I have to disagree. You are painting ALL conservatives with too wide of a brush.
So making the case ought to be easy, right?
Start with a simple question: Who?
What it means: Who will bring that platform? There are plenty of conservatives who claim to not support something their fellows are doing, but neither will they do much to stop it, and in the moment, conservatives generally tend to fall in line and dutifully complain about Democrats, liberals, feminists, and even make-believe.
Who are these
other conservatives?
Historically, the racism and sexism of our institutions precedes the Republic itself. Slavery, 1619. Hutchinson clearly won the argument, but she was a woman, so they threw her out for being uppity, 1637. Praying towns, 1645. Anti-Catholicism in Maryland, 1654. Even after the Revolution, the failed Articles of Confederation in 1781 left slavery to the states, and its successor, the Constitution, presupposed slavery within its society. The Fourteenth Amendment is what it is, but the Equal Protection Clause has always struggled against conservative opposition. The
Plessy period, for instance; the dissenting Justice was a former slave-owner, and could see the trouble "separate but equal" would bring. The fact of the the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, reminds of our persistent societal disdain shown women. Remember, the law struck in
Griswold, 1965¹, was a nineteenth-century speech constraint sponsored in the legislature by P. T. Barnum. Presently, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, having overturned
Roe in an act of calculated activism that is its own magnificent irony, eyes
Griswold.
In my own time, a basic difference in the both-sides argument about racism in American politics is that on one side it's supposed to be unwelcome, while the other side is softer about the question. Or, rather, that is obsolete; having failed to stop this, what are conservatives going to do now that the rightists, supposedly extremist, are in charge? That is, other than dutifully lining up to complain about Democrats, liberals, women, people of color, schoolteachers, doctors and nurses, homosexuals, transgender, Aunty Phở, workers, migrants, imaginary radical leftists, imaginary child traffickers, and even actual windmills?
Remember, the Democratic Party has never been especially liberal; it's all of twelve years between the '68 convention and the Reagan experience, and in my time it has been all Democratic voters can do to hold the line against the sort of catastrophe that prevailed in the Trump presidency. Tough-on-crime, bawling about welfare queens, supremacism² as equality, and a story of increasing, self-inflicted alienation literally leading the Republican Party to insurrection.
It's a difficult part of the story to explain, but the whole time, there were so many people who weren't this or that supremacist, but they would wag on cue and moralize about liberal elitism, and pretend it was a reason to vote not so much for Republicans they otherwise supported, but against Democrats.
Think of politics around jobs and economy, or tax reform. And then think about the number of conservatives who vote for Republicans who will steer those reforms toward corporations and the one percent because something about birth control, homosexuals, or other moral crises threatening the nation. Where are these other conservatives to stop the widespread censorship in conservative-governed public schools? If this is like any other year, the answer is that they appreciate and desire the political momentum and impetus of authority these supremacist crackpots bring the party and movement. As it has been, now, for several years at least, the only difference between this and older conservatism is how simplistically and superficially it is being expressed, even boasted. An interesting contrast in recent years is the idea that William F. Buckley Jr. would somehow be distressed by what conservatism has become, but if we consider what the proposition means, the actual point that would trouble him is the lack of subtlety.
There is in that aspect of conservatism the value of good men doing nothing; the underlying conservative pretense concedes certain ways of the world and then calculates to operate within and even exploit those constraints. This question of a place for everything and everything in its place runs back at least to Aristotle, and if we might in historical rumination agree that Catholics made a living mess of it, and Anselm's desperate assertion of proof in order to justify faith ought to be laughable, but there is also Weber, on the Protestant ethic in the history and evolution of capitalism. Fast-forward: We ought not be surprised to find economic applications of stable hierarchies and fixed stratification popular in the pro-business politic. Compared to
Wilde's↱ argument that the "proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible", the requisite poverty of capitalism and the aesthetic priorities by which it is allocated really do stand out as both craven and arbitrary.
I could try to tell you a long, messy story about a Jesse Jackson speech in '82, and what it cost the Democratic Party to achieve that appearance sometime around 2014, which in turn was only pretty much everything else. The punch line is that over the decade after Jackon's speech, the good Rev won on points, but the DLC and Bill Clinton won on votes. There are reasons why it took thirty years, and reasons why the other route took ten.
A basic formulation: Consider, a generic corpus of
tradition. From this, a person raised in a society will inherently learn a
prevailing narrative, an underlying story against which other stories are compared. Appeals to change, that is,
deviation from tradition, raise a particular sort of
uncertainty, which is a
mystery of unknown future resolutions. It is easy to
fear the uncertainties of
unexplored futures; it is a
fear of the unknown.
But what happens, then, if the comfort of familiarity includes the sins of the traditional corpus? Think of the 2008 election cycle; no matter how angry we were supposed to be at a Black preacher saying, "God damn America", our society just couldn't muster the same sort of outrage about the white vice-presidential candidate's white preacher angrily warning that God will reach out his hand against America. See, the difference is that the one was a Black guy lamenting the cruelty of our society; the other was a white guy complaining that our society was not cruel enough.
It's not that so many people intend to be cruel, but that they cannot countenance the cruelty of their familiarity. Still, though, the cruelty had long been problematic; it's just that after so long, with all the façades and pretenses and excuses worn through, conservatives are pretty much coming right out and saying it.
Consider a simpler example, something we can draw from our own community history: What is the value of rational discourse? There is a principle of sorts that eschews basic standards of rational discourse as some tool of oppression, as if certain political viewpoints would be utterly censored and silenced if they were somehow obliged to make sense. Maybe it's easy enough to wag at fortean crackpottery or one's favorite religion, but one part of our experience that is not unlike the American tale is when people make excuses for particular, familiar brands of infamy and dysfunction because they would somehow feel badly³ if they didn't.
It's easy enough to
say↑ a great many Republicans do not want sexism and racism promulgated, but they're clearly not winning their internecene partisan argument, and are inclined to accept and even enjoy the influence, prestige, and authority the supremacists bring. After witnessing the reluctantly indulgent in so many iterations over the course of decades, it might start to seem those many Republicans do not want to see sexism and racism
promulgated, but are kind of okay with the actual sexism and racism. That would make more sense than continuing to pretend they still don't get it. Those great many Republicans have had
decades, even
generations to correct course; at this point, only a fool would pretend surprise they have not. Trumpism, as such,
is a brand experience↗, and the underlying product it is and represents existed before, and will continue in the marketplace.
As a question of broad brushes, fine, there was this one time, in Oregon, when the Republican Party dissolved in order to evade the machinations of Christian nationalists. It was more about appearances, of course, and didn't add up to much, in the end, but at least they tried.
____________________
Notes:
¹ Historical note, file under pub trivia: Justice John Harlan dissented in Plessy v. Ferguson. His grandson, Justice John Harlan II, appointed to the Supreme Court the year after the Plessy decision fell, would write a powerful concurrence in Griswold, believing the majority opinion historically and procedurally insecure, i.e., the Court did not go far enough to secure free speech. The doctrinal subtlety of the difference continues to haunt American society and governance.
² i.e., nonreciprocal authority, an advantageous position of inequality, superior protection under law, supremacy
³ i.e., powerless, remiss, derelict, guilty
Wilde, Oscar. "The Soul of Man Under Socialism". 1891. Marxists.org. 20 August 2022. http://bit.ly/1JdDOaw
