Contemporary Conservatism: ‘Not Liking’ Become Hatred
There was a time when conservatism made sense. Edmund Burke, the original conservative, comes to mind. An English MP during the American and French Revolutions, he was sympathetic towards the former but denounced the latter every chance he got.
That kind of conservatism accepts the inevitability of change but calls for being very careful about upsetting the status quo, including relations of authority, and especially being careful about changing the institutional structures in society. That is a conservatism of sensible prudence.
That is not what contemporary conservatism is, especially in the U.S. Contemporary conservatism is only one thing: unthinking, even irrational hatred of liberalism. It is reduced to a mere mantra: anything any ‘liberal’ (i.e., anyone who isn’t being anti-liberal) says, thinks, or feels must be wrong. It simply has to be. Thus, anyone who is being anti-liberal/conservative has to be right, no matter what. President Trump is the personification of that attitude.
Global warming is the penultimate example. Every human being on the planet is experiencing a world that is getting warmer. To deny it is to deny one’s own experience of material reality.
Still, that is what is called anecdotal evidence. Such evidence can be refuted by rigorous observation, such as meteorologists and other scientists conduct. When the science reinforces one’s own experience, however, there can be no room for doubt.
Yet, conservatives deny the reality of global warming. Why? There is only one cause for that denial: it is caused by liberals’ acceptance of the reality of global warming. Some conservatives go to great lengths to justify their denial of the reality of global warming, to put a fig leaf on the naked irrationality of their denial of that reality, but for ‘true’ conservatives that is not really necessary. Because liberals accept it, they would deny that reality no matter what.
I have spent a fair amount of time trying to understand conservatives’ hatred of liberalism. This is not my first attempt at explaining it. In the end, no one can know with final, absolute certainty what is going on in the minds and hearts of any other human beings. I have no problem admitting that this, my most recent attempt at an explanation, can only be conjecture. I also doubt that I am the only person to have had this thought, though I can say haven’t encountered it previously.
As someone who is not a liberal, I can also readily point out that liberals are less than totally rational beings. They have an ideology that drives their political agenda, and like all ideologies it is based on beliefs. That makes it, like any other ideology, a secular religion. Ideologies — secular religions — are no more rationalistic than any spiritual religion is.
All people get emotional when it comes to their beliefs. I do. Christians do. Libertarians do. Marxists do. Conservatives do. Liberals do, too.
There is a difference, however, between basing one’s politics on an ideology and getting emotional about it at times, and basing one’s politics on irrational hatred of an ideology. That difference makes all the difference between liberals and conservatives these days.
What accounts for conservatives’ irrational hatred of liberalism? Conservatives hate liberalism so much because they know it is fundamentally right, yet they are against it anyway.
The ideological focus of liberalism is a belief in human equality at the most fundamental level. Many conservatives consider themselves to be Christians, and their Bible insists on a fundamental human equality. All conservatives, secular and religious, certainly bridle at any suggestion of their own inequality — hence their railing against ‘elitism’.
So how can conservatives hate liberalism despite knowing that it is right? They have to hate it in order to be against it.
I accept that conservatives’ hatred of liberalism started as a response to policies being espoused by liberals. It started with ‘not liking’. Somewhere along the way, though, that not liking turned into hatred.
Not liking can be rational. Hatred cannot be rational. It is pure emotion. It is the irrationality of contemporary conservatives that betrays that transition.