Why Conservatives Can't or Won't Talk About The Future

[elfs]

In my last post I discussed listening to Glen Beck, and Glen Beck's refrain, "I believe in America's future." Beck does not describe this future, ever. Partly, I believe Beck can't describe it: Beck is too shallow and lacking in creative thought to imagine a future. But I also suspect that Beck can't describe the future because doing so would betray his free-market conservatism.

Free market conservatives espouse the principle of the invisible hand. The idea is a simple one: we engage in trade we believe is beneficial to us. By doing so, we create market signals that cause the generation of more trade of that kind, until the market is saturated or until someone comes up with something better.

Adam Smith, who created the metaphor of the invisible hand, was arguing against trade restriction and government regulation, and we can see how government regulation has stifled telecommunications in this country horribly over the past fifty years, to the point where you must now get government authorization to roll out an innovation in that space.

There are four ways to talk about the future:

The future will be more like the past.

This is a popular one among paleoconservatives, but they're not a popular group because when they say "like the past," what they openly describe domestically is a de jure enforcement of a specific civil order, and that civil order will naturally be the one that has dominated their imagination for sixty years now: the Christianized segments of America circa 1950s.

The future will be like the present

This is really no vision at all, but a mere hope for stagnation. Very few people on either the left or the right want the status quo (or even a vaguely improved status quo, say an economic state of 1998 with our current technology) so this vision is usually left out of any discussion of the future. It's actually the vision most Americans are most comfortable with: "Let the world change, just let it all stay out of my home! If I must know about it, let it be on the other side of the screen!"

The future will be (insert specific vision here)

The problem with this one is that it is specific, and to the extent that it's a specific future, it's one that can only come about through government action. The invisble hand needs invisible handcuffs: we will get to the future the speaker wants only through regulation and restrictions, both commercial and personal. Other than the wacky Dominionist arm at the far right (of which Mick Huckabee is a member, never forget), no conservative dares breathe about this future too much. Aiming for a specific, concrete goal five or ten or twenty years down the line is something the Soviets did, it's something that only liberals do. You cannot beat your audience over the head with a contradictory message forever.

The future will be weird.

This is the outcome of public conservative policy, but it's so deeply unsettling to people like Beck and Hannity and so on that they don't dare really say this out loud.

This open contradiction between the wish for stability and wisdom that is at the heart of the honest conservative impulse, and the unwillingness to put up any barriers at all by the beholden-to-the-money conservatism (which doubles as an emasculated, finger-pointing, tongue-clicking Christianist conservatism only by dint of funding), lies at the root of why the public conservative movement, the one epitomized by Beck and Hannity and Limbaugh and the entirety of Fox News, does not feel comfortable talking about the future even as they pat their audience on the head and say, "There, there, the future will be all right."

The future will not be "all right."

Think about yourself suddenly time-warping into America 175 years ago. Slavery is still around, and no matter where in the country you go, attitudes towards the way your fellow men treat minorities is, I would hope, deeply offensive to you. The way men treat women is outrageous, especially if you are a woman. Class distinctions are even more absurd then than they are now, especially if you live in a huge, stinking city with bad sewage, little running water, no artifical lighting at night, and medicine that hasn't advanced much since the Roman times. You might adjust, but it would always be deeply unsettling to you, this world so unlike your own, so unlikeable compared to your own.

The future given to the invisible hand is just as unsettling-- and for some, unlikeable. You and I feel it-- some of us embrace it, some of us fear it. This unsettling, disturbing, even weirder than now future of happy mutants is the conservative future, if we believe what the conservatives tell us. The liberal future, if we believe what the liberals tell us, always seems to entail a degree of freedom in those things that don't matter much and don't accomplish much, but goverment intervention in our schools, our mortgages, and our businesses limit what innovation and change the future will be permitted.

Both sides tell their base that the future will be "all right." The difference is that liberals can say how it will be, and damn the consequences. The conservatives can't or won't say how or why it will be, because they don't know how it will be, or they know it won't be.

Comments

[fallenpegasus]

In your final paragraph, the conservative position is the more honest one.

That cultural conservatives can't hack the consequences of that, is irrelativant. That the liberals (of most all stripes) think they can, is relativant, because invariably their damning and ignoring of consequences always makes everything worse.

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Yep.

I honestly think this is one of the reasons the "End Times" thing is so popular amongst conservatives. A future in which they are not in total control of a theocratic paradise - or, even worse, that they, not some flying god-figure, must deal with the consequences of their actions - is so frightening that they literally wish for the end of the world and the painful extermination of their fellow creatures, human and otherwise.

That such people wish for this - and actually work toward this end - explains my violent abhorrance of monotheistic fundamentalism.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

I was just about to say.

I suspect that part of the reason they don't talk about what they want for the future is because what they want for the future is so mind-bogglingly horrible and unpopular that they can't speak their mind without a lynch mob forming. Half of their *audience* would help form the riot that would be spearheaded by equally enraged liberals.

They *will* go on and on about how the separation of church and state is destroying the country, while simultaneously neglecting to mention what would happen if they got their way, and a state religion were put into place. They like to allude to how their way is the "Christian" way, but there's no such thing as Christianity as a unified religion. What they really mean is that they want *their* church or in particular their pastor (or themselves, in the case of the televangelists who try to get political), to be in charge. And if the Evangelists get to be in charge, we *all* know what *they* want.

[tagryn]

Whenever I see a homogeneous "they" or "them" being referred to, usually its followed by a strawman statement about what the person talking is sure "they" would say, if they were to bother to talk to the group or viewpoint in question. Guessing at what "they" would say doesn't work, though, since it can't at all replicate how the rationales behind the beliefs would be presented by an actual believer. I'd even go so far as to say that the 'echo chamber' approach is counterproductive when it is mistakenly taken to be an adequate replacement for dialogue.

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that the future being weird is the outcome of public *conservative* policy, i think it's just a function of time. Societies evolve, but institutions generally don't, (or at least not as quickly) and eventually become obsolete as they fail to keep up with the changing needs, wants, and desires of society.

The future will be *INTERESTING*. It'll be different in ways that will continue to surprise and baffle us. If there's a single lesson to take home from economics throughout history, it's that we don't fully understand the complex system that we're participating in. The future generations will look back at the current one and wonder how we didn't see what was blindingly obvious in hindsight, just as we do the same for decades gone by. (or even weeks gone by, if current headlines are any gauge)

I see it as loosly analogous to the uncertainty principle. We can't study this (economic) system without changing it, and every level of understanding we gain and then act upon changes things on still more subtle and perplexing levels which we won't grok in fullness until we're living with the consequences. Again.

I can understand the role of fiscal conservatism from this viewpoint as being cautious about how to react to societal changes over time, and not leaping before looking. That's not how it's acted upon, though. Instead, it's generally ham-fisted reactionary crap, (usually illustrating your first two examples) marching blindly forward expecting the floor not to drop out from under us because it was told not to in a firm, authoritative voice.

Listening to the screams as they doppler downwards is fun, at least.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I think you missed what I mean.

Publicly stated conservative policy will not impede the weird future. This conclusion is so disturbing that conservatives dare not admit this in public.

Publicly stated liberal policy will impede the weird future, and retard innovation in those spheres where innovation would be most creative and influential. This conclusion is so disturbing that liberals dare not admit this in public.

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

What is this "publicly stated liberal policy", in your opinion? I'm not at all sure I understand what you mean by that term.

[rhonan.livejournal.com]

A key point here is that not all innovation is good. We would be far better off had effective regulation prevented most of the innovations of the financial world for the past 20 years.

[fallenpegasus]

I rather like the existense of the ACH system, credit card clearing houses, the ARM, the 401k and the IRA, non-hierarchicial interbank transfers, and the Euro.

[rhonan.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I should have been more specific and said innovations in financial products. Now, the 401k and IRA are financial products, but they are also well regulated products.

[mrf-arch.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I agree with either statement. So far as I can tell, either policy will simply make the future weird in mildly different ways, as their limited effectiveness runs up against the march of technological progress, the every-other-week occurrence of one in a million happenstances, human contrariness, and the law of unintended consequences.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

I have hated the terms, "Conservative," and "Liberal" since 1985.

They're utterly meaningless terms. When used as a target of a critical argument, the terms almost always are made of straw.

Elf did a good job of trying to avoid those straw-man uses by explicit labelling the real groups that get lumped under, "Conservative." However, he sorta missed when it came to identifying what he meant by, "Liberal." And all of the other commenters ran with it, taking shots at the straw-man Librul so-often paraded around on right-wing media outlets.

Anyone care to define their terms?