Conservative Extremism is Made Possible by Our Collective Lack of Conviction

Conservatives are angry. I accept that fact, but I have to say: it’s weird.

When you really take a step back and look at the state of things, they’re getting their way. Their grievances are petty; their rancor, completely disproportionate to the perceived offense. They’re demonstrably ready to overthrow our constitutional democracy over the most trivial things, and it won’t take much more incitement from clownish buffoons before they’re ready to start a civil war…over what exactly?

Look at the scorecard. What do conservatives want most?

• Low taxes. Well, they’ve got that. Taxation rates are at historic lows.
• Profit. Corporate America has never done better.
• Fetal heartbeats. Abortion is being steadily delegalized across the land.
• Guns. More legal than ever.
• Cars. Still the thing we build almost all our social policy around.
• De-regulation. Last time I checked, corporations were still duopolizing every industry unchecked, and the airlines were still free to drop fares super-low so they can give us the worst service imaginable in return for cheap, uncomfortable flights.
• Law and order. We still have harsh, unforgiving sentencing rules and the highest incarceration rate in the world. We’re still one of the only so-called democracies that regularly executes people.
• Beef. Still subsidized. Still wrecking the environment in every way imaginable, and yet still shockingly cheap to buy.

In short, the fantasy that each of us is a rugged cowboy on the frontier is still alive and well, but to hear it, conservatives must spring into action to save America from the snowflakes destroying it. This should make us all stop and wonder: what’s really going on here?

Really, nothing much has changed since the 1950’s and yet, a certain kind of person thinks we’re on a rollercoaster straight to hell. Let’s review the reasons why:

• The stream of rapists flooding across our porous borders. This would be legitimately a concern, if it were at all true.
• Pronouns.
• “Happy holidays.”
• This supposed idea that the “woke mob” is dominating public discourse, even though Fox News is still bleating out its worldview, along with OAN and Sinclair Broadcasting. True Will & Grace did dominate the airwaves for eight whole seasons, and Demi Burnett was all bisexual and stuff on Bachelor in Paradise, but take heart — there’s plenty of good ol’ fashioned heteronormative programming on The Bachelor and Too Hot to Handle. #metoo has caused some issues, but mostly for ugly Jewish guys, and what’s a conservative not to like in that? It’s like we’re doing your job for you in combatting the globalist conspiracy.
• Socialism. I guess the Affordable Care Act was socialism? I guess unemployment benefits are socialism? Where do I go for my check, guys? Let me know, because I’ll be there; but if this is a worker’s paradise, I haven’t noticed.

Things are objectively going their way, except in two regards:

• For under-educated whites, things are getting more and more expensive, while folks in tech are earning more and more. Correlation does not equal causation, but like Joey on Friends, they conclude: “Now that I think about it, I’m constantly finding myself without 20’s, while you always have lots!”
• They’re being asked — and I do mean asked — in the mildest possible terms to be respectful of others. A lot of us are being very visibly considerate, and that threatens them.

All the so-called liberals have done over the last 30+ years is try to appease them. As much as the democrats are supposedly unleashing a socialist hell, they’ve moved to the center. They embraced our culture of punishment over rehabilitation. They’ve hopped on the low taxation bandwagon. They’ve done scarcely a thing to rein in corporate hegemony. They’ve failed to put up much of a fight on guns.

Liberals are so polite and mild, all they did when confronted was apologize and get out of the way, which is the worst possible thing you can do when confronting a bully.

It’s not liberals’ fault that the conservatives are institutional assholes. That fault lies with the real assholes — the arch conservatives in the 1970’s who decided enough was enough. Assholes like Reagan and the Kochs who put action to our worst impulses. Assholes like Murdoch and Alex Jones who decided to take advantage of the end of the Fairness Doctrine and profit off of white fear.

It is, however, all our faults that it was so easy for them to pull it off. They exposed the absence of a real backbone in this country, and we need to be honest about that fact.

Societies — no different than individuals — make their non-negotiables clear. Anyone who has ever been in a relationship knows the things that will push their partner to their breaking point and which things are negotiable. Once those lines are drawn, they’re very hard, if not impossible, to re-draw. When the slow-motion conservative subversion of American democracy began after the civil rights act, we could have made it clear that we wouldn’t budge. Voting rights are non-negotiable. Individual freedom from the threat of being gunned down by an angry white man has more value than the right to bear arms, period. A cohesive society means more than broadcasters’ right to use public airwaves to sow division. The benefits of an equitable system of taxation outweigh the value of enriching an autistic dipshit who thinks we should colonize Mars or a bald sociopath who likes to help celebrities claim to be astronauts aboard his embarrassing dickship.

But no. We meekly suffered the unions to be broken and the airwaves deregulated, along with the “friendly” skies. We went along with the war chant against taxes. We did little as the 2nd amendment got twisted further and further into an absolutist statement that ignores its dependent clause.

As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the Clinton presidency was the final surrender. So-called liberals adopted harsh sentencing and corporate profits. We can have our cake and eat it, too.

Only you can’t. You have to choose what’s most important to you. The radicalized right is winning, because we have accepted their Trojan horse. Individual liberty and profit codify the supremacy of white men. Once you accept those two things as principles worthy of defending ahead of any other possible good, the game is lost.

American society has always swung back and forth between authoritarian awfulness and mainstream decency. We abandoned the constitution without much hesitation when we thought certain citizens were spies, just because they were Japanese. We dropped a couple of nuclear bombs on a city full of civilians without really pausing to consider we had committed a war crime (okay, maybe we get a pass on the first one, but when we dropped a second one…). We hounded people out of their livelihoods, just because we thought they were communists. We experimented on people of color, just because we could. We resorted to torture, when we were really scared of terrorists. We threw millions of people in jail, consigning them to the permanent underclass as felons.

We never go too, too far. We don’t do anything obviously awful. We haven’t rounded up an ethnic minority and gassed them (yet).

Will we pull back from the brink this time? I’d like to think we will — that we are still fundamentally decent at our core; but things have changed. The center is gone, and the backbone on the left is MIA.