1.20.09*

I was reading a piece by Thomas Frank today at Salon,

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/08/07/frank_wrecking/

and after what has become a daily ritual for about the last two years--reading about how corrupt our government is--my chest knotted up, blood rushed into my face, my teeth clinched. Thank God for term limits.

Anyway, this passage captures something I've been mulling over for some time: if conservatives pretend to be so suspicious of government, why are they so eager claim its mantle?

"Yes, today's conservatives have disgraced themselves, but they have not strayed from the teaching of their forefathers or the great ideas of their movement. When conservatives appoint the opponents of government agencies to head those government agencies; when they auction their official services to the purveyor of the most lavish "golf weekend"; when they mulct millions from groups with business before Congress; when they dynamite the Treasury and sabotage the regulatory process and force government shutdowns -- in short, when they treat government with contempt -- they are running true to form. They have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds follow naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition."

A real conservative might answer that conservatives enter government in order to keep it small--but if government is measured in terms of how much we spend (a very good, but not the only measure), then it's been liberals actually, and not conservatives who have balanced the federal budget in the last 30 years. It's conservatives who have launched us into a foreign policy that requires an exponential expansion of the federal government, and which has forced us to borrow literally trillions of dollars from China. It's conservatives, who are supposed to know what they're doing in the field of business, who have presided over one of the worst financial collapses in American history. So if they fail at governance, and fail at free enterprise, why do we continue to vote for them?

Today's conservativism seems to thrive on, what for most of us, would appear to be a contradiction: even if conservatives fail at government, they can still claim they've succeeded by pointing out that government doesn't work anyway--that it fails because it's meant to fail. They stay in power by pretending to care about socially conservative causes, or by pretending to be religious, and yet their policies often run counter to the economic well-being of the people who normally vote for them (this is a basic version of Frank's thesis in his book, What's the Matter with Kansas?). Like Larry Craig and Mark Foley, they'll rail vociferously against gay marriage, all the while soliciting gay sex in public bathrooms and sending naughty text messages to underage boys. They'll pay lip-service to anti-abortion causes, and yet have never seriously challenged Roe v. Wade.

I began to veer away from conservativism when I oberved, around 2002-03, that conservativism in action bears very little resemblance to its philosophy. I started making these observations when it was clear that our Iraq adventure was based on a foundation of lies--lies worse than Nixon ever told. And I became very angry about those lies.

But perhaps incompetence is rooted in conservatism; its contempt for government seems to go hand-in-hand with a contempt for American citizens, who are incessantly force-fed lie after lie, and a contempt for truth itself.

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*1.20.09 is, of course, Bush and his cronies last day. (Thanks to Becky for '08/'08 correction).