From a Conversation on Political Philosophy: The Conservative Infatuation with The Violence of Empire and Inequality

I highly recommend this conversation between Corey Robin and Daniel Larison. Maybe now I'll get off my lazy ass and order Robin's book, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin . Maybe it will stir up distant memories from philosophy classes that will make me better understand the underpinnings of today's conservatives. After reading Robin's blogging for years, I'm certain I'll learn something.

I took a few notes while reading the riveting conversation, when I wasn't busy looking up topics like pan-Slavism, which I had forgotten about. Mostly I was interested in Larison's apparent embarrassment in regards to the right's infatuation with violence.

Daniel Larison: "...there is no disputing that most conservatives in most Western countries in the past two centuries have supported their governments’ foreign wars. I am still not persuaded that this is because there is a conservative infatuation with violence. There are several other factors that may help account for it: deference to authority"

If authority is violent, and you defer to it, is this not an infatuation w/ violence? Is deferring to violence not support for it? If they're not infatuated with the violence (and I think they are, based on how many times I heard "nuke all Muslims" during debates about Iraq), then they are infatuated with the perpetrators of violence. So infatuated, in fact, that rather than think through the conservative implications of imperialism, they not only defer to the violent authority, but they use violence against those who oppose it.

I was physically attacked many times by people who got angry that they couldn't argue with me about the war. I was attacked a few times by people who attempted to make a coherent argument for the Iraq war, but found themselves floundering to the point that they had to resort to throwing a punch. I argued with conservatives and some neo-liberals, some of them in my own family, and was eventually told that either I should support my president in a time of war, or I was a traitor. This seems more like "the distorting effects of nationalism" Larison lists as another possible explanation for the tendency for violence on the right, but if someone allows nationalism to distort their view to such an extent as to accuse someone of treason (punishable by death), doesn't this expose an infatuation with violence that is tempered only by a desire not to get one's hands bloody?

To this day, I hear people try to defend the Iraq war (mostly lame arguments involving the "everyone thought they had WMD" BS, which isn't really a defense but a spreading of blame). Is this infatuation with defending the violent Bush administration not itself an infatuation with violence? If not directly, then indirectly through continued support for those who committed it?

Corey Robin: "the primary audience for violence on the right is the perpetrator and/or his/her allies. In other words, the right sees violence as primarily a source of rejuvenation among a ruling class that has gone soft. "

Is this not the best explanation for the support of GW Bush's $6 trillion dollar war? And even if you don't think the "deference to authority" is, in itself, violence, then isn't the right's continued defense of the Iraq war a result of the primary audience for violence on the right being the allies of the perpetrator? Isn't the right's continued defense of Iraq an attempt to milk every last ounce of rejuvenation from the violence in order to toughen up the right that has, supposedly, gone soft?

It reminds me of the Lee Atwater quote about the southern strategy (the audio of which was recently released). He says that you start of saying "nigger, nigger" in order to get votes for the GOP in the south, and then that starts to backfire, so you start talking about bussing, taxes, more "abstract" things that still, essentially, say "nigger, nigger!" In this case, it's hippie punching. Right wingers still want to punch hippies, and many of them still do, but that kind of lashing out tends to backfire, makes you look bad. So, now you're talking about opposing a violent, power crazed President who's lying us into a war, you must be a traitor who would be toast in any other country, so you should surrender to the power of the authority that knows what's good for you. It's certainly more abstract than a right cross to the nose, but the infatuation with violence has merely gone from actually throwing the punch oneself, to wishing that the powerful authority to which one defers would put you to death for your non-Patriotic use of the 1st Amendment. Just because your hands don't have blood on them doesn't mean you're not violent. It just means you don't like the mess, so you defer to an authority--a kind of outsourcing of the violence.

I often think of how, when he was running for office, GW Bush used the phrase "compassionate conservatism." Is the continued defense of the Bush administration, with a gaping lack of reference to compassion, and a continued reliance on the idea of spreading democracy at the barrel of a gun, not the  toughening up of a philosophy that many on the right saw as "too soft." Is not the current fervor to stop people from getting affordable insurance, or to cut food stamps, or to cut minorities off from the voting booth, or to blame the 47% who are moochers for all our problems, aren't these all methods to "toughen up" the right? Aren't these all just more abstract ways of punching hippies?

Larison: "If we assume that concentrating wealth and increasing economic inequality were goals of the right, I suppose I would have to agree that there has been success of a sort. But I don’t consider either of those things to be desirable or consistent with conservative assumptions."

If economic inequality were not goals of the right, then what is trickle down economics? Are we to believe that conservatives actually believed that if we cut taxes on the rich that would lead to more economic equality? And since Larison admitted earlier that a large part of conservatism is deference to authority, then isn't having more wealth in the hands of the supposedly deserving meritocracy an outcome the right would desire?

Anyway, great conversation. Very educational. Go read the whole thing.

Conservative Catharsis: Blame Deregulation and Privatization

[Cross posted everywhere it makes sense.]

George W Bush broke the world. It was pretty fucked up to begin with, after years of laissez-faire economics practiced by all American presidents since FDR, but much more so since Reagan. The conservative philosophy was corrupted by deregulators who's belief in the free market completely left out the fact that most people are greedy bastards who will steal everything that's not tied down.

Now this upper class of well-to-do Reaganites, many of them in the Democratic party, have drained the wealth of this country into their walled communities and private security forces, while they whine about their portfolios being worthless. What did they think when they were doing everything Phil Graham suggested? Did they think we could just trust the robber baron class not to be robber barons?

The profit motive works just fine in a regulated market, where everyone has their cards above the table, and we all play by the same rules, which we can all understand. Old timey conservatives were for stringent regulations, especially capital requirements on banks and the like. To be a fiscal conservative meant, literally, to not take crazy risks. A little risk for a decent return, but nothing crazy.

Well, you guys had your chance and you blew it. But what's funny about it is that Karl Marx basically predicted it. It's not hedge fund science, you know. If you have a bunch of money in one place, and you loosen the rules that protect it, someone will steal it. Human nature--GREED--is not good in a market because the greedy will take down the rest of us in that inter-dependent system.

So, now we're going to try something else. It's kind of like what FDR tried, at least in the sense of the largess, the investment in infrastructure and people, and the like. But it's also like FDR in the sense that he realized that everyone deserves some basic floor to stand on: a starting place so that we are all, indeed, created equal when we become a member of The Class of US Taxpayers. Now some of us might get more out of that system than we paid in, but the ones at the top will still get something out of it. They'll have clean dishes to eat cooked food on in restaurants. They'll have firemen and cops and teachers and those people will have the basic dignity of health coverage, affordable housing and utilities, and the like. If the private enterprise system refuses to charge enough for the products and services so that those people can be paid enough to buy their own coverage, then it is we the people, the government, who must force them to, through taxation.

And if you don't believe that, then your option is to have a whole class of people who are broke, unhealthy, and damn angry about it. In this country, those people vote for someone who will make the playing field fair again. In the current view of the dominant conservative voices, those people can just crawl off and die somewhere. Or wind up in prison where we subsidize their everything.

There will be people at the top who pay for it. That is populism. That is the price you pay for living in a country where we pay people who stock shelves at Wal Mart so little that they qualify for government subsidized health care. I'm sure most free market conservatives would prefer to have Wal Mart take care of their employees. But then how could they be the low price leader?

It's still a free country, and there's going to be a free market for practically anything (including things that are illegal). There will be a free market for health care and those of you who can afford it are more than welcome to sink your dollars into a system that profits from your sickness on one end (the HMOs) and profits from your minimal care on the other (the insurance companies who don't want to pay, they just want to collect). I ask you, which force will drive doctor salaries lower? A government that tries to enforce fairness, no matter how cumbersome a bureaucracy that develops in order to implement that fairness (and, again, medicare does it with amazingly low administrative costs compared to private companies), or a private insurance company that is trying desperately to keep outlays down because raising premiums is just making them lose customers?

I'm all for personal responsibility. I grow a lot of my own food. I own my own small business and work for a lot less than minimum wage. I would require more stringent food requirements on Food Stamp recipients, like me, to eat healthy foods and support local, small, and organic farmers. But when it comes to something as complex as health care, I just don't trust the greedy bastards to run it anywhere but into the ground.

I lived in LA for 20 years. I remember the Enron fiasco during the electricity crisis. We had been sold a bill of goods about privatizing and deregulating the electricity markets that turned out to be worse than a load of horse shit (which is at least good fertilizer). It is a perfect example of how unfettered markets only serve as suet to a bunch of hungry birds like Ken Lay who fly away with the whole chunk if they can.

At that point, I started looking into co-ops, public ownership of utilities, community supported agriculture, and credit unions. I like employee owned companies and try to support them when I can. Guess what all those examples are? Communist! They take the assets, the factories, the power lines, the loan portfolios, and they collectively own them among all the members. Where I live now, we have an electric co-op (a remnant of FDR's Rural Electrification Association). It's great. All the people who get the cheap power own the assets of the power company collectively. There is no profit, but the guys who cut the tree branches out of the way get paid well, get health insurance and other benefits. So does the nice lady who answers the phone. Because we, the owners, have decided that's a good thing to do. There's no profit for any corporation, but there is enough to make sure everyone gets paid what they're worth. If those employees had a government health plan they could choose, and pay for with a tax on their paychecks, then as a co-owner of the co-op, I would be more than happy to give them a raise with the money the co-op saved by not having to pay for their health care.

I'm pretty sure GM would like that too.

Why should health care be any different than the co-op itself? Why can we not use the medicare paycheck tax to pay into a fund that is then used to pay our dues for a medical co-op that fairly and equitably distributes care on a triage basis, and puts a premium on prevention, even to the point of rewarding people who do the right thing for their health (thereby being less of a burden to the rest of the co-op)?

Now a lot of people will say it's a red commie flag there, but if you really think about it, and look back over American history at the collective good that has developed as a ethic in this country, it's conservative. It says YOU have a stake, YOU have a responsibility, and if you do well, you will be rewarded. The fact that we are all owners makes it the ownership society for real. And the fact that it is controlled by a bureaucracy that is built to make it as fair as possible takes it out of the realm of Stalin or other totalitarian philosophies, and puts it squarely in the hands of voters who get tho choose the head of the federal government every four years.

I worked my ass off for big entertainment companies for 20 years. They made plenty of money off my labor: more than I did, in fact. And when that work caused the degenerative disease I have in my big load bearing joints, those company's insurance companies denied that they had caused it, and tossed me out like any old broken cog. In your world, it's toughsky shitsky for Scotty because they have to profit. In my world, the money I put into the co-op would come back to me from the co-op when I needed it. Some guy who profited more from my work might have to pay a little more tax now to fund it, but I'll never get back all the profit I helped him make. That's fine. But when he tries to say he has no responsibility for my care, now that I'm broken down and can't do the physical labor that I spent 20 years turning into a career, I say he's full of it.

But when he says, well, I don't really want to pay into a system where a bunch of jet-setting insurance company executives and HMO executives milk every last dime out of everything in order to feed their Myopic vision of next quarter's stock price, then he has a point. I don't want him to pay them either. I want him to pay my doctor, with as little administrative or other overhead as possible. In fact, less overhead means more for my doctor.

So that's my long and winding explanation of why I want medical care to be non-profit and universal. And I'd like to thank the Ron Paul Republican who's been rattling a few cages around here for setting me off on what was a comment, but turned into a diary. So much for banging out a quick answer and getting back to work!

And thanks to Hunter today for firing up my populist, anti-Randian roots. Sometimes I forget why I hang out here, and then Hunter posts something that makes me feel like writing again.