Post-Conservatism

“I used to be a conservative,” Jeb Bush admitted last week after a speech in Dallas. “I watch these debates and I’m wondering, I don’t think I’ve changed,” he said, “but it’s a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people’s fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective.” Conservatives, according to the Governor of Florida, are calm and reasonable people who think their audience capable of cool cogitation. They don’t traffic in bombast or promote discontent. Looking at the Republican primary debates of the 2012 presidential season, Jeb Bush saw something else. Not only were his fellow Republicans disregarding conservative values, they had so besmirched the term that Jeb could no longer use it.

Jeb Bush’s conservative principles harken back to those of Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century parliamentarian and political theorist, who looked at the revolutionary activity in France and said in so many words, “Whoa, Nelly.” All those cries for liberty, fraternity, and equality, said Burke, were just raising “false hopes and vain expectations.” The spirit of liberty, Burke noted, is intoxicating: “but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface.”

Conservatives don’t go running into the fray, reasoned Burke, they don’t knock down existing institutions in hopes of building the world anew. Conservatives, by disposition, are pessimistic about new possibilities. They don’t flatter the optimists until the dust has settled. “I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing,” wrote Burke, “that they have really received one.”

For almost two hundred years Americans didn’t have a lot of interest in conservatism, finding it too dour a disposition for a country animated by high hopes. For the European settler, America was a place of infinite possibility and endless enthusiasm. Who needed the stodgy lessons of the past when we were so busy formulating in advance the praises for our next project? The spirit of liberty put politicians in office and convinced fathers to send their sons off to wars in Mexico and the Philippines. When Americans decided to do something, by God, we did it! Only nervous Europeans waited for the surface to settle to see if the actions were good.

Given America’s aggressive form of optimism, perhaps it is not surprising that our brand of conservatism would drop the Whiggish hesitancy in favor of something bolder.  In his 1951 book, God and Man at Yale, William F. Buckley, Jr. castigated his undergraduate professors for cultivating atheism and collectivism. Like Burke, Buckley believed that traditional institutions, like the family and religion, curbed people’s excessive spirits. But unlike Burke, Buckley believed that the righteous should take prompt and immediate action. “I myself believe,” wrote Buckley in his preface, “that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism [by which Buckley meant American capitalism] and collectivism [by which he meant Soviet-style socialism] is the same struggle reproduced on another level.” By pairing Judeo-Christian religion with capitalism, Buckley undid much of Burke’s philosophy. Where Burke might have used religion as a brake to unfettered markets, Buckley put God on the side of laissez-faire capitalism. With divinely-inspired markets, there was little reason for conservatives to slow down and consider any damaging effects.

By the end of his life, however, Buckley had become as cranky as any conservative parliamentarian. Listening to George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, Buckley observed, “his words were too ambitious.” Concluding “there will be no legacy for Mr. Bush,” Buckley predicted that Bush’s successor would not “re-enunciate the words he used.” Buckley called Bush’s speech “indecipherable”: it troubled the water without leaving any useful effect.

It must have been a bitter observation for Buckley. Fresh out of college, he believed that God plus money would slow down the dangerous spread of atheism and socialist economies. Unfortunately, he forgot the cardinal rule of conservatism, Stop and Think. By pairing omnipotence with capital, Buckley created the ideology that supported Bush’s excesses. He must have felt somewhat responsible for those endless wars, skyrocketing public debt, and a speech that had no enduring value.

Buckley once wrote that, “A conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling, ‘Stop!’” By that definition, Ron Paul is the only candidate who fits the bill, particularly when it comes to war. Were it not for the fact that Paul wants to topple existing administrative agencies, Jeb Bush might still be calling himself a conservative. But Paul’s hasty solutions are more geared toward troubling the waters than considering the effect of his libertarian revolution. There really is no conservative in the bunch.

As Burke and Buckley have noted, the true job of the conservative is to slow us all down, to get us to wait for the dust to settle before determining our next move. Unfortunately, conservatives have become too ambitious, too quick to raise false hopes and vain expectations. Liberals, on the other hand, are tending more toward pessimism and dismissive deconstructions. With conservatives insisting that anything is possible, and liberals shaking their heads in disbelief, it’s hard not to notice that the national endocrine system is seriously out of whack.

In truth, a healthy country, like a healthy individual, needs both conservative crankiness and a liberal imagination. We need to act and we need to hesitate before acting again. We need to wait for the effervescence to settle, to see clearly what we have wrought. Right now, the Republican presidential candidates are not performing that function. Maybe the post-conservatives can organize themselves and do a better job. Once we can count on their Whiggish hesitancy, the rest of us can go back to conjuring bold new worlds. If we knew that conservatives were judiciously applying the brakes, we might feel safer to press forward.   

Jersey Girl

            When Governor Chris Christie ordered that flags on state office buildings be flown at half-mast this past Saturday, there was grumbling in and out of the Garden State. “Whitney Houston doesn’t deserve this,” said one group of indignant Tweeters. “We only drop the flag half-way down the pole when members of the military, or official leaders, or first responders pass to the other side.” Another group’s tweets were even more concise, “We don’t honor drug addicts.”

            The governor held firm. While acknowledging that Whitney might not have been a perfect role model, she was still a “daughter of New Jersey” and her cultural impact on the state was huge. “I am disturbed by people who believe that because of her … history of substance abuse that somehow she forfeited the good things she did in her life,” said the governor during a press briefing. “I just reject that on a human level.”  On Saturday, the day of Houston’s private funeral in Newark, the state’s flags were flown at half-mast.

            The fact that the Republican governor of an urban state stood up against Houston’s detractors is a very good sign. For forty years Republicans (and some Democrats) have relentlessly vilified a certain class of drug users even as they cut social services for the poor. Crack, in particular, was used to justify a dramatic restructuring of government spending. Rather than provide urban neighborhoods with garbage service and good schools, politicians just needed to say, “crack,” and the money flowed into profitable prison contracts. But allegations of crack didn’t just funnel money into upstate prisons, it also legitimated private economic development on a very grand scale. State money would not go to the undeserving, the homeless, the families in public housing, because those people all did drugs. Rather, state money would go to the building of convention centers and airports and parking garages, where a different class of drug users could indulge in reckless high finance and no one would say, “shame on you.”

            Houston’s funeral was in Newark, the city of her birth. During her lifetime, its manufacturing base disappeared, social services dried up and a massive airport lured coach and business class travelers out of New York. Going to London? Fly out of Newark! “It’s so much easier to get out of Newark,” said my Northern New Jersey mother-in-law in the eighties. “Just don’t get lost on your way to the airport,” she cautioned. “You might never get out of some of those neighborhoods.”

            “That’s the plan,” I told her. She thought I was talking about dangerous drug dealers who would hold her dear son and his difficult young wife for ransom. I didn’t correct her. Ronald Reagan was in the White House. Margaret Thatcher was in 10 Downing Street. “Governments will no longer protect the people,” they said with great confidence. “Governments will provide resources for Big Business.”

“But wait,” said the people, “aren’t you guys running democracies, English-speaking democracies for that matter? Isn’t the point of all this freedom-rhetoric that government protects the people?”

The Neoliberal Monarchs had a ready-answer. “Big Business doesn’t use drugs, it doesn’t waste its resources. Only Big Business can provide a healthy future. The people, unfortunately, have a drug habit and do not deserve our protection. If they suffer from our new economic development policies, they have only themselves to blame.” My mother-in-law completely agreed.

Forty years later, there are miserable conditions in the inner cities and swanky convention centers near international airports. There is also a high degree of heartlessness in the land. “Your state has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times,” said NBC’s Brian Williams to Governor Perry during a presidential debate and the conservative audience erupted in glee. “Should we let a thirty-year old without health insurance just die?” asked another moderator at the CNN/Tea Party Debate in September. Before Ron Paul could answer, a member of the audience yelled, “Yes!” Again the crowd cheered. The beneficiaries of neoliberal policies don’t have any qualms about exposing its cruel side.

An argument could be made that Christie can afford to defend Houston because he is not running for the highest office in the land. One could also say that neoliberal leaders usually get the white middle-class to do the dirty work of hate while they remain looking noble at the top. But as the crowds get more brazen in their heartlessness, some leaders are starting to look nervous. It’s hard to look noble when your constituency is made up of thugs.

Meanwhile, in Newark, one of America’s most promising leaders has devised an economic program to end homelessness. Mayor Cory Booker’s ten-year plan puts the creation of permanent housing at the top of the city’s agenda. Not airports, not highways, not convention centers, but neighborhoods where people actually want to live. Rather than wasting money on emergency shelters, Booker wants to create an environment in which a young girl who sings in the Baptist choir can walk down the sidewalk without ducking bullets, can step into a grocery store with fresh New Jersey vegetables, and can easily love herself because her community was loved.

As far as I can tell, people take drugs to feel the love the world denies them. By targeting certain communities as undeserving of public love, neoliberal economic policies cultivated the conditions for drug use. By creating a class of people to hate (drug users), these same policies created a nation of haters who cheer at executions and want the uninsured to die young. It’s not a pretty picture.

So kudos to Governor Christie! May all the flags fly at half-mast until we stop wasting lives, wasting neighborhoods, wasting topsoil for airports and convention centers. May the national banners flutter at that mid-way point until we are moved more by the sound of an extraordinary woman’s voice, by the beauty of gospel culture, than by the mob’s manipulated urge to hate.

A Valentine Without Chocolate

Years ago, when I worked at a battered women’s shelter, Valentine’s Day was observed with a good deal of skepticism. Coming shortly after Superbowl Sunday – a day when shelters around the country brought in extra workers to handle the brutal aftermath of fan disappointment – Valentine’s Day seemed made for the batterer. The women, who had come to the shelter out of desperation, who had shared their stories with other football refugees, who were beginning to see that another life was possible, were at just that point in their recovery where they had healed enough to forget the pain of two weeks ago. And then came this revelry in romance, the ubiquitous rose and red satin and chocolates everywhere. Even with a restraining order, it was hard to resist the seduction of Valentine’s Day.

But Valentine’s Day or not, brutal relationships have their own form of seduction. The master says to the slave, “I own you,” and the slave finds a strange comfort in being owned. Aristotle pointed out years ago that there are some men, by nature, “who are capable of becoming the property of another.” European conquerors used his natural slave argument to enslave native peoples across the planet, but that’s not how I read this passage. The natural slave is someone who prefers to have someone else make his decisions; who, when given the choice of freedom, would rather be ruled. Unlike institutionalized slavery, which is what we would call the American practice of enslaving Africans and their descendants, natural slavery is an inside job. The habit of being ruled creates a disposition for servitude.

Where there is a natural slave there is also a natural master, a person who gets his needs met by ruling another person. Put them together and the natural master and the natural slave have a symbiotic relationship. The slave does as the master directs, thus avoiding the difficulty of having to think through things on his own. The master gets to rule without acknowledging that he can’t meet his own needs; he has the slave to do that for him. Aristotle scorned both the master and the slave for taking up roles that limited their capacity to grow. Each member of a political community, he wrote over two thousand years ago, must take turns ruling and being ruled. A democracy cannot work, he told us, when peopled by masters and slaves.

            It’s not just abusive relationships that seduce us away from life in a political community. Our relationship to the earth is marked with all the indignities of the master/slave relationship. We are a race of masters who believe we know what is best for the animals, plants, and soil. We cut off her mountains and ejaculate chemicals into natural gas reserves. Like all masters, we dismiss our needs and focus on our magnificent will. We will have her. We will bend her to our desires, which, after all is why she is there in the first place.

            Historically, slaves have had an easier time making the shift to political life than their tyrannical masters. Once slaves start to organize, they start ruling themselves. They make decisions, they consider other options, they come up with strategies, and, voilà! – they no longer act as slaves. Having spent much of their life being ruled, however, they don’t give up on that part of the equation. They just ask that when they are ruled, they be ruled well.

Masters, on the other hand, have difficulty organizing because they are accustomed to getting their way. Their knees are stiff and not accustomed to bend. They don’t know how to compromise. Tyranny has also distracted them from their terrible feelings of insecurity; masters keep slaves around in order to mask their terrifying dependency. For all these reasons, masters have a hard time seeing the benefits of living in a political community. They are too scared to risk being ruled.

            As if the earth itself was conspiring to ease us out of the master/slave relationship, the world’s chocolate supply is at great risk. Brazil, which during the eighties was supposed to be the world’s greatest producer of chocolate, lost its dominant market share almost overnight because of disease.  In West Africa, where most of the world’s chocolate is currently produced, thirty to forty percent of the harvest is lost to disease. Add climate change and poor farming practices to the mix and suddenly the endless supply of chocolate seems less secure.

            But maybe a chocolate scarcity will free us from the seductions of the master/slave relationship. “I’ll never do it again,” is less convincing without chocolate. “I can give you whatever you want,” is less palatable without the magic of the cocoa bean. Without the crutch of chocolate, the master/slave dichotomy may give way to a political community where people, the remaining cocoa plants, and the mastectomied mountains all take turns ruling and being ruled.

Muy Emocionante

            A nice way to begin a critical inquiry into the present moment is to set up a timeline. All it takes is a piece of paper and marker and voilà, the investigator is ready to go. Important dates are duly noted and major events arranged in chronological order. As more information gathers on the timeline, trends start to emerge. Some of those trends can be reassuring, others not so much. But the researcher presses on, determined to better understand what some theorists call “the direction of the present.”

            In her book on the transition to democracy in post-Pinochet Chile, anthropologist Julia Paley describes the effectiveness of timelines as a political tool. The residents of one of Santiago’s poorer neighborhood gathered to plot major events in Chile’s political history. September 11, 1973 was a big date; the day President Allende was overthrown by the military and General Pinochet came to power. But there were other dates: When squatters first settled in the abandoned field of a hacienda, when the government promised to set up a clinic and a school, when a park was approved by the neighborhood council, when the national government abandoned public services in favor of structural adjustment programs. As the timeline became more detailed, the residents began to see how, over time, they had come to expect less and less of their government. They also saw how many times the government had reneged on promises. The timeline became an important tool to mobilize the neighborhood.

            But not all visual aids inspire political action. There is a type of graph, one that plots exponential growth, that can take most of the oxygen out of the room. A first cousin to the timeline, environmentalists call this type of graph, “hockey stick,” referring to the shape of the line itself. Map global population from 1800 to 2012 and you’ll get a hockey stick lying on its side. From 1800 to 1950, the line runs pretty flat. Then in the mid-1950s, the number of people on earth rushes skyward, from 2 billion to over 7 billion in fifty years. If you map the number of species going extinct over time, you’ll get another hockey stick to the noggin.

            Which is exactly what these graphs do; they bang us over the head with a direction of the present that seems way too fast and way too big to deal with. With human population rising at a tremendous rate and biodiversity disappearing almost as fast, it’s hard to find the energy to do anything. “I guess we’re f___’ed,” is how one audience member described it, after a lecture at Marlboro’s Graduate Center a few years back. He had just been hockey struck.

            Besides global population and species extinction, another hockey stick is incarceration rates for African-American men without high school degrees. In the 18-34-age category, we see a big spike in the incarceration rate beginning in the 1980’s. At that time, less than ten percent of that population was behind bars. Now it hovers around 40 percent.

            But here’s an interesting twist: show an audience the population and extinction graphs and they’ll just want to go home and cry. Show an audience the incarceration rates and chances are good some will want to mobilize around prison reform. In other words, some graphs provoke, and some just numb.

            Interestingly enough, timelines have the advantage of generating more political energy because they require more work to read. Members of the Santiago neighborhood looked hard at the information plotted along their x-axis and then hypothesized about possible trends. The timeline provided the stuff of political narratives, suggesting plot lines where bravery wins briefly against corruption and considers future opportunities for resistance. Graphs, on the other hand, control the story. “Look where that line is going!” we say to ourselves, as if we were not involved.

            I’m thinking about this because on Wednesday evening I’ll be speaking at Landmark College about species extinction and population growth and I don’t want to take the oxygen out of the room. The hockey sticks are there, floating above my timeline like celestial visitors, playing the role of Fate and Fortune. In this new 21^st century, the direction of the present is haunted by their undeniable facts. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have choices in how we go forward.

            For instance, population growth may not be as horrible as some Vermonters dread. The second time we walked across Spain on the Camino de Santiago, it was a holy year. The saint’s day fell on a Sunday, making the indulgences we received for our blisters worth far more in papal heaven. With greater value came bigger crowds, particularly for the last hundred kilometers of the journey. The refugios were full and used toilet paper littered the fields just outside the villages. “Look at all the people!” I said to a schoolteacher from Madrid, thinking she would share my distress. “Sí,” she said, with tears in her eyes, “Es muy emocionante.”

            For those of you who don’t speak Spanish, my Madrileña guide was teaching me that life is more exciting when there are more people to share it with. Where I saw toilet paper, she saw the pulsating energy of pilgrims.

Almost 8 billion of us are on pilgrimage now, filling up all available beds, in prison and out, scattering our waste across the planet’s fields. Our collective timeline reminds us of promises that were broken and plans we still cherish. What ever happened to that park by the river? Why does so much public money go towards prisons instead of playgrounds? How did we inherit these choices? With more people participating, the timeline is rich with details, the trends more obvious. Oh right, we tell ourselves, that’s what we wanted back then.

This is our story, made step by step, even with blisters, even with fewer species by our side.