A lot of us look at the country in which we live, baffled by what goes on! Many of our fellow-citizens, I suspect, identify with various camps —political camps, on the face of it— without actually paying attention to what those camps really stand for, and how they have evolved. Among less thoughtful individuals, you see knee-jerk reactions to everything. Unfortunately, if your periscope into society is in large part via faceBook, as mine is, you see a larger proportion of cranks in these days than we would ever have seen in earlier times.
All through the post-WWII years, as Americans began to look out on the world with greater interest, and as high-school education began to be something everyone could aspire to, and as students came into contact with liberal intellectuals in colleges and universities (yes, institutions of higher learning were less hidebound and conservative than the towns and villages from which the students came), young people could no longer see the logic of racism and sexism and classism, which had kept US society so tidy and stratified. On the wake of the recovery from the great depression, and the industrialized economy that offered jobs outside farms and old-time professions, it was convenient for the richer strata of society to allow minorities and the flood of immigrants, and returning GI's to get a basic level of technical education, to help with manning the assembly-lines.
But, in the Sixties and Seventies, the Vietnam War drove American Youth to identify more strongly with minorities and the poor, and the privileged classes began to think that things were going too far. An educated workforce was one thing, and a few drugs for the kids of wealthy parents was fine. But it was repugnant to see blacks and hispanics grabbing themselves a joint, and demanding the right (as it appeared) to a free ride, on the back of high taxes. It didn’t matter that the upper classes had a pretty good time, despite the taxes. Their appetites had grown, and it irked them to see that their taxes helped the poor enjoy such things as State Parks and the new superhighways. Fat cats flying First Class were appalled to see the scum that dared to fly Economy class. (Never mind that the airlines were owned by yet other Fat Cats whose purposes it suited to allow scum to fly Economy.) Worst of all was the young fat cats having to hobnob with scum on scholarships to colleges and universities.
Ronald Reagan offered the wealthy classes the prospect of reduced taxes, and something approaching the comfortable social stratification whose absence was so disturbing. But now, confusing the issue, the younger members of the wealthy classes had already been acculturated to accept many principles of social justice: access to education should not be denied, segregation was wrong, women should be given equal pay, skilled immigrants were useful additions to our society, and so on. So a set of artificial principles had to be assembled, to put the Liberals in their place. And so the list of Conservative planks began to take shape, even if they had contradictory philosophical implications:
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- Taxes were too high.
- Deficit spending was bad.
- Contraception was bad.
- Drugs were despicable.
- Social Welfare was bad.
- Guns were good.
- Law and order was good.
- Immigration had to be controlled.
- Inflation was bad.
- Social Injustice in Foreign Countries was bad.
- Freedom of Speech was good.
- Flag burning was bad.
- Science was good.
- Evolution was bad.
- American primacy in Space was good.
- Funding NASA was bad.
- Reigning in energy exploration was bad.
- A clean environment was good.
and so on and so forth.
Many of our Conservative friends have bought into these precepts despite their inherent inconsistency. To make things even more confusing, they have bought into one-line slogans that purport to counter Liberal assertions that these principles are contradictory.
Now, a generation and a half after Reagan, racism has to go underground. So the almost insane hostility to Barack Obama as a black man has to be hidden, and people have to find other reasons why he is the Worst President in US History, which drives our Conservative friends to find slogans that make even less sense than any that we have seen thus far.
Accustomed to making reasonable-sounding arguments that could never be supported by even a seven-year-old who was even vaguely aware of the facts, our amateur political pundits are learning to make fallacious arguments from high-school age on up, and we are raising new generations that have no idea what reasoned debate is. All around the country, one half of the population believes that argument means a defense of prejudices. Being consistent is no longer an option to many.
It wasn’t very long ago that, to say that one was embarrassed by the actions of one’s country raised a hysterical howl, especially among the spokesmen for the Conservatives. But I recently read that Rush Limbough had allowed himself the heretofore forbidden privilege of stating that he was embarrassed to be an American. (I’m paraphrasing; I forget the exact wording, and I got the news secondhand. The link was added later.) This is not an isolated instance. Sauce for the goose is often not sauce for the gander.
What I’m trying to do is to explain why ordinary conservatives, who do not have the advantage of the new Voodoo Economics that more expert conservatives can invoke, have to rely on such patently silly arguments to defend their self-contradictory stances on so many issues.
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