Is the Fake Essential to Conservatism?

Welcome friends!

I was reading an article the other day on the peculiar fake science American conservatives in the supremely southern state of Alabama employed recently when explaining their new anti-abortion bill.  It occurred to me conservatives and Republicans here in the USA are famous for espousing fake science in a variety of contexts including human sexuality and the climate to take two random examples.  And it’s not just science.  Our current conservative Republican president is famous for fakery in the form of stretching the truth, making things up, and basically just lying his backside off every chance he gets.  We have a vast conservative “infotainment” industry devoted to peddling fake news to a clientele with an apparently insatiable appetite for fakery.  So what is it with conservatives and fakery anyway?  Why do they love it so much or at least not seem bothered by it at all?  I’m starting to realize the conservative commitment to the unreal may be greater than I had  previously appreciated.  Indeed, they may see accepting convenient falsehoods as the fundamental and necessary basis of human society.  How did I arrive at that conclusion?  Well, that’s a funny story.

I had submitted one of my usual humble comments to the aforementioned article in which I suggested a love of fake science was central to conservatism and likely began with their fascination with the Queen of Fake Science, that fetid stew of hidden and mis-stated value premises, mathematical proofs of the obvious and unremarkable, and clueless amateur philosopher gobbledygook that is neoclassical economic theory and in particular the so-called welfare economics component of that theory.  I suggested conservatives are committed to fake science the way they’re committed to fake news and alternative facts, and that it was likely because for conservatives words are always just a means to an end, a cheap attempt to manipulate other people through rhetoric and salesmanship.  They never employ nor expect to employ words in an honest discussion of any value or issue.

In a short while a reply or really a riposte appeared from some fellow (I assume) rather drolly named Will Yum arguing what humanists like me fake is a “rationale for values” beyond the faith-based one.  (A very typical rhetorical device for conservatives over the past several years has been to not bother denying or addressing criticisms but to simply lob the same criticism back in an attempt to establish what usually turns out to be a false equivalence.  In this case Mr. Yum didn’t bother disputing the claim conservatives rely on fakery but predictably sought to establish humanists also rely on fakery thus apparently eliminating the problem in the us against them world of the conservative info warrior.)  According to Mr. Yum’s comment “a totally materialistic and naturalistic universe doesn’t provide any moral guidance at all,” with the unfortunate consequence a regime like Nazi Germany for example could not be “shown to be evil.”  This feat in Mr. Yum’s estimation can only be accomplished if one believes in “transcendent values,” which he suggested cannot possibly exist in a naturalistic universe.  

I responded of course that I found his way of thinking somewhat peculiar and delivered the usual humanist response.  I suggested the ultimate rationale for human values must be human emotion and reason.  While I understood his desire to demonstrate Nazi Germany to have been evil in some absolute and indisputable way I suggested making things up to arrive at that result really only gives one the illusion of getting where one wants to go.  It doesn’t really get one there.  I argued we should face the world as it is, not as how we would like it to be.  We may believe Nazi Germany was evil but the old Nazis clearly did not.  That was the whole problem.  We did not share certain values and emotions we each found important.  That’s why we had to fight it out, because we had no other way to connect with one another and work it out peacefully.  I suggested unfortunately that is what sometimes happens.  That’s the way the world works.  I did concede it would be nice if we could do a little science experiment or bit of math or logic or look deep into our collective conscience or whatever and get an answer we must all necessarily accept, but I pointed out that’s not how values and ethics actually work.  I disputed the idea we shouldn’t support our own values unless we can show those values to have some superhuman validity or origin, that is, unless they’re something they’re really not, as just not really making a whole lot of sense.  I urged Mr.Yum not to fake his or her way through life but to be real and face life.  And there the exchange ended, except for a little coda in which Mr. Yum characterized my reply as breathtaking in its honesty but “utterly revealing of the vapidness of the revealed worldview,” to which I responded I was sorry he found reality so vapid, I hoped he would continue trying to make life more interesting for himself by making things up if he felt so inclined, but I thought it unreasonable of him to expect other people, particularly those seeking honesty and the truth, to join him there.  After that the line as they say went dead.

But you know the larger issue for me was how did we get from fake science to fake religion and fake ethics anyway?  It’s a funny sort of segue, although when I thought about it a bit I did seem to remember hearing a somewhat similar argument from some religious conservatives to the effect that if religion were not true we’d still have to pretend it is in order to have some basis for ethical reasoning.  It occurred to me although Mr. Yum didn’t explicitly say so and indeed was ostensibly interested in establishing just the opposite, that non-religious people pretend to have a basis for ethics when they really don’t, perhaps the comment was in the order of a Freudian slip.  Perhaps he was alluding in some way to the argument about the supposed necessity of religion.  Perhaps what got him thinking about religion was the suspicion the conservative attachment to convenient fakery started not with the Queen of Fake Science, economics, as I had suggested but with religion and hence in their view the foundation of ethics.  In a sense I wondered if he meant the conservative attachment or at least acceptance of convenient fakery was integral to their theory of the formation and continuation of human society.  I mean, it would explain a lot wouldn’t it?  Coming from that perspective, with society based on the Greatest Convenient Lie Every Told, who would bat an eye at the sort of falsehood and fakery we see in politics and economics?  Could conservatism really be such a sad and inhuman creed?  Could it really be eternally committed to the false and unreal?  From what I’ve seen of it I think so.  All the more reason for those who believe in the power of human reason and the truth to fight the anti-intellectual, anti-democratic, and indeed anti-social doctrine of conservatism.  Vincit omnia veritas.  

References

Conservatives’ junk science is having real consequences.  Dana Milbank.  May 17, 2019.  The Washington Post.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/our-states-are-laboratories--run-right-now-by-mad-scientists/2019/05/17/94da1a72-78aa-11e9-bd25-c989555e7766_story.html?utm_term=.b5f86bd3146f

American Conservatives and Republicans Not Big Believers In Democracy

Welcome friends!

Looks like I’ve focused on the religious head of the multi-headed monster of contemporary conservatism the last couple of times out so maybe this time I’ll take another swipe at the economic head.  You may recall one of the themes I’ve returned to time and time again is the inherent conflict between the increasingly concentrated economic power structure generated by our current formulation of a market system and our at least theoretically broader based democratic political power structure and how economic conservatives are basically big on the former but not the latter, that is to say, they tend to be all for rich folk being able to exercise their economic power but generally suspicious or downright aghast at the prospect of poor folk being able to exercise their democratic political power.  (See my post Democracy and Leftism, March 21, 2019, for a recent discussion of that issue.)  Shouldn’t come as a big surprise to anyone given that Americans, predominantly conservatives, have recently elected corrupt billionaire Donald Trump to the White House with the mandate he shrink the power of democratic government and expand the power of wealthy folk such as CEOs, stock brokers, bankers, and of course the hereditarily wealthy class.  I’ve expressed this a number of times in rather blunt terms by suggesting American conservatives have become ever more forthright in their disdain for or sometimes intense hatred of political democracy.  The conservatives’ great champion, President Trump, is famous for attacking our democratic political institutions, attempting to obstruct justice, attacking the free press, making “jokes” about becoming president for life, and openly admiring or as he says “falling in love” with anti-democratic despots all across the globe.  However, my vote for the most conclusive example of contemporary American conservatism’s antipathy toward political democracy would have to be President Trump’s recent nominee for the Federal Reserve Board, a conservative gasbag named Stephen Moore who formerly worked for the Wall Street Journal (of course) and CNN (rather surprisingly) and currently works at a so-called conservative “think tank” called the Heritage Foundation (of course).

According to the CNN story on his nomination Mr. Moore has said repeatedly he believes “capitalism” rather more important than political democracy.  (I’m putting the quotes around the word “capitalism” because as I’ve explained a number of times in the past I view the word sufficiently ill-defined that it has no place in serious economic thinking or writing and belongs only to the field of political rhetoric.  All modern democracies including the USA in particular have had primarily market based economies with government regulation and intervention for some time and all reasonable debate for years has been about the level and type of government involvement, an issue which the notion of “capitalism” leaves entirely unaddressed and hence open to subjective interpretation.  Indeed, according to conservative pundits we’ve ended “capitalism” in favor of “socialism” any number of times in this country in the past through such unmitigated horrors as the income tax, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, minimum wage laws, etc., and yet miraculously it seems always available to be destroyed anew by whatever social policy may be on the table.)  He clarified his views on the relative importance and validity of the economic power structure and political power structure in an interview for Michael Moore’s 2009 file “Capitalism: A Love Story” by saying, “I’m not even a big believer in democracy.”  Of course, it must be noted he later presented his views rather differently by basically punting on the issue and saying, “I believe in free market capitalism and representative government.”  Assuming he wasn’t playing games with the phrase “representative government” and accepts it equates to political democracy one suspects he may have submitted to that much feared social force conservatives call “political correctness,” which ostensibly requires them to lie about their true values to avoid censure by other people.  Or maybe he just doesn’t really have any strong views on the subject and flip flops this way and that like the proverbial silk hanky of legend.  Conservatives do have a reputation in this country for simple mindedness.  

If you review the rest of Mr. Moore’s sophomoric economic stylings you’ll understand the basis of his love for “capitalism” and his possibly on again off again hatred of political democracy.  Basically, he’s an advocate of the hoary notion that an ill-defined unregulated “free market” or, yes, “capitalism,” is a panacea for all of society’s ills and in particular does away with any distributional concerns one might have.  As such he appears to have spent a good deal of time and effort on the standard litany of complaints economic conservatives have with “activist” government “interfering” with the “free market” by addressing market failures and distributional concerns.  So for example, he has questioned the existence of the Department of Labor, Energy, and Commerce; the IRS; the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau; the Department of Housing and Urban Development; and the Department of Education.  He has suggested eliminating Social Security, Medicaid, minimum wage laws, and personal as well as corporate taxes.  Of course, along with this standard conservative claptrap he’s also had a few ideas that must be classified as a bit odd even for conservatives.  In 2015 for example he advocated abolishing the Federal Reserve and returning to the gold standard although since that time he’s apparently thought it through again and now reports he doesn’t support that.  So let’s give the man the benefit of the doubt and set that one aside.  The point is that in general Mr. Moore can be taken as a fairly standard representative of the common economic conservative themes of free markets as miraculous and ethically infallible panaceas and the importance of shrinking the role of democratic government.  As such his views relating to not being a big believer in democracy, despite being half-heartedly and rather unconvincingly walked back later, is a very good example of the way in which mainstream conservatives tend to favor the concentrated economic power derived from the market however construed over the theoretically at least much broader based and more egalitarian political power derived from voting power in a political democracy.

Some articles have suggested Mr. Moore might not end up on the Fed after all although interestingly not because of his clear animus toward political democracy, which supports my contention that that view is now accepted as perfectly representative of the conservative viewpoint, but because of some combination of the typical social conservative mix of racism and sexism in some of his previous commentary.  Well, that plus plain old economic incompetence. As an example of what some people probably fear in that area Paul Waldman, opinion writer for the Washington Post, suggested Mr. Moore has the curious tendency whenever a Republican is in office to view the economy at risk of deflation and needing the Fed to give it a little boost and whenever a Democrat is in office to view the economy at risk of hyperinflation and needing the Fed to slow things down a bit.  That pressure to use the Fed for short term political gain is of course why we have an independent Fed in the first place, although given Mr. Moore’s apparent inability to grasp the rationale for a great many other government programs and institutions, and given his waffling on the legitimacy and necessity of the Fed itself, one would hardly expect him to appreciate the point.  On the other hand Mr. Moore’s views are perfectly consistent with Mr. Trump’s own views on the Fed, which led one former chair of the Fed, Janet Yellen, to suggest Mr. Trump doesn’t really understand national economics and the role of the Fed.  Ironic of course because in the minds of economic conservatives and the relatively educated part of the conservative Republican base the laughably simplistic claptrap expressed by Mr. Moore is evidence of their ostensibly superior grasp of economics.  The relatively less educated part of the conservative base of course doesn’t even understand the simplistic claptrap instead attributing to Mr. Trump a superior knowledge of economics because he’s rich and at least poses as a successful businessman.

Lest there be any confusion on this issue in the future let me explain that for many decades now conservative thinkers have been espousing a simplistic and really just flat out incorrect interpretation of economic theory that implies something called “the free market” necessarily runs to or approximates a perfectly competitive market structure, that fails to acknowledge other market structures or market failures, and that fails to acknowledge the distributional issues that must be addressed and are addressed but lie entirely outside the scope of economic theory.  That rhetorical nonsense has led them to excoriate democratic government as a dire threat that unscrupulous people in the form of the voting public can use to “interfere” with the black box panacea of “the free market.” As a result we now have a president, very popular with conservatives indeed, who clearly questions the fundamental basis of political democracy, openly admires foreign anti-democratic despots, and nominates to top government posts people like Mr. Moore who state flatly they’re not big believers in political democracy.  After many years fretting about the threat of anti-democratic authoritarian communism and other foreign enemies it seems the true threat to American democracy is the intellectually vacuous and amoral rot of conservative ideology.

Addendum:

Mr. Moore announced today he has withdrawn his name from consideration to sit on the Fed.  Apparently and rather surprisingly some Senate Republicans took issue with some of Mr. Moore’s more sexist and racist statements, although I see no indication his views on political democracy or the role of the Fed played any role.  I guess one might say we dodged a bullet that time, but of course one presumes conservative Republicans have a great stockpile of bullets beyond just this one man.  We’re not out of the woods yet.  Not by a long shot.

References

Trump’s Fed pick Stephen Moore is a self-described ‘radical’ who said he’s not a ‘big believe in democracy.’  Andrew Kaczynski and Paul LeBlanc.  April 13, 2019.  CNN.  https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/12/politics/stephen-moore-kfile/index.html

The Stephen Moor farce reveals the depths of GOP cynicism.  Paul Waldman.  May 1, 2019.  The Washington Post.    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/01/stephen-moore-farce-reveals-depths-gop-cynicism/?utm_term=.f1387e55c33a.

Trump doesn’t understand economics, says former Fed chair Janet Yellen.   February 26, 2019.  BBC.  https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47369123

Stephen Moore, Trump’s Federal Reserve choice, bows out amid scrutiny of past remarks about women, other topics.  Felicia Sonmez and Damian Paletta.  May 2, 2019.  The Washington Post.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/stephen-moore-trumps-choice-for-federal-reserve-seat-bows-out-amid-scrutiny-of-past-remarks-about-women-other-topics/2019/05/02/0eb33cba-6c45-11e9-a66d-a82d3f3d96d5_story.html?utm_term=.013d98865a47