Why Are Conservatives So, Ah, Err, Conservative?

The current abortion debate, reignited by President Obama's Notre Dame commencement speech, says as much about the pro-life advocates as about the issue. It goes something like this: "There can be no common ground such as Obama called for. Either a baby is killed during an abortion or it isn't. Just like slavery. Either a person is enslaved or free."

That kind of simplistic black and white mindlessness is at the heart of what passes as "thinking" among conservatives. Take slavery for instance.

Sure, following the Civil War, slaves were freed. But were they "free" when they were forced to lives of sharecropping, violence, servility, racial intolerance, second class citizenship and lack of suffrage for 100 years? Blacks were -- and in some cases still are -- in a gray zone between slavery and freedom. And cons just can't handle gray zones.

And it turns out for a very good reason. In a study published in Psychological Bulletin, the authors determined that conservatives essentially are psychologically damaged goods, having a pathological reliance on hierarchy, authority, nostalgia, resistance to change and intolerance of ambiguity.

In other words, long before they were pro-life, born-again, anti-immigrant uber-pats, they were hardwired to be cantankerous. People too set in their ways to consider anything else!

In his May 27 New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof reported on subsequent studies showing that liberals and conservatives don't just think differently, they also feel differently often reaching conclusions through flash intuitions that aren't a result of a deliberative intellectual process. Instead they come from the medial prefrontal cortex, which has more to do with moralizing than with rationality; the so-called harrumphing factor. The upshot is that for people who end up as liberals morality derives mostly from an innate sense of fairness and prevention of harm especially to the powerless. For those who become conservatives morality involves upholding authority and loyalty as well as a strong sense of revulsion.

Invariably, liberals make two mistakes when confronting conservatives. First, they forget conservatives are incapable of nuanced reasoning -- i.e. the intellectual capacity to view stuff in subtle shades of gray, not just in black and white.

Their second mistake is lumping all right wingers into the same troll pond. Not because they're not all trolls, but because there are really four distinct ponds -- each with its particular taste in small children and puppies. Conservatives do have one thing in common; their relentless pursuit of the past. They are simply different "pasts."

Constitutional, or "Original Intent," conservatives fixate on 1896, a time before wild-eyed Supreme Court justices legislated politically correct social fashions from the bench instead basing decisions on objective, unbiased constitutional reasoning as they did in Plessy v. Ferguson. In that year, the Court determined separate accommodations for Negroes on railway cars did not violate the equal protection clause of the 14^th Amendment. Its conclusion, and the resulting Jim Crow laws, stood for 58 years until nine wild-eyed justices unanimously reversed the precedent in the madcap Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Christian or "Movement" conservatives fantasize about returning America to the 1600s, when, as opposed to their current delusions, there actually were officially established churches. What a wonderful time to be alive. Fire and brimstone, scarlet letters, burning witches for heresy, and the stocks to punish moral turpitude.

Establishment conservatives, with their subsets of economic libertarians and neocons, dream of the corporate "Golden Age" following the Civil War when the business of America was business and petty considerations such as child labor, sweatshops, conservation, epidemics and warehousing the poor, disabled and elderly, to say nothing of, aughh, labor unions, were never mentioned in proper company. Then, in 1890, it all began to unravel when the socialist congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Never again would there be as large a gap between rich and poor -- ah, well, until Reagan-Bush repackaged Robber Barron America into the GOP's "Ownership Society."

Ah, for the good old days ! No nettlesome environmentalists; no tiresome activists spouting justice and equality and secularists insisting on religious tolerance; no inconvenient government transparency and ethical oversight.

The distance between troll ponds is not far. Many religious conservatives are also Original Intenters -- hey, one delusion is as good as another. And, among the more affluent movement and constitutional conservatives, economic libertarianism -- a gussied-up theory to rationalize unrelenting greed -- holds plenty of appeal. I wonder which came first, the theory or the greed. Hmmm.

In the last troll pond, the one way over on the fringe, in the shadows of the evil smelling forest are the AWM -- angry white men. They're angry America "gets no respect from pissant little countries." They're angry that blacks and illegal immigrants "are getting all the breaks." They're angry that "their jobs are being sent to China." They're angry that their kids "got no respect." And they're angry that, what one whack-job site refers to as "O'Sambo" gets to run the country.

These are the lunatics that scumbags like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity incite everyday, reinforcing their stupidity, malice and prejudices; their belief that the "Demon-rats, Niggers, Spics, Kikes and Godless heathens" -- never the corporatists -- are the cause of all that troubles America, and that only a right-wing revolution can return America to something it never was in the first place.

There is another group -- not so much actual conservatives, more like simply "old farts" -- those who think the world should have been frozen in time in 1955. They are the Archie Bunkers of conservatism: "Aw jeez, Meathead, just leave things be." These are the people who took years to accept short pants on men, the designated hitter, "Ms.," imported pickup trucks, men's jewelry, interracial marriage, tattoos on women, cell phones and signage in Spanish. They hate change; any change! I actually feel sorry for this group. They vote for wistfulness over their own best economic interests.

It's the blue collar worker in the corner bar raging at long-haired WTO protestors on TV while American corporations sabotage his entire way of life by cutting benefits and shifting jobs to China. It's the family farmer fretting about two gay men who moved into town to open a diner while Congress votes to subsidize the agri-corp that will eventually drive him off his farm.

Always too late, these Nostalgia Conservatives come around to the liberals' point of view. (Of course, by then liberals have moved on to some new issue that pisses them off.) They were partly accountable for the 50 percent drop in support for the Iraq war. Too late by five years and 4300 lives.

Down the road, the unemployed union guy will be on the global trade picket line, and the farmer will be having his breakfast in the diner because he no longer has cows to tend in the morning. Always too late.