example, asked whether global poverty had fallen by half, doubled or remained the same in the past twenty years, only 5% of Americans answered correctly that it had fallen by half. This is not simple ignorance. By guessing randomly, a chimpanzee would pick the right answer far more often. The record clearly shows how quickly poverty has receded in two hundred years. In 1820, 94% of humanity subsisted on less than $2 a day (in modern money). That fell to 37% in 1990, and less than 10% by 2015.
So, to the question of why I am not a Republican, I must insist that, by the definition offered by the world’s leading conservative publication, the Republican party is no longer ‘conservative.’
Matt Landry is a retired simulations engineer now living in Colorado, blogging frequently about “the Phenomenon of Love” at lloydmattlandry.com.
Photo Credit: Andy Feliciotti at Unsplash
Thanks for the thoughtful post. As a conservative who unabashedly voted for Trump, I’d politely disagree. Obviously, much can be said in response here to that end, but I’ll try to be succinct.
1) I don’t find the Economist’s definition as particularly conservative and not merely because they’re openly socially liberal. Fiscally conservative tends today to mean support for the sort of globalism, economic universalism, and trade deals that have economically gutted the American heartland. In my view, conservatives need to have an eye toward the local and particular ways of life and support a more morally-minded capitalism. Before William H. Buckley, conservatives like were conscientious of this. The free market absolutism and job outsourcing that has dominated American conservative politics for the past 40 years pushes for the opposite of that. It incentivizes further dissolution of national boundaries and melding of countries’ economies, thus inducing rapid change and greater standardization, hurting smaller communities, for example, who relied on steady manufacturing jobs and companies investing in them instead of cheap Chinese labor.
2) You mention the Enlightenment as being conservative. I don’t see it that way. When conservatism emerged in the English-speaking world, it was in reaction to the Enlightenment. The classic example was Edmund Burke presciently denouncing the Enlightenment-inspired French Revolution as the bloody, destructive, nihilistic calamity that history indeed records it as. He did so in large part because Enlightenment Reason had posited an egalitarian “universal rights of man” that violently broke with the course of French civilization and injected radical, experimental values in a society which had no precedent for them. The only way to establish this new constitution was by inhumane force. The Jacobins, in the name of humanity, were all too enthusiastic to oblige. The Terror was thus inevitable for Burke.
3) Thoughtful conservatives are not so much distrustful of science, journalism, and the possibility of systemic injustice per se, but of the technocratic ideology pervasive in what these institutions have become across the West. Conservatives in the English-speaking world are distrustful of purported expertise and the self-aggrandizing centralization and consolidation of power accompanying it, preferring instead the tried and true, well-worn, and traditional ways of doing things.
To be fair, I don’t find the arguments or the proponents of systemic racism very convincing. Moreover, my own brand of conservative, although in touch with the themes of Burkean conservatism that I’ve detailed above, is indebted to a much older, pre-Enligtenment way of looking at the world.
Very informative post. Thanks for sharing