CONSERVATIVES WITHOUT CONSCIENCE

William F. Buckley, founder of the National Review and a major force in modern American conservatism, is almost always articulate to a fault. Yet he, too, has difficulty defining conservatism. When asked to do so by Chris Matthews on NBC's Hardball, Buckley became tongue-tied. "The, the, it's very hard to define, define conservatism," Buckley stammered, before proceeding to offer his favorite but meaningless definition: "A famous professor, University of Chicago, was up against it when somebody said, 'How do you define it?' He didn't want to say, well, he said, he said, 'Conservatism is a paragon of essences toward which the phenomenology of the world is continuing approximation'." National Review editor Jonah Goldberg hinted that Buckley has made a career of looking for a definition of conservatism but has not really succeeded.

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In their efforts to present conservatism as an American tradition, conservatives have also reinterpreted the U.S. Constitution. One of the key elements of the Constitution is the establishment of a unique republic, in that a federal system would coexist with state and local governments. Before it was ratified many opponents attacked its progressive and innovative nature, for far from representing the status quo, the Constitution was dramatically liberal. James Madison defended it in The Federalist Papers by explaining that the founders "have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom" but rather employed "numerous innovations. . .in favor of private rights and public happiness." Madison said that "precedent could not be discovered," for there was no other government "on the face of the globe" that provided a model. Madison, the father of the Constitution, clearly saw his work as the opposite of conservatism. Far from venerating the principles of the past, or feeling bound by custom, our nation's founders relied on reason, which is anathema for many of today's conservatives.

– Pages 15-16

Right-wing talk radio could not survive without its endless bloviating about the horrors of liberalism. Trashing liberals is nothing short of a cottage industry for conservative authors. Take the "queen of mean", Ann Coulter, whose titles speak for themselves: Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (2002); Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terror (2003); and How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter (2004). Slander, for example, contains page after page of scorn, criticism, belittlement, and bemoaning of ideas she believes liberal. Her books have also generated a substantial cottage industry in fact-checking her work, which has amply demonstrated that Coulter apparently considers accuracy as something that needs only be approximated.

– Page 24

Not surprisingly, the very conservatives who love to hurl invective against the ranks of their enemies prove to have the thinnest of skins when the same is done to them. Many of the examples are familiar: Ann Coulter, who can trash perceived liberals on national television but has been known to walk offstage when booed, or to start crying when she thinks she is being treated unfairly; Rush Limbaugh, who also makes his living saying unkind things about those with whom he disagrees, thought it unfair, as did his followers, when his addiction to OxyContin was reported, along with the dubious means [by which] he serviced his habit, despite his own attacks on others who use drugs. Similarly, Mr. Virtue, William Bennett, apparently found nothing ironic or contradictory in his preaching (and selling) virtue while being a compulsive gambler himself, and was angry when he was found out.

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"By drawing districts that snaked hundreds of miles across various counties," the NAACP reported, "Republicans drained African-American and Latino voters from integrated Democratic districts and replaced them with enough white Republican voters to outnumber remaining white Democratic voters. As a result, DeLay converted a 32-member Texas congressional delegation that had been evenly divided between the parties into one in which Republicans enjoyed a 10-seat advantage after the 2004 election." Under the federal Voting Rights Act, Texas was required to submit any changes in its voting laws to the federal government for approval by the Department of Justice. After it sent its 2003 redistricting plan to Washington, five lawyers and two analysts in the department's Civil Rights Division rejected it in a seventy-three page memorandum highlighting its flaws. But Bush appointees at the Justice Department rejected the findings of their own experts and approved the highly partisan plan.

– Pages 134-135

One of the more colorful (and accurate) descriptions of the typical neoconservative comes from Philip Gold, who justifiably described himself as having "impeccable conservative credentials and long experience in the national security field," as well as being "a grumpy old Marine (a former intelligence officer), who has grown infuriated with and appalled by the conservative embrace of disaster" served up by neoconservatives. Gold, a former Georgetown University professor, described neoconservative foreign policy wonks as "a new aristocracy of aggression that combines 19-century Prussian pigheadedness with a most un-Prussian inability to read a man or a ledger book, and a near total lack of military—let alone combat—experience. Ask these people to show you their wounds, and they'll probably wave a Washington Post editorial at you."

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Bad judgment is Dick Cheney's trademark.

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Among the most troubling of the authoritarian and radical tactics being employed by Bush and Cheney are their politics of fear. A favorite gambit of Latin American dictators who run sham democracies, fearmongering has generally been frowned upon in American politics. Think of the modern presidents who have governed our nation—Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton—and the crises they confronted... None of these presidents resorted to fear in dealing with these situations...

Frightening Americans, nonetheless, has become a standard ploy for Bush, Cheney, and their surrogates. They add a fear factor to every course of action they pursue, whether it is their radical foreign policy of preemptive war, their call for tax cuts, their desire to privatize social security, or their implementation of a radical new health care scheme.

– Pages 171-172

In short, fear takes reasoning out of the decision-making process, which our history has shown us often enough can have dangerous and long-lasting consequences. If Americans cannot engage in analytical thinking as a result of Republicans' using fear for their own political purposes, we are all in serious trouble. I am sure I am not alone in worrying about the road that we are now on, and where the current authoritarianism is taking the country. I only wish more people would talk about it.

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