Compassionate Conservatism: An Enigmatic Obscuration
I started out early in my life as a passionate Barry Goldwater Conservative. The word had a different meaning back then. It meant the Government stayed out of people's private lives; it meant balanced budgets; it meant trying to provide all citizens a level playing field more so than handouts, and it wreaked with rugged individualism. Back then it had a very militaristic and arrogant foreign policy. Like, if someone is in our way we bomb them back to the stone-age. With time I outgrew that adolescent foreign policy mentality and so did Barry. There was never a lot of empathy back then for the disadvantaged or diverse cultures. For the most part it was more obliviousness than mean spiritedness. Growing up I can't say myself or my friends spent any amount of time at all trashing blacks or any other minority, it was more like they didn't exist in our world. A kind of out of sight, out of mind.
Today I don't use the word conservative anymore. If it means anything it is associated with endless efforts to make certain religious beliefs the law of the land, it means massive federal deficits, it means endless military adventures all over the globe, it means endless legislation to enable the rich to get richer, it means the poor are left to wait for some kind of trickle down; it means blind patriotism, it means intolerance to diversity, it means character assassination as the main political operative, it means assembling a weird disconnected litany of hot button issues which prey upon people's prejudices and fears to win elections. Whenever any party preys upon people's prejudices, ignorance, and fears quite a mob can be assembled. Whenever around 50% of those eligible to vote are too discouraged to bother, the stage is set for those 1% who own 90% of the wealth in this country, to control all three branches of the government. They, for the most part, could care less about these hot button issues, they care about wealth and power and control. The hot button issues simply serve as the means to get and keep the power. Ethics, to these power and wealth brokers, is merely one more manipulative tool.
Recently these New Age conservatives have coined the appealing term compassionate conservative. I think it was the George Bush brain trust who coined this term. The question is, what the hell does the term mean? I know these new conservatives are certainly passionate about their own religious beliefs, their own family interests, their own heritage, their own country, their own kids, their own welfare, their own homes, etc. But does being compassionate to your own family and others who think and look just like you make anyone compassionate? That sounds more like selfishness to me.
At any rate I think the following is the most accurate definition of a compassionate conservative: A compassionate conservative is one who cares about many of the same issues as humanistic liberals but they don't do a damn thing about these issues. They really do wish urban ghettoes did not exist, but they still support the current War on Drugs which created these ghettoes. They always vote for tougher sentencing for teenage drug peddlers and those who use these drugs UNLESS it is their kid who abuses some recreational drug, in which case they want it treated as medical matter. They have zero interest in understanding why people abuse recreational drugs or spending money on prevention or treatment. Punishment is always---almost always---their solution to disagreement or conflict.
They really do see the sanctity of life, but never expend much, if any energy, on the millions upon millions of kids who die of starvation, who die from treatable diseases, who receive poor funding for their schools, for those who died needless deaths in places like Vietnam, Darfur, Iraq, and South America. They work hard to deny poor women access to abortions, thus leaving abortion a choice only for the affluent. They really do care about religion as long as it is their religious beliefs that are the law of the land. They really do pray for the poor and unfortunate and insist this must be done in public places and everyone else be forced to pray with them. They really do take marriage seriously and believe they have the right to choose who they marry but limit who others can marry. In doing this they turn the true concept of love upside down. They really do believe there is too much violence in our society but see no connection between violence and allowing citizens to arm themselves with assault weapons and even tote them around in public. They really do believe in the teachings of Christ, but if anyone hears them talk about other people, or their enthusiastic support of war adventures, you would never mistake their talk of violence and intolerance to solve conflicts with the teachings of Christ. Since when did Christ ever endorse indifference, intolerance, violence, financial greed, the hoarding of wealth via inheritance, the accumulation of any society's wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many? etc. If enough is ever enough, compassionate conservatives never give any indication of where that point is. It seems there can never be too many people on this globe---no such thing as overpopulation let alone do anything about it----no such thing as too many people killed on the killing fields---rather the solution is to surge up the killing and the level of destruction-----there is no such thing as too many military bases in too many countries (750 bases in 130 countries is always ok)---there is no such thing as too many assault guns loose in the population---there is no such thing as separation of church and state----there is no injustice about spending more on the education of children of the affluent than the children of the poor----there is no such thing as too low a minimum wage----there is no such thing as freedom to marry the person of your choice----there is no such sin as employing foreign workers as slave workers so people in this country can buy cheap---there is no such limit to how much of our GNP we spend on military hardware and adventures even when the amount is more than the amount of all the other countries in the world combined----there is no such thing as a living wage, just bottom lines----there is no such thing as an obligation for the richest country in the world to provide 40 million, and millions more soon to be, with health care----there is no such thing as drug abuse being a medical problem, just a certainty that it is a criminal act----there is no such thing as our own country being engaged in an immoral war----there is no such thing as a bad environment, just bad people----there is no such thing as any need for level playing fields, just a need to put more people in jail even though 23% of the people in jail in this world are already in American jails---there is no such thing as procedural justice for those arrested on suspicion of terrorism---there is no such thing as unethical torture of suspected terrorists, just a necessity to torture them for the frustrationl of it----there is no such thing as working with other countries on environment protection , poverty, energy, population control, or other such issues common to all of humanity, especially when Father Always Knows Best----there is no such thing as any need for inheritance taxes to return massive accumulations of wealth back into the society from which it came---there is no notion that all young people should acquire wealth the old fashioned way by earning it----there is no such obligation to put human values on par with family values----and family values are limited to immediate family----there is no obligation to spread the cost of ongoing wars all over the globe among the current population but run up the charge on the next generation by borrowing from our economic competitors----there is no need to develop alternate energy sources, just a need to drill our way out of the crisis---there is no need to close the borders because cheap goods mean cheap labor and cheap labor means huge illegal immigrant work forces----and no doubt I could go on more here, but this suffices.
The term compassionate conservative is a contradiction to itself. There is no real compassion in the absence of action. It doesn't make any difference how sorry anyone feels about the killings across the globe or any of the problems listed above if the person doesn't support actions to alleviate the problems. We can't drill ourselves out of the energy problem, we can't bomb away global conflicts, we can't escape the consequences of overpopulation, we can't stop people with nothing to lose from engaging in terrorism, we can't support some sort of American empire across the globe and also care for our own people, we can't get along with ourselves if we don't respect the rights and feelings of differing ethnic and religious groups, we can't sustain our own affluent lifestyle on the backs of the poor, we can't ever again be a united country if we refuse to share the wealth and maintain a reasonable distribution of that wealth, we can't ever have peace in the world if we insist on becoming involved in the internal politics of other sovereign nations, we can't ever reduce the mentality of violence to solve conflict when we now employ more violence and cause more deaths than any other country on the globe. We can't can't remain a world economic power if we continue to spend our money on military matters while other countries spend their money on economic issues at home. We can't foster peace across the globe and be the supplier of almost all the weapons being used in these global killing sprees.
Compassionate conservatism is a slogan, a cynical attempt to deny the essence of what conservatism has become. And no group ever yells more loudly or more often for God to Bless America. Wow. They do as they selfishly want and then tell God to bless them. Some nerve.
