Let us, for the sake of argument, imagine that human history has been a game of tug-a-war between progressives and conservatives at work in the creation of an idea which we call history. The progressives would have been those talking their fellow primates down from the trees. Teaching the rest of the hunter-gatherer tribe to cultivate crops in a time of diminishing game. And overthrowing any despots who rose up among them.
The conservatives, we might imagine, would be those who insisted that peace with a hungry pride of lions was not going to work, or who helped their tribe prevail against another pushing for anarchy. And the conservatives would be the ones who kept the spears sharp so they did not starve when the crops failed.
Given this narrative, it is understandable that the current fashion is to applaud the balance of the conservative and the progressive in society, and to opine that it is perhaps for the best that we have both types in our society, as surely the balance between the two is the golden mean, like the brake pedal and the accelerator which are both needed to keep the bus of state from crashing through the guardrails of history and plummeting down the cliff of darwinian unfitness.
That may well be the case, though it is a leap of faith. Just as it is a leap to claim that the conservatives are nothing but a hindrance, that the bus doesn’t need a brake. But either way, the valid follow-up question to ask is, does the brake have to be applied with the same force and frequency as the accelerator?
For the fact is that the conservative plays an outsized role in hindering human happiness throughout the course of every culture as it evolves from the poor to wealthy. Indeed, it is a tautology that every civilization’s rulers evolve from autocrat to oligarch to kleptocrat. They winnow their own ruling ranks to a smaller and smaller minority, and still strip an increasingly onerous share of the wealth from the population. When these oligarchs--warlords, nobility, emperors, or party leaders, the titles matter not--exceed some tipping point, it is by definition the progressives who lead the yoked masses into revolt, and the conservatives who, by definition, continue to support them.
Let us consider for a brief moment the three different means by which the oligarchs cling to power: compulsion, corruption, and confusion.
Compulsion
When the grip on power is primarily through violence. The reign only lasts until the leader or one of his heirs slips up, and is overthrown by a popular plurality.
Corruption
Maintaining power by co-opting certain leaders within the peasantry, rather than the more expensive and tenuous means of violence. Though this is an unstable arrangement, and inevitably ends in an uprising of unanimous opposition.
Confusion
The most sophisticated means of maintaining an oligarchy. This method requires propaganda: obfuscation and lies. Historically, the propaganda comes as either a heaven or a utopia. The former celebrates the noble sacrifice of the masses and promises them their rewards in some fictional afterlife. There may be 72 virgins, or a reincarnation to a higher being, or a promised seat at the right hand of the divinity. To an outsider, it is surprising how effective these fictions work as a very real force among the credulous populace.
In contrast, the Utopian oligarchs do not invoke a supernatural power, but rather some Camelot, some Bolshevik Dream where premier and serf will one day be brothers. As with the heaven myth, an outside will laugh at how the population was duped by a dream so implausible.
Though the Utopian and the Heavenly confusion take opposite promises of Eden now or Eden later, they both share the common trait that they are carried out of necessity by a faction of the society which we identify as the conservative, and are opposed by the opposing faction, the progressive.
It is worth taking pains to note that, after the revolution, the conservative faction may actively try to restore power to the deposed autocrat. This is a feature not enjoyed by those who rule by compulsion or corruption.
Progressive versus Conservative
Webster’s defines conservatism as “a political philosophy based on tradition and social stability, stressing established institutions, and preferring gradual development to abrupt change.” They define a progressive as “one believing in moderate political change, and especially social improvement by government action.” So the progressive and the conservative hold opposing views about whether society can be legislated into improvement.
The Liberal: An Aside
Let’s eliminate any possible confusion between a “liberal” and a “progressive.” A liberal, by definition, is a person with a free mind--libera mentis--not wedded to the status quo. When the status quo works better for the whole society than what the progressive advocates, then the liberal and conservative will agree in opposing the progressive. An obvious example from the past century is the repeal of prohibition. A current example would be the hue by some radical progressives to defund the police, a cause not taken up by most liberals.
In this definition, a “liberal” is an undeniably good thing, apolitical and uncontroversial to any but the cultist who resents freedom of thought.
Modern Conservatism
By definition, the modern conservative believes that society has already reached--or gone beyond--the optimal society. Things are just fine right now, or things were better back in some golden age, but they will definitely not be improved by authorizing the government to impose some do-gooder’s will on us.
Consider the decreasing number of people in the US who own an increasingly greater share of all wealth--the tautology mentioned earlier. The progressive aims to reverse this trend, which unchecked will turn our country into a feudal state of autocrats and serfs. It is, of course, true that there will always be certain people through luck or hard work who get wealthy faster than the general populace. This only becomes a societal ill when the consolidation of wealth occurs out of all proportion to the value of the autocrats. And the US is indisputably at that point now. For example, most of the wealth of the Walmart enterprise goes to the Walton family, and yet they do not contribute even a tiny fraction of the value of their minimum-wage, benefit-deprived employees. The intelligent observer--the liberal--cannot view this situation as optimal, and so is constrained to agree with the progressive that reform is needed. The conservative will disagree, with some noise about heirs’ rights and dark imprecations against communism. He will attempt to convince everyone that an iceberg is a cloudbank, and hope the ship of state can steam right through it. But reality is apolitical: in a hundred years, our heirs will be paddling around in tiny lifeboats and wondering what the hell we were thinking.
Or consider the current status quo of reduced opportunities for women and minorities: the conservative take is that any attempt to improve this disparity by political will is likely to make things worse for the population as a whole. The progressive take is that this can and should be fixed. And a liberal will freely consider both arguments and side with the one he finds most compelling.
The same with education, the environment, and so on: the progressive wants to fix what he considers broken, the conservative wants to preserve what he considers optimal, and the liberal considers both sides of each argument and makes the most reasoned, most intelligent, decision based on his unprejudiced view.
So how did it happen that conservatives in the modern US chose to demonize their opponents with the epithet of “liberal”? For he has accused his enemy of being less prejudiced and more clear-minded than himself!
The answer is exactly as bad as you might think. Defective cogitation.
1. Compromised Intelligence
The hallmark of the conservative is that he believes in the irrational myths of the priests and/or the ideologues. By teaching him an absurd lie before he is old enough to defend his own brain against the attack, they have planted a virus of irrationality. Thus, grown men can believe the impossible fable of a crucified Jew who is magically resurrected and will be coming back... any day now. Even though it's been 2,000 years. Or that social democracy, the preferred system for the hundreds of millions of people in the most prosperous countries in the world, is somehow worse than the cold amorality of raw capitalism.
Once the first virus of irrtionality within the conservative is installed, it is much easier for authorities to short-circuit rational thinking at will: the Han people are inferior. Jews are trying to rule the world. A coup in some distant country will save its people from Communism.
Indeed, the authorities can choose exactly the opposite line and the conservatives will believe that, too--it’s all fiction anyway: The Han are the master race. Communism is the only salvation for the masses. The Jews are the chosen people.
Another symptom of a conservative’s compromised intelligence may occur when he recognizes the validity of a solution pushed by progressives, but doesn’t care because the end of the world is coming. Who needs to improve on society if the chosen will be raptured into Paradise, anyway?
2. Empathy Deficit
Not all conservatives have a deficit in intelligence. Some, perhaps smart enough to know better, nonetheless chose conservatism out of an inability to empathize with the less fortunate.
There are many well-known instances of a conservative politician who has railed against the immorality of sex outside of a marriage until the day he was found out in his extramarital affair. Or outed as gay. Then his years of preaching bigotry and intolerance are bookended by tearful pleas for forgiveness.
When a conservative suddenly discovers she is in the very population that she has been preaching against, she can either double down on the hatred and intolerance and claim to be reformed, or she can grow from the experience. If she learns to see the cruelty of her intolerance, then the tendrils of a newly liberal mind can emerge from the cracked facade of her ideology, and she can learn empathy. The anti-discrimination laws she has fought against for her whole career finally begin to make sense to her, though not for her furious ex-followers.
And yet, if exposure to empathy is all that an intelligent conservative needs in order to see the error of her ways, then why are there still so many who are unreformed? It is because they haven’t broken through the bubble of their dogma. They’ve never been to a public-health clinic and talked to the very people who pure capitalism is neglecting. They won’t go to the border and meet any real-life refugee to learn what conditions he is escaping. And when they do look into an inner-city ghetto, they are blinded by their dogma to do no more than look down upon them. For the enemy of empathy is antipathy.
3. A Poverty of Vision
Are there any conservatives in the contemporary US who are neither feeble-minded nor heard-hearted? Yes, there is one other group of adherents to backwardness and prejudice; those so-called “objectivists” who, from a defective understanding, believe that everyone is the sole captain of their successes.
In the world-view of their libertarian arrogance, the best of all possible worlds is meritocracy which rewards only those people who have inherently successful qualities. The diligent and the smart get to rake in all that they can, and damn the rest. Any government attempts to level the playing field, or help the downtrodden, is wrong-headed because it subsidizes incompetence.
People of this mindset believe that those who earn a low wage are responsible for their poverty because they are stupid or lazy. Even if they work for sixty hours a week, even if they grew up in a pocket of violence or poor opportunity. They take the anecdotal data that one person found a way to rise above such adverse origins, and foolishly extrapolate that everyone should be able to.
These naive people can’t recognize that the quality of their lives depends on the very government services they despise: they drive on publicly funded roads, they hire people educated at government schools, their privileged position in society is guaranteed by a publicly funded police force. Their very excrement, which in their madness they seem to take for treasure, is hauled away by the very “uneducated and lazy” whom they consider unworthy of any largesse.
It is a sad truth of human nature that we none of us enjoy confronting the shortcomings of our limited brainpower. Show an objectivist the destruction that will logically ensue from cutting the social safety net, and you will be witness to startlingly gymnastic illogic. Suggest that the libertarian ideal he worships already exists under the warlords of Afghanistan, and his slippery denialism will make the ice sheets of Dinali seem like a walk in the park.
These meritocrats simply haven’t connected the dots on how many fantastic advantages they enjoy which they were not responsible for. Of course, they have worked hard, they have sacrificed. But their mistake is thinking that’s the end of the story. They take for granted that they won the best lottery of all simply by being born with certain gifts: mental fitness, and a capacity for achievement. They also don’t consider the economic and social advantages they inherited. They have no idea how many people below the poverty line actually work harder then they, but never have the same combination of privilege, of intelligence, of physical blessings and of luck, and so were not able to monetize their efforts as advantageously.
The Conservative in the Modern US
In the modern US, a person adopts a conservative worldview because he lacks one or more of the three mental attributes: intelligence, empathy, or vision. This is why they stand in opposition to liberalism, which is synonymous with free thinking, understanding, and lack of prejudice.
Let us test the validity of this observation by evaluating the relationship of the Conservative to his society. In doing so, we will hold the following four boons to be self-evident:
Life: access to health care, right to self-preservation, protection of weak or poor, and protection of young and defenseless.
Liberty: freedom of occupation, of thought, of spirituality
The Pursuit of happiness: equal opportunity to earn wealth, equal treatment by race/gender/religion, equal rights independent of ability/merit/position
Environment: livability of cities, cleanliness of air and water and land, stability of climate.
We all would rather live with these blessings rather than be deprived of any of them, and so we have a common language for judging the stewardship of the country under the progressive versus the conservative.
Metric: the recent Candidates
Compare the policies of recent US presidential contests. In the past fifty years, they have been:
| Year | Contest | Scores | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Life | Liberty | Purs Hap | Environ | ||
| 1972 | McGovern v Nixon | 1-0 | 1-0 | 1-0 | 1-1 |
| 1976 | Carter v Ford | 1-1 | 1-1 | 1-1 | 1-0 |
| 1980 | Carter v Reagan | 1-0 | 1-0 | 1-0 | 1-0 |
| 1984 | Mondale v Regan | 1-0 | 1-0 | 1-0 | 1-0 |
| 1988 | Dukakis v Bush | 1-1 | 1-1 | 1-0 | 1-1 |
| 1992 | Clinton v Bush | 1-1 | 1-1 | 1-0 | 1-1 |
| 1996 | Clinton v Dole | 1-1 | 1-1 | 1-1 | 1-1 |
| 2000 | Gore v G W Bush | 1-0 | 1-0 | 1-0 | 1-0 |
| 2004 | Kerry v G W Bush | 1-0 | 1-1 | 1-1 | 1-0 |
| 2008 | Obama v McCain | 1-0 | 1-1 | 1-1 | 1-1 |
| 2012 | Obama v Romney | 1-0 | 1-1 | 1-1 | 1-1 |
| 2016 | H Clinton v Trump | 1-0 | 1-0 | 1-0 | 1-0 |
| 2020 | Biden v Trump | 1-0 | 1-0 | 1-0 | 1-0 |
It cannot be a coincidence that the left fielded not only a higher score on every one of these elections, but generally candidates of greater intelligence than the right. In some cases the difference was so great as to be laughable: Carter studied nuclear engineering in college while Ford played football. Trump was so famously incompetent that the Maga Hat is now a symbol of idiocy.
Where educational differences weren’t so stark, this bears out in the candidate’s ability to grasp major issues of the time: McGovern figured out that the US had to get out of Vietnam before Nixon did. Mondale tried to warn us all of the folly of Reaganomics, which we now understand quadrupled the deficit. Clinton got that too, but Bush didn’t. Neither did George W, whose revived Reaganomics threw the US economy into the worst recession since WWII. Obama presided over a successful rebuilding of the economy that Romney warned wouldn’t work.
In the case of Dukakis versus Bush, there’s not an obvious distinction. Same with Obama versus McCain. But since the question is the intelligence of candidates as a whole on the right versus the left, let’s extend the comparison from the presidential candidates to combinations of president/vice-president. If you do that Bush is greatly dragged down by Quayle, and McCain by Palin.
Metric: Use of Science
In the modern-day United States, there is no a priori philosophical reason why progressives or conservatives should disagree on the question of climate change. After all, there is no party relationship to other natural phenomena like hurricanes or wildfires. So why should the unanimity of scientists and rising tide of evidence behind our understanding of Global Warming evoke this schism? It is because the conservative’s cognition is damaged.
There is enormous wealth within the fossil-fuel industry, and they needed a political force to protect them. They found an amenable ally in the party endowed with less intelligence and greater susceptibility to mythology. The conservative was easier to convince to take a position against a rising tide of global data, against a virtual unanimity of the world’s scientists, and even against their own senses. They believe instead a handful of unqualified talk-show hosts and in those politicians demonstrably on the oil-company dole.
Metric: Historical Decisions
In the history of the United States, there is a clear pattern of social improvement by progressives. At each stop of the way, opposition, when it case, came from the conservatives, starting from the American Revolution itself, an act of rebellion by radical patriots (progressives) against conservatives (loyalists).
A century later, the Republican Party’s first president, Lincoln, opposed the then-reactionary Democratic party. He accomplished many progressive goals, including abolishing slavery, guaranteeing the right to vote, expanding federal power, as well as funding the transcontinental railroad, the state university system, and the settlement of the West. Fellow republican Teddy Roosevelt, the last of the progressive Republicans, regulated many monopolies, increased the National Park system, and regulated the meat and dairy industries.
How did two Republicans accomplish such progressive agendas? The simple answer is that the Republican party was then the party of progressives and not conservatives. That flip-flopped when Republican sponsors of the western settlement found more lucrative support from the big banks and railroads who had grown wealthy from the expansion, in opposition to the small farms and settlers whom they farmed like so much cattle.
Thus, it was the Democratic party who took up the cause of the small (white, let's be clear) farmer and white settler, in order to run against the Republicans. And so Democrats began to championed the causes of the working man--the 40 hour work week, child labor laws, and Income Tax--in opposition to the pro-business Republicans. Teddy’s cousin, FDR, ushered in the age of the modern Democratic Party with the creation of Income Tax, Social Security, Welfare, and the Minimum Wage.
Note that racism is not considered in this analysis. Up until the civil rights movement of the 60's, it's probably fair to say that both parties were equally racist.
Counterpoint: Trolling the Conservative And Progressive
When a hostile foreign head of state--Putin--wanted to bombard social media with fake news in an attempt to divide the populace and turn an impending election toward a result favorable to him, whom did he target as the softer-minded, the less intellectually robust, and the more gullible dupes to his troll farms?
Actually, Putin targeted both the left and the right. Or, more precisely, he targeted certain radical fringes of both: on the left, the Kremlin sponsored Nigerian troll farms to fan the flames of distrust in the cause of Black Lives Matter, and also created a fake UK group, Peace Data, to convince leftists in the US that candidate Biden was too conservative for their support.
On the right, Russia sponsored NAEBC, a Group that attacked Biden and Black Lives Matter, and defended Trump and homicidal vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse. After Facebook and Twitter shut down that group, the Russians moved to the new alt-right platforms Parler and Gab, where they have been active in peddling false hyper-partisan hate speech and a campaign of lies.
To be fair, we should remind ourselves that it is within the natural bounds of human nature to want to believe disinformation. It was not that long ago, from an evolutionary standpoint, that every rustle of grass on the savannah might be a hungry lion. Without our capacity for easy gullibility, the species might well have perished, naked and unarmed, on the plains of the Greater Rift a million years ago. This may be enough to explain the hysteria of either fringe.
Counterpoint: Unanimity of Conservatives and Progressives
In some cases, a societal improvement is recognized as transcending politics. Consider the existential threat to all of humanity posed by the nuclear arsenal. Johnson began the process of arms reduction, but it was Reagan and then Bush who achieved the greatest reductions. Obama cut the remaining arsenal in half again.
The Affordable Care Act, though enacted along strict party lines, is a program based on the model of Massachusetts Republican governor Mitt Romney. It now enjoys support by a majority of both conservative and progressive citizens, and its only real opposition comes from Republican officials taking huge payouts from the health care industry.
Civil rights for all races and both sexes is also resoundingly supported by citizens of all ideologies. There remain, of course, differences of opinion about further work needed to reduce economic disparity and long-term "soft" racism and sexism, but at least we as a country seem to have managed to pull our heads out of the disturbingly ass-backward beliefs of the pre-1960s.
Most glaringly, all of the major wars which the US engaged in were roundly supported by both parties, an indication perhaps of the faint connection between ideology and patriotism.
Other issues of national importance championed not only by both progressive but also conservatives citizenry include the National Park system, the national highway system, the system for national education, and protection and regulation of the agricultural industry.
Counterpoint: Issues where Conservatives are Right
There do exist issues in which progressives exhibit of a kind of willful mass blindness. This is not new--progressives were enamored of Trotskyism in the 1920s, blind to the genocides and despotism in the Soviet Union. Also, many progressives did not support entering WWII, believing in a policy of isolationism.
In modern times, in their dedication to preserving reproductive rights, many progressives oppose any restrictions on abortions, even in the case of a viable foetus who could be removed from the womb and survive, rather than be grusomely killed and dismembered.
And it is true that many progressives are hostile to even limited gun rights, blind to the necessities of self-protection that people outside of their affluent bubbles might experience. Conservatives are not susceptible to this position, no doubt in part because so many of them receive massive financial and political support from the NRA. But in fact many conservatives live in rural areas where the response time of the police force is not short enough to afford any real security.
Finally, there is a current misunderstanding among many progressives that most police are at least subconsciously racist, and in a confrontation with the police, a black man is more likely to be killed than a white man. Not only is this not borne out by statistics, but in fact the opposite conclusion was reached in at least one important survey done by a black researcher who could not believe his results: and yet it is the white arrestee who is more likely to be killed.
This is complicated by the fact that black men are arrested in far greater proportion, which may well be the result of racism. Nevertheless, the progressive response is to riot every time a black man is killed by police and to ignore every killing of white arrestees.
Conclusions
Progressives are, on the average, more intelligent, empathetic, and have a more accurate vision of reality than conservatives. What conclusions may we then draw? Should not we progressives, in keeping with our higher plane of motivation, turn the other cheek and suffer the fools?
No. We should speak truth whenever we recognize it.
But we should do so with the humility of the true liberal, who acknowledges his limitations and the inherent equality of all men, regardless of sex, race, or--yes--ability.
And we can take comfort that there is a progressive trend in human history away from the troglodytes and toward the globalists, the inhabitants of the green tech economy, the post-war global economy, the guardians of the individual, and of the refugee. The steward of the endangered species, and the toxic waste, and the international economy must inevitably carry the day, or we doom ourselves.
America was once the liberal beacon to the rest of the world. And hopefully one day we will again catch up with those countries leading in this noble pursuit. Even with the conservatives slowing us down. We may need them. After all, who else will there be to save us from the hubris of the next shiny new Bolshevik revolution?
