Thoughts on the learning curve of Conservatives

I was raised a Conservative Republican back when the people that are now Tea Party folks were in the John Birch society.  I was crushed when Goldwater was defeated in 1964. I voted for Richard Nixon and for Ronald Reagan for President.   I learned the ideology as a child and that was all I needed, I was not going to waste my time thinking about wrong-headed non-Conservative notions.  I felt my opinions were right, and I trusted those emotions.  I would look around for facts and logic to justify my emotion based beliefs, but when facts and emotions that contradicted my beliefs were presented I simply dismissed them.   


Huge emotional upheavals in my life, coupled with moving into a profession where being right is about facts, not belief, were necessary to get me to open up my mind and start questioning the truth of my emotional beliefs.


I don't mean to imply conservative are the only folks who unconsciously rely on their emotional beliefs and block out facts and reality, we all do it to some extent.  We are hardwired to make our emotions the chairman of the brain board.  But I think what makes one a conservative is the willingness to trust ones emotions in the day to day interactions of life.  It works well for individuals - the emotions are pretty good at figuring out what we need as individuals.  Conservatives often do pretty well for themselves in life.  Where it doesn't work so well is in dealing with a world of people with different backgrounds and outlooks.   Basically conservatives are very judgmental and inclined to think any thinking or behavior they aren't emotionally comfortable with is bad and should be prohibited. The evolution of modern society has been a constant battle of conservatives fighting to stifle new ideas or ways of living.


The drug war was a Conservative war.  Richard Nixon first called it the drug war in 1971, although in fact it had been going on since politicians first started using drug use by immigrants and minorities as a tool to fire up peoples emotions and get their vote back in the 1920's.  In about 1986 while investigating some old California laws punishing drug use I ran across 1929 newspaper articles, and transcripts of legislative proceedings from 1928 and 1929 where the arguments of police chiefs and politicians were virtually identical in tone and content to the quotes  I was hearing and reading in the media and political speeches in 1986.  The drug war had been going on 50 years at that point.

Beginning in the 1970's, in response to the ideas of individual freedom that grew out of the 1960's, conservatives pounded on any moderate Republican or  Democrat who questioned the wisdom of the drug war.  The buzz phrase was people were "soft on drugs".  Conservatives were so good at appealing to peoples fears and instincts that by the early 1990's few politicians of either party who wanted to get elected dared be anything but one more drug warrior.


Now, after trillions of dollars spent on enforcement and incarceration over nearly a century, some conservatives are coming to the conclusion maybe it isn't really working.    Debra Saunders, SF Chronicle columnist, is representative of this turnabout by many Conservatives.  In her column on June 12, 2011 she argued that the drug war encouraged criminality, deprived government of needed revenue, limited individual rights and was the essence of hypocrisy given that huge percentages of the leaders in the country used drugs as young people.   


She argues "Prohibition didn't work for alcohol and it doesn't work for drugs".  Prohibition ended in 1934 - why did it take conservatives 76 years to figure that one out?


She next implies Democrats are what is keeping the drug war going.  She quotes some former Narcotics officer saying "(Obama)...needs to think about where he would be if he had been caught with drugs as a young black man".   I find this breathtakingly condescending.  Do they really believe Obama hasn't been painfully aware of that fact his whole life?  


In the last decade immigration has been one of the clubs conservative politicians use to beat up political opponents.  Now that conservatives have basically taken over many of the smaller states, they are passing harsh immigration laws.  Georgia  passed a really tough immigration law that takes effect on July 1 that is basically causing many of the farmworkers in the State to leave.   As a result farmers in Georgia had only about 1/2 to 2/3 the labor available they normally need during the May/June harvest period.  The farmers estimate they lost about $300 million because they did not have enough labor.  The Governor of Georgia who signed the bill into law suggested that Parolee's would take those newly available jobs (Right - parolees are going to voluntarily do hard physical labor all day in the hot sun).  Here is my prediction.  There is little that is more important to conservatives than letting people make money, so Georgia's law will be amended to become relatively toothless and then Georgia's conservatives will be keeping mum about immigration, or find a way to say Democrats caused the states economic problems.  I just have to wonder why they couldn't take a couple minutes before they passed the law to question the wisdom of their emotional beliefs, to think and do some research about the consequences of their actions.  In the last decade every time the topic of immigration came up farmers or other people who actually know what immigrants do would point out migratory labor does the dirty work no one else is hungry enough to do.  But conservatives don't seem capable of hearing voices that contradict their ideology.


In 1863 Republican President Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.  Yet in my lifetime Republicans are consistently the last to get on board with civil rights issues.  The fought the 1963 Civil Rights Act tooth and nail.  They railed against equal rights for women.  The last decade they have been firing people up about saving marriage by not letting gays get married, but never stopping to think exactly how a gay couples marriage negatively impacts anyone else.  For the longer term that battle is probably over - in the Prop 8 case in California the Conservatives had to actually put on evidence showing gay marriage harmed society in some way - and suddenly discovered they had none.  Strongly held emotional belief doesn't cut it as evidence in Federal Court.  The proponents of Prop 8 still think they may get the extremely conservative current Supreme Court to reverse the trial courts decision.   But I don't think even this Supreme Court will be able to find a way to protect this particular Conservative ideology.  They may be Conservative but they are lawyers who have devoted their entire life to the distinction between evidence and belief.


In another couple decades Conservatives will be standing up on the floor of Congress making self righteous speeches in support the right of gays to be treated like everyone else.  Much as they now support racial equality, or womens rights.  I just wish they could pause from time to time to really critically exam their ideology to see if it makes sense before they start manning the political barriers for decades long fights.


(Sources:  SF Chronicle Insight Section for Debra Saunders quotes, June 12, 2011, Economist, June 18, 2011, page 37 for discussion about the Georgia immigration law)