The Replacement of Conservatism by Right-Wing Ideology

Daniel Larison has been on a roll this week, taking down everything from a broadside against the libertine founder of Girls Gone Wild to the Iraqi Civil War. But his real strength has always been religion and ideas; he does a bang-up job of showing why the new imposter ideology masquerading as conservatism has much in common with every other ideology, and that all these ideologies have in common certain inhumane and illiberal tendencies rooted in their attempt to rationalize and oversimplify reality, often ignoring facts when they contradit the theory:

If the Big Idea has failed, it has not really failed, because we are the ones who have actually failed the Idea or because some perfidious enemy has sabotaged or undermined the project (this is why highly unrealistic revolutionary ideologies always fall into the ugly habit of denouncing and killing internal enemies with alarming frequency after they have finished wiping out the external enemy–they always need someone, anyone, to blame for the fact that things are not going as they should, and so deviationist and traitorous enemies from within have to be manufactured to keep the revolution on track). If an ideology begins to fail, the ideologue will look for circumstances that explain away the apparent failure or he will attribute failure either to an abandonment of the ‘true’ ideology or an insufficiently zealous application of the ideology’s tenets. Ideas that are manifestly wrong to others are ideas that will sometimes inspire people to redouble their efforts to make these bad ideas “work.” Disillusionment may take a whole lifetime and require some truly shocking atrocity at the hands of fellow ideologues or monumental collapse on a large scale to shatter the world of delusions the conditioned people have been living in.

In the uncritical mind of an ideologue (and an entire people can come to see the world as the ideologue does and believe just as strongly as he does), there is no question that the assumptions he uses are wrong–there must always be something wrong with some part of the world, whether it is a case of counterrevolutionaries and reactionaries holding back the progress of the revolution or a misapplication of the correct assumptions by incompetents. The people, for their part, know that the fault cannot ever lie in them–they are The People, after all, not fallible human beings–so it must always be the fault of corrupt officials or leaders who have “betrayed” the ‘true’ revolution (see silly people in Ukraine complaining about the appointment of Yanukovych for an example of this).

The main point is that if an ideology or worldview gives a people sufficient meaning, purpose and strengthens their identity, they may well embrace it and interpret all their misfortunes in terms of their temporary failure to realise the ‘true’ form of that ideology. They will only grudgingly and only after great suffering give up on it all together, and even when they give up on it there will be a tendency to want to emphasise the “good” aspects of the revolution that were simply eventually outweighed by the bad, which is a whimsical sigh of regret that it did not turn out as they had hoped but that it always had potential.

This reminds me of something I wrote in 2004, “During Bush’s press conference yesterday I was struck by two things. One, in his mind the only possible failure is a failure of nerve. He does not countenance the possibility that we are going further and further down the wrong path in Iraq or in general. Two he believes these things because of his belief in the neoconservative shibboleth that democracy is identical with good government and that the whole world wants liberal democracy. Any resistance is by necessity a small clique opposed to progress. “

Ideology can make smart people stupid and stupid people think they’re smart. In the case of the former, it filters their information so that obvious and intuitive connections between things and reasonable hypotheses are abandoned in favor of elaborate explanations to fit the ideology. Consider the constant explanations that even the resulting chaos from our invastion of Iraq may be a good thing if it is never corrected . . . this after being told Iraq would be a model for the rest of the Middle East. And in the case of those who are dumber and less curious, it gives them a mantra to repeat in the case of bad news, unexpected events, or rare successes. The ideology is true, only people have failed it. Worst of all, in the case of all ideologues, the ideology can discourage rethinking one’s course and recognizing one’s setbacks. For the ideologue, like the religious fanatic, the sought-after City of Gold is just over the next mountain. Quitting now woud simply show that all one has done thus far in the name of the ideology was in vain.

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