Liberals and centrists need to figure out* that a significant conservative block WANTS pain and WANTS inequality and thinks that they are intrinsically good, godly, natural things and that without them the world is a worse place.
And that they are willing to harm the economy and even reduce their own absolute wealth in order to get the pain and inequality they want. (Though they plan to increase their relative wealth). After 1900 some Southern leaders knew that the steps they were taking to protect white supremacy came at the cost of continued underdevelopment, and they supported white supremacy anyway.
Beyond that, liberals and moderates need to know that some conservatives are long shot gamblers, not utility maximizers, and that they are willing to take big, rationally unjustifiable chances. Dick Cheney is a recent example. The Hunt Brothers trying to corner the precious metals market is a historic example.
*Figure of speech here. They won’t figure it out.
May 13, 2012 at 1:27 am
Centrists and moderates will, by their very nature (splitting the difference rather than turning their brains on) not figure it out.
But liberals have figured it out in the past. It leads to Earl Grey if they’re rich powerful liberals, or to the French Revolution or the February Revolution in Russia if they don’t have enough power to pull off a Reform Bill. In the US Civil War example, Lincoln was in fact a liberal (and arguably a moderate). Do not underestimate liberals; they are slow to anger, but when they get going, they don’t practice cruelty or pain, they practice total war, William Tecumseh Sherman style.
In fact, all improvement depends on waking up liberals to the behavior of the right-wingers. Thanks for doing your part.
May 14, 2012 at 1:53 pm
Just ran across this blog. Figured I’d leave a comment to encourage you to keep writing. Cranky is good!
This particular column … eh not so much. Not really buying. I’ve been around the block a bit too and from my experience hard-core conservatives really truly do not give a shit. They don’t wish to cause pain, they don’t wish to not cause pain. They really don’t care. They want theirs and the spillover costs are not summed.
Which is pretty typical, no? West Virginian voters loathe the President because he’s not fond of coal-fired electricity. Coal-fired electricity is bad for the U.S. because costs more to clean up than it generates in electricity. So the President is doing what is right for America … and is disliked by those who are happy to do what is wrong for America if it works for them.
But the West Virginians don’t wish to cause pain and pollution. They just don’t care.
May 15, 2012 at 12:24 am
John Roberts, Joe the Plumber was offended by the idea that rich people should be taxed, even though there wasn’t a nickel in it for him. Emerson gets it right: According to some, U.S. inequality is insufficient, and the lower classes ought to suffer more than they do.
It’s always been thus, but modern conservatives have innovated by convincing many that “the lower classes” include approximately 99% of the population.
May 15, 2012 at 2:22 pm
“Joe the Plumber was offended by the idea that rich people should be taxed, even though there wasn’t a nickel in it for him”
That is not the same as Joe the Plumber wishing that poor people suffer pain.
May 15, 2012 at 5:04 pm
I think sometimes you have to take the Right at its word. People who say, for instance, that the recipients of welfare, unemployment or the minimum wage have it too easy, they probably mean just that.
You want to talk about “pain”? You might want to reflect on the conservative position on torture.
I suppose on some level one could quibble with paragraph 2 of Mr. Emerson’s post. The Right has a lot of quasi-mystical beliefs about authoritarianism. If you keep the black man down, you are, almost by definition, boosting the status of the white man. Slavery suits the temperament of Africans, don’cha know. If more poor people suffer, then everyone benefits, including the poor themselves.
But that’s really a quibble. A conservative I know recently explained to me that a lot of people don’t deserve healthcare. He meant it, and he’s representative of an awful lot of people.
May 16, 2012 at 4:09 am
I don’t think you have to dig very deep to realize that for a whole lot of right-wingers, grinding economic insecurity is **desirable** for its (supposed) disciplinary effects. John Roberts is right that a lot of ordinary, sub-commissar right-wingers don’t give a shit, and are just out for Number One. (A lot of them are just obtuse, too.) But there’s no denying that there’s a central, real meanness in right-wing ideology these days.
politicalfootball — I’ve run into **many** right-wingers who are positively offended, sometimes outraged, whenever they hear about somebody getting health care on the public dime. Again, there’s a little more there than simple selfishness.
May 18, 2012 at 6:57 pm
John, I think you are thinking about inequality using the wrong measure. Although dollars are a rough measure of inequality in our society, they are not really what conservatives care about, in and of itself, even if many say that’s it.
It is quite possible to increase the aggregate of wealth in any society. Wealth is not a zero sum game — but status is always a zero sum game. Status is a measure of distance; status measures how much better I am than you. Money is just the way we keep the point total in the U.S. As G. Vidal said, “it’s not enough that I succeed; others must fail.”
The outrage comes because of what I think of as the “Bob Ewell”effect. Middle and working class conservatives can’t stand the idea that “lesser” folk might have what they have, or worse, pass them by.
June 14, 2012 at 9:07 pm
The problem here is that you left out why they want pain and inequality. Strange, because they are pretty straightforward about it.
They want pain and inequality because it will drive people back to religion. If there is no material way that secular institutions can help, then people will turn to the churches for aid. If there is more inequality and insecurity, people will be less likely (they think) to involve themselves with risky behavior that might get them fired and will be more conscientious about religious observances in order to create the right impression for their employers, their betters, and the church.
Now, needless to say, anyone who looks at how Victorian and Edwardian times actually worked knows that Ryan, Himmelfarb, and co. are completely wrong about this; desperate people behave desperately. But when they do, there’s an excuse for ignoring their fate and leaving them to it. They’re sinners, after all. That makes it easy for the deserving poor to be distinguished and the rest of the population to be damned.
Makes some sense from their perspective. The young are abandoning faith in God in droves, approval of sinful behavior (same sex marriage, act.) is increasing, and all they have to do is look to Europe to see where this may be headed. And recall that most of those countries have state supported religions; if the people begin to abandon religion here it will be in real trouble with no way out. Add in the entrepreneurial aspects of American religion – no taxes, no qualifications for many “religious”, lots of “non-sectarian” churches that are in effect very profitable small businesses – and its easy to see why they’re worried.
Let’s hope they continue to feel the pressure.
June 18, 2012 at 6:47 pm
I’m working on a piece about the reasons for the desire for pain and inequality. Part of it is the status defensiveness Corey Robin talks about. What I will specifically say is that there are at least five types of justifications: punishment for sin, social Darwinist competition (cleaning out the gene pool), economic competition (labor discipline) , hierarchy as such (sopme people just are no good), and finally just a brute love of competition and excitement, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, the kind of feeling that gamblers and duelists have.
Many individuals feel all of these motives a little bit, even though they aren’t all compatible. But if your commitment is to the outcome, pain, you can slip easily from justification to justification without even noticing what you’re doing. I think that at the root is the self-validation coming from seeing someone worse of than yourself — schadenfreude. Americans sleep into me-against-the-world attitude easily, and once you’re there, anything good happening to someone else is potentially interpretable as a harm to yourself.