Sympathy for the Devil: the Conservative Struggle to Explain How Hard Times Can Hit Good People

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Related subjects: J.E. Robertson, Opinion, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, Vote 2008 Comments (1)

2 November 2008 :: J.E. Robertson

The confluence of viciously hard economic times and an election that has stoked tensions over social and political conservative values and their place in our future course, pushing ideology to the side —even as vastly divergent approaches to multiple crises play out in the national political discourse—, has illuminated a dark corner of institutional conservatism: the empathy deficit. The struggle of conservative ideologues and politicos to be relevant in the present economic unraveling is tied to a rhetorical habit of demonizing the Other, i.e. the underprivileged, the alien, the non-institutional, the marginalized.

Conservative ideology has for some time now operated in the rhetorical sphere by painting non-establishment social actors as signs of an impending decay of the moral order of society. There are important contradictions inherent in this strategy, not least of which is the simultaneous claim to be defending the freedoms of devoutly non-state, non-establishment actors in society. The hard line simultaneously attacks the social order and rules out the basic human decency of those not devoted to its most abstract and institutional powers.

The ugliest manifestations of this bias-defense attack plan have to do with the outright demonization of the poor by the pseudo-conservative hard-right punditocracy: the ailment is so far spread that an otherwise serious discussion about economics on CNN in September included one conservative intellectual saying, astonishingly, that “poor people can have the things rich people have when they work as hard as rich people do”. The remark is horrifying in its lack of empathy, but also in its lack of connection to reality. Do the working poor, who may work three jobs on any given day, as much as 20 hours a day, all for minimum wage and just to be able to feed their kids, not work hard?

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Does anyone pay them to go on $400,000 spa visits just for doing their jobs, like AIG did for its “independent sales reps”? Do the working poor get paid hundreds of millions of dollars just to leave a job where their performance amounted to utter, at times incomprehensibly vast, failure? Is it not work for a poor child to learn to read when there are no books in the only schools open to them, the municipal library has been closed for budgetary concerns, not one of their schoolteachers has a Masters-level degree, and their parents are unable to assist in their learning because they work up to 2-full-shift days, at least 5 days a week?

The economically disadvantaged are just that: disadvantaged. They live and breathe at a constant disadvantage, and they are not in that condition because they deserve to be or because they have a lazy nature. Usually, they are born into an economically disadvantaged state. The failure of conservative politics to address the dire economic condition of the moment in part stems from the assumption that people who suffer economic hardship somehow deserve it, but also from the strategy of seeking to convince poor conservative voters that 1) they are not poor (so there can be no talking of their plight), and 2) the world that would talk of helping them is full of demon creatures like crack addicts, “welfare queens” and, terror of all terrors, intellectuals.

This is part of a perversion of moral reality in which ideological wishful thinking, demanding a moral world, projects onto the actual world a quality so inherently moralistic that the moral nature of the world could not possibly allow bad things to happen to good people. If they are suffering, they should repent, be more like us, and then they will prosper. And anyone who talks about unfair hardship within our moral world are just dangerous con artists trying to infect our free society with devilish tendencies and unspeakable dangers.

The pique and vitriol reached frenzied levels at the RNC this year, when Gov. Sarah Palin and former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani laughed derisively at the very idea of community organizers, who work to help people access services they need, due to daily hardship of one kind or another. It was no longer a primitive “us versus them” mentality; it was now to be a mentality which perceived helping others outside the cocoon of million-dollar white-tie charity banquets as a laughable, ridiculous, unpatriotic sort of thing to do, a kind of moral unraveling of the mind akin to chronic use of hallucinogens.

The fact that the faux-conservative rhetoric that functions as umbrella ideology for a series of more or less really conservative policy agendas, has fallen into the intellectual trap of this moral denigration of the other, means that when conservative voters fall on hard times, they feel a little bit more like potential targets of an inherently dehumanizing rhetoric. As such their votes shift to the center, and the ideology of institutional conservatism loses relevance.

It might be instructive for concerned movement conservatives to learn from the mighty waning of their relevance that true conservatism and bloody attack politics have little reason to be so closely linked. True conservatism need not be narrow-minded, infantile or bigoted, while the politics of demonization has a very hard time not falling into those tendencies. Conservatism need not be an policy-free zone where reflexive soundbite answers replace cooperative work on real strategies for bettering the human condition in our society: that is the byproduct of a flawed political strategy that only works when no one is paying attention.

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