Some interesting articles

Here are a couple of interesting articles I've come across in the past few days. The first is one by Fareed Zakaria entitled How Today's Conservatism Lost Touch With Reality. The criticism of today's conservatives is completely accurate, and many have noted how even in the Reagan era ideas such as taxes can never be raised under any conditions (even when they are already low and the country has a huge debt) were not standard among conservatives. Reagan himself raised taxes more than once, and I have already cited his budget director David Stockman's scathing criticism of this mentality. In comparison with today's leading right wing politicians and talking heads, the conservatives of previous generations do seem more rational. That's not to say that I agree with George Will, or with a number of the other assertions in the first part of the piece.

For one thing, while I agree with the criticism of Marxism as not being well grounded in reality (as I noted in my recent post which discussed The Communist Manifesto, among other books), not all aspects of traditional conservatism were firmly grounded in reality (for instance, as I mentioned in the same post, the capitalist economic theory regarding international trade). Furthermore, liberalism (as opposed to Marxism) can and often is fairly well grounded in reality. Certainly I and many other sensible liberals would agree that "to change societies, one must understand them...and help them evolve" (though we would disagree about "accept[ing] them as they are". Also, most conservatives, whether now or in the past, have not really been interested in changing society or helping it evolve. They want it to stay the same, or go back to some mythical golden age.

For that matter, George Will himself, while fairly intelligent and rational (certainly when compared to people like Limbaugh, Beck and Palin), has made assertions that were not very well grounded in the real world, such as in a recent column where he criticized Obama for not knowing history by picking on a few misstatements (yes, Obama's statement on Texas was incorrect, but the southern Democrats of four decades ago were essentially the same as the Republicans of today), but himself displayed a rather simplistic and misleading view of history. He seemed to imply that getting rid of or weakening programs like Social Security or Medicare would simply return the US to the conditions that existed before the New Deal -- as if the country had not changed in any other ways. Obama was completely right to say that Ryan's budget proposal would lead to an America that would be "fundamentally different than what we've known throughout our history", because even aside from the existence of programs like those Ryan wants to kill, America is a fundamentally different place from what it was 80 years ago. It's a country of close to 300 million people rather than 120 million, it's urban rather than rural, it's closely tied to a global system rather than being isolationist, it's far more ethnically and culturally diverse, and its communications are dominated by television and the Internet rather than radio and letters. It is also a place in which a lack of a safety net would mean even more suffering than was the case in the pre-New Deal days, and one in which (I would hope) people would be far less content to see others suffer, as many did before those social programs existed (not that they eliminated all suffering -- far from it -- but they did alleviate much of it for the most vulnerable segments of the population). While Will's view of history as given in his column lacks the blatant inaccuracies of people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, it does share with them a rather myopic view that refuses to acknowledge that things have changed a great deal in America and the world since the early 20th century, and it is impossible to go back, even if we wanted to (I sure wouldn't).

There was a time, back when I was young and ignorant, that I would have agreed with Will's statement about conservatism being true. When I was in secondary school, I considered myself a conservative. Even then though, when I read about modern European and American history, I noticed how at virtually every point in the past, I agreed with the liberals. It was the liberals who wanted religious tolerance, an end to absolute monarchies, the abolition of slavery, labor laws, the breaking up of monopolies, women's suffrage, and civil rights. My assumption at the time was that modern liberals were simply trying to push things too far, as if we'd reached an ideal society and it should be kept the way it was. Of course later I learned that there were still many problems and inequalities, and more importantly I learned to empathize better with the situations faced by more disadvantaged people. This didn't mean given up rationality, or coming to insist on any particular means for solving all these problems. For instance, where properly regulated private enterprise is more efficient than government (and there are many areas where that is the case), I am in favor of it. The purpose is to create an open, tolerant equable society where all people have their basic needs met. George Will's brand of conservatism won't do that, and the completely irrational brand of conservatism Zakaria criticizes certainly will not do so.

Speaking of issues where leading conservatives are not only irrational but even downright immoral in their treatment of hardworking, innocent people, the New York Times Sunday Magazine recently published a long article by Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, about how he came to the US from the Philippines at the age of 12 as an undocumented immigrant (i.e., an illegal immigrant) and has lived under the shadow of possible discovery and deportation since. This is exactly the kind of person who the US should want to have here, and the kind who the Dream Act would help. And yet the right wing not only prevented its passage, but continues to demonize all illegal immigrants as criminals no better than murderers and thieves. While there is little hope for the unrepentantly racist and hardhearted among the anti-immigrant crowd, perhaps a few of the relatively open-minded ones could learn something from Vargas's story, or a recent film called A Better Life.