What Are Conservatives Trying to Conserve?

Water Color Painting “The Storming of the Bastille” by Jean-Pierre Houël (1789)

Here is a brain teaser: Why are there poor, or female, or black, or Hispanic conservatives? Are there actually poor or black or Hispanic or female people in this country that feel like we should “conserve” the status quo?  Are the people whose very livelihood and civil rights are under attack on a daily basis really okay with that?

Perhaps they think right wingers call themselves “conservatives” because they want to conserve some utopian idea that does not yet exist? But conservatives must have “the truth” because they are always promoting “true” things like capitalism and the inferiority of everything else.

Take the oft repeated phrase “capitalism works.”  This is usually shoveled out in contrast to the line: “communism does not work.”   Note that you could easily substitute “socialism” for “communism” since the speakers that use either soundbite seldom, if ever, understand the distinction between the two. 

For most of my life, I have heard the American party line: Capitalism good – Socialism bad.  If you are a billionaire and okay with the fact that your neighbors are homeless, sick and starving, that may be true for you.  After all, who has the right to “redistribute wealth” by taking some of your gourmet coffee money without your permission just to feed some hungry brat whose mom can’t find work since you moved her job overseas.  Unless you think there is something wrong with uninhibited greed, capitalists are not immoral.  They are simply amoral.  You did not terminate her job to hurt her.  As a true capitalist you had no choice but to maximize your profits by going elsewhere to use people without the pesky expensive baggage of thinking they have some “right” to a living wage, healthcare, and safe working conditions. 

Corporate mouthpieces often use the analogy of the three legged stool.  You have probably seen the slideshow presentations explaining that whatever concept they are marketing at the time is based on three equally important things.  If any one of the vital ingredients is missing, the stool cannot stand.  Let’s apply that analogy to capitalism. Imagine a three legged stool sitting in the middle of a cow pasture called the global economy. The philosophy of capitalism is supported by one deceptively simple idea.  But it is also propped up by two other legs that only exist in the minds of the true believers.  The first leg posits that people are basically greedy.  And if you give greed a safe nurturing environment in which to grow there is no limit to the amount of wealth the greediest people can accumulate. 

The second leg stands or falls on the premise that the more wealth greedy people accumulate, the better it will be for everyone else.  This philosophy was popularized by the patron saint of American capitalism, Ronald Reagan.  He called it “Trickle Down economics.”  This theory is often promoted by religious fanatics and is similar to the Biblical statement that “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the Master’s table.”  [For all of you Biblical purists, I am aware that this statement was not made in the context of economic theory.  I realize it was actually attributed to a Gentile woman who wanted Jesus to heal her in spite of the fact that she was not a Jew and therefore not within the scope of Jesus’ agenda.  But you get the idea.]  Greedy people don’t have a direct interest in benefiting the surfs.  But the peasants will reap bountiful treasures as an unintended side effect of their selfish activities. 

The third leg is related to the second.  The insatiable appetite for more, by its very nature requires investment and growth from the greedy folks at the top.  Therefore (we are supposed to believe), they will grow their good ol’ red, white and blue American businesses by employing more surfs.  Or to put it another way, as long as there is a rich old ass that needs wiping, there will be more and more jobs for the rest of us.  It’s win-win! 

But that first leg (the only one that isn’t total bullshit) also has an Achilles heel.  It is based on a pyramid scheme.  Unfortunately, there is a limit to the total amount of wealth and resources that can be sucked up by the selfish Pharaohs.  The first Amway distributors do great.  The guys at the next tier do pretty well.  But those that buy in after a while thinking they will someday reach the top, have a hard lesson ahead of them.  For everyone sitting at the top of the pyramid, there are ten thousand peasants with an upside down mortgage and a basement full of soap products no one really wants.  This vast majority of schmucks are scrambling for the crumbs of wealth that fall from the American corporate tables. I say American tables because so many of the crumbs have already been exported to the lands of child labor and sweatshops.

We know from the examples of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church before the Protestant Reformation, and France under Louis the XVI, that unlimited greed eventually begins to devour the minimum level of resources necessary for everyone else’s survival.  When peasants get too hungry, the empire is in trouble.  So here we are with record unemployment and most of us sharing the crumbs of what (in spite of the lies we have been told) are clearly finite resources.  That what we share are the crumbs is no weak analogy.  From 2002 to 2007, the income of the top one percent of households grew ten times faster than that of the bottom ninety percent.  That is the largest disparity in American income since 1928.  Yet, as the following rant by Bill Maher points out, the conservatives go berserk and imply you are unpatriotic if you dare complain about it.

If only the goal of the conservatives was to protect the equality and fairness for everyone that brave, progressive people wrested from them in 60s and 70s, their objectives would be worthy of support. Instead, we are watching the dismantling of those triumphs and their rapid replacement with a hypocritical socio-economic cast system that conserves the wealth and power of a select few at everyone else’s expense.

Copyright © 2011, Rick D. Massey, JD