Why I'm Not a Conservative

Conservatives resist change. Progressives embrace it. This isn't just politics, I think, but character. These are opposite approaches to life. The difference seems to depend on tolerance for uncertainty. Conservatives and liberals are often contrasted, but that's misleading. Because of the conservative two-step, most American conservatives today are old-fashioned liberals. 

Conservatives tend to accept contemporary injustices and oppose, on principle, reforms to correct them. Novel reforms, they fear, will only make matters worse. Extreme conservatives oppose all untried reforms and dream of returning to the culture of their childhood, if not of earlier.

Pure progressives believe that progress is inevitable, that history is a benign steamroller. My own progressivism is more pessimistic. I simply acknowledge that changes happen. If we don't at least try to promote good changes, bad ones are likely to accumulate. Continual reforms are needed.

A conservative friend of mine complained of being sanctioned on Facebook for expressing values his parents taught him. Maybe his parents were morally perfect and condemned all of the evils around them, but I doubt it. Generation gaps are as opportunities for idealistic youth to challenge sold-out elders. My adolescence was a time for questioning entrenched racist values.

At the center of my moral formation in the 1950's was the Civil Rights Movement. In Alabama when I grew up, the status quo was brutal racism. Blacks were excluded from leadership positions except in all-black schools and churches. They couldn't even work sales downtown but were sometimes delivery helpers. At sixteen, I helped with deliveries for Hitchcock Electric, the type of job held by black "boys" in their forties who like me were underpaid muscle. Everywhere that could be segregated was--schools, churches, restrooms, and waiting rooms--and black facilities were uniformly shabby. The idea of marriage between the races inspired horror in whites. Would you want your children consigned to this lack of status?

The ironing woman my mother hired, of course, couldn't afford a car. She had to be picked up from a shack in a field outside of town where she lived without electricity or running water. Of course, she smelled the way blacks often did at the time, and I don't recall anybody's wanting to remedy their lack of bathrooms--a result of deep, segregation-enforced poverty. It was just the way things were. South African apartheid had nothing on the Alabama of my childhood.

Conservatives didn't care. Pervasive racist injustice was in full view, enforced by social custom and all-white police, and they liked it that way. They supported it, just as their ancestors had supported slavery. They were morally blind. Unjust suffering was fine, but, hey, if a dark child attended a white school or a dark woman sat in the wrong bus seat, conservatives got violent. They hated racial justice, equity, and fairness, worshipping a hideously un-Christian status quo. White churches were conservative temples to this systemic immorality.

Now, seventy years later, conservatives deny being racists (except for a surly few) and celebrate the very reforms that in the 1950s they blamed on Communists and the Devil. Of course, this is another generation. These are the children or grandchildren of Strom Thurman's Dixiecrats, but the American conservative movement has been a seamless continuity, even as it ditched the Democratic Party as not racist enough. 

          For fifty years I've watched conservatives dance the conservative two-step. Step one: fight against a reform. Step two: when the reform works, make it a plank of conservatism. This is facilitated by instant amnesia. They never admit that conservatism was evil in the past, that it blundered in supporting slavery and Jim Crow and is probably blundering again today. Conservatives have been repeatedly complicit with the evils of the past, but somehow they don't think they're complicit today. They forget history and imagine that the status quo, as reformed by past progressives, has now achieved perfection.

History is littered with instances of conservatives fighting reforms, losing, and then adopting the progressive stance as their own, a new sacred status quo. Conservatives opposed abolition but aren't pro-slavery today. Conservatives opposed women's suffrage, income tax, Social Security, Medicare, minimum wage, racial equality, voting rights, women's equality, gay rights, legalized marijuana, abolishing pre-existing medical conditions, and same-sex marriage. They supported the invasions of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Now, though a fringe lags behind, even on the issue of slavery, these issues are politically settled. Conservatives campaign on the successes of progressives, at least in public stances. Even Donald Trump doesn't openly oppose same-sex marriage, racial equality, social security, a minimum wage, and gay and women's rights.

Of course, special interests who benefit from injustice resist changes reflexively, often without conscious malice. They are just comfortable with how things are--the rich with low taxes, men with patriarchy, cisgender people with anti-trans policies--but selfishness doesn't explain all conservatism. That is much too simple.  I've known left-wing conservatives. Raised by parents who taught the coming Revolution as status quo, they are as resistant to changing their worldview as George Wallace was to integration. Change and uncertainty can disturb and repel us even if we are oppressed, and some people have deeply conservative personalities.

Haidt, McCauley, and Rozin devised a 32-point questionnaire in 1994 to score respondents on a "Disgust Scale" (https://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/disgust.scale.original.doc), and repeated trials have found that sensitivity to "disgust" predicts political conservatism. This is, of course, only a correlation. But what is striking about the questionnaire is that nothing on it is political. How bothered are you by a man eating messy food with his fingers? How disgusted by a cockroach in someone else's house? A mucous-filled throat clearing? A rat in a public park? A stranger's homosexual activity? Eating monkey meat? These all have in common that they aren't practical threats to your health or welfare and are, in most cases, none of your damn business. 

The disgust reflex serves to prevent poisoning and infection. This useful function, however, intrudes into politics. When I see an event that disgusts me and feel discomfort, it's natural for me to condemn it even though my personal sensitivity, not the event itself, is the immediate cause of my discomfort. My impulse is to suppress harmless events that cause mental discomfort. Maggots in a garbage can, a friend's bad hygiene, a dead cat, or a stranger's private consensual sex don't threaten public welfare or my own. Needlessly acting on disgust would lead me to butt in where I have no business, to try to control other people to make things "right." This impulse drives conservatism, perhaps irresistibly when sensitivity to disgust is strong.

An instance is homosexual practice. I would be personally disgusted if forced to perform, even to witness, some sexual practices. It's personal taste, not religion or morality. But it seems that some conservatives, imagining activities and feeling similar disgust, make unwarranted leaps from, "This disgusts me" to "This is disgusting" to "This is wrong." They may even attribute their disgust to God. My refusal to make such leaps is, I think, another basic reason why I can't be a conservative. I resist on moral grounds imposing my own disgust on others.

          Rather, I try to remember that the fact that something disgusts me may be a point in its favor. If I am disgusted, I am clearly biased and therefore not a fair judge of a thing's value for others. This is a moral priority, a call to respect others, to leave them free to make their own choices when they aren't inflicting harm on other people.

This may be harder for some personality types. I once played in a music combo with a man who needed to know in advance that a gig would go well before he accepted it. We were constantly at odds. He worried, "Will they like us?" Presumably, he felt intolerable disgust at the idea of audience rejection. My attitude: "You miss every shot you don't take." I was a shy child and fought my shyness. In music, as in politics, my policy is to blast through uncertainty and embrace the woozy dis-ease of things looking "wrong" when a hopeful change is ventured. 

        Of course, I don't salute every "reform" that progressives run up the flagpole. I try to judge whether it will be helpful, but I have no patience with the way conservatives cling to the evils of the past or their disgust when things inevitably look different after systemic reforms. And I laugh at the conservative two-step they dance along with racists of my Alabama childhood.