Progressive’s Views of Conservatives (2)

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What is it about conservatives that makes at least some progressives want to incarcerate them and otherwise remove them from any influence on society? I can understand how progressives want to win political arguments and to get elected instead of conservatives. Yet the progressives’ reaction to conservatives is something far more rabid, as if a conservative’s beliefs could contaminate the very air we breathe and the water we drink. In fact that is one claim I am absolutely sure many progressives would make. What is it about conservatives’ convictions progressives find so threatening?

Some progressives would say conservatives are not willing to change society in the directions it must go; that they are too resistant to change. However, that is not quite correct. Conservatives are not exclusively about resistance to societal change, no more than progressives have no desire to conserve some features of society. There may have been a time in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when such a characterization might have been correct. (This assumes you accept the mapping of progressive to leftist, as the term ‘progressive’ in a political sense was first used in the late eighteenth century.) In what follows I am going to use the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ to be synonymous with American progressives and American conservatives respectively. Since the times of first definition of the political Left and and political Right, the meaning of these terms has changed vastly. Over the last several centuries great changes have been made, adopting and abandoning different approaches to solving human problems. Therefore, receptiveness or resistance to change can not be used to define any political frame-of-mind, movement, or political party coherently. Everyone wants to conserve some things and change others. What varies between political and philosophical groups are exactly which things should be changed and which should be conserved. For example, I as a conservative want very much to conserve a free-market, capitalist economy as much as possible, but I also very much desire to change the way in which government intrudes into our lives. You as a liberal may desire to conserve the powers of government to address social problems, but be passionate about changing (i.e. lessening) the powers of corporations.

If there is one factor of society on which Left and Right take diametrically opposite sides, it is the amount and power of government. In general, the Left wants more and the Right wants less. This observation points to the reason for the progressives’ antipathy toward conservatives, and the somewhat lessor animus of the Right for the Left. As we discussed in the posts Progressives’ Basic Assumptions and The Complexity of Reality, progressives feel that without a great escalation of state power, wielded by themselves of course, the causes of human misery can neither be eliminated nor ameliorated. The conservatives form a threatening road block to human progress, in the view of progressives, because they wish to minimize government power to the greatest degree possible. The definition of ‘possible’ in this case determines how far right a particular conservative is. The conservative  farthest to the right would be an anarchist. Similar kinds of remarks can be made about progressives.

Every time a conservative opposes some power or program for government, a natural reaction on the part of a progressive is that the conservative is against whomever or whatever would benefit – or at least whomever is being targeted as the beneficiary. If a conservative opposes a welfare program, he is heartless or a racist. If the conservative opposes the federal government granting same-sex marriage, he is a homophobe. Opposed to the state financing abortions or birth-control? The conservative is a misogynist! Never mentioned is the possibility the conservative opposes these government programs for other reasons.

Whenever conservatives oppose progressive schemes effectively for a long period of time, the progressives are driven to despair, as one would naturally expect. Desperation tends to drive people to desperate measures, as we have seen with the IRS scandal and the Wisconsin prosecutors. When Barack Obama first assumed the Presidency, the Democrats held both houses of Congress. They had every right to believe their progressive movement had turned a corner and they were on the verge of completely transforming the nation. Now, almost seven years later, they have lost both congressional houses back to the Republicans, their only major accomplishment, Obamacare, is being increasingly opposed by the American electorate, Obama himself is reviled as an inveterate liar and a weakling in foreign affairs, and their one major candidate (excluding the democratic-socialist Bernie Sanders) is facing a felony indictment for mishandling classified documents. They now have every reason to feel a great deal of despair.

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