COVID killed Conservatism

Guns, gains and games.

This may seem a counterintuitive claim to make, given the fact that Trump’s supporters — whom I shall now call “Trumpets” — charged the Senate in Washington just days ago. You’d be forgiven for assuming that the baying mob indicates Conservatism is actually very much on the ascendancy.

That is until you take a step back to realize that the thousands who picked up arms to attack the country’s most important institution were acting out of desperation. And while they may have thought of themselves as “storming the Bastille” the Trumpets, unlike the French revolutionaries of 1789, were not driven by starvation and inequality.

On the contrary, what they set out to do was to forcibly deny a fair and legitimate election because they did not like the result. Their candidate, an incoherent and overtly racist, misogynistic, demagogue, had enjoyed four years in office but has now been asked by the majority of Americans to leave. Upset to hear that he was not a unique and perfect snowflake and that the rules applied to him as much as they did to everyone else, he spurred on his all-too-willing followers to violence, with fanciful conspiracies of vote-rigging.

Where does this complete detachment from reality and sense of entitlement come from? It is the death cry of a movement — the Conservative movement — that has little to offer 21st Century society. A political ideology that has ever thus been devoid of substance and is now beginning to finally collapse in on itself.

The French philosopher Voltaire once famously declared that “Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities”. Never was that more apparent than at the Senate in Washington. United by absurd QAnon conspiracies, anti-vaccine ignorance, 5G paranoia, and white supremacist nonsense — a crowd of desperados who have become completely detached from reality decided to attack democracy.

Of course, some of the Republican party have attempted to distance the party from Trump. And Rep. Mitt Romney tried to explain that the angry rioters were “misinformed for the past two months and stirred to action” (and insurrection) “due to a selfish man’s injured pride”.

But as Corey Robin argues in his seminal book The Reactionary Mind, the fact of the matter is that Trump is not an aberration in Conservatism, he is the epitome of it — which is why most Republicans have given him their full support. A rich Right-Wing tradition of creating bogeymen — terrifying socialists, homosexuals, immigrants, and Antifa terrorists — has, unsurprisingly, attracted and fostered a following that is characterized by paranoia, bigotry, and anger. It is also shaped by a sense of entitlement and, more significantly, a quickness to self-pity if the Right-Winger does not get what they want.

How has this nonsense sustained itself for so long? We’re going to look at the elements that comprise any Right-Wing movement globally:

Protecting Power

The first reason is, in part, because the Conservative philosophy regards every concession or compromise as a defeat. In their view, the world is a battleground, and in their zero-sum logic, anyone else’s gain is their loss. It is important for every conservative and authoritarian figurehead — from Republicans to Tories, from Bolsonaro to Duterte — to encourage this sense of constant war because, as right-wing British philosopher Richard Scruton once opined, “conservatism does its best in times of crisis.” As Corey Robin puts it, “Conservatism is the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back”.

The Trump shade of Conservatism (and the current post-Brexit mess in the UK) is just an example of what happens when Conservatives are finally confronted by something that they cannot battle or bend to their will: Reality.

In fact, many of the elites in the Enlightenment period who opposed the French Revolution, for example, sniffed at the simpleminded rationalism that animated that revolution. Edmund Burke (widely considered the father of the Modern Conservative movement) believed that “A clear idea is, therefore, another name for a little idea”. One of Burke’s counterparts in France, Joseph de Maistre, scoffed that Thomas Paine “didn’t believe in a constitution unless he could fit it in his back pocket”.

As Robin argues in his book, this wasn’t due to an aversion to sloganeering or populism — conservatives have never been averse to either. It is because the discomforting truths spoken by Enlightenment thinkers were a challenge to the privilege so many of the elite enjoyed.

Victimhood

Unable to escape Reality, but unwilling to concede defeat, the right-wing retreats to their safe space, which we may call “the self-pity space”. They assume the role of victim, however out of touch and preposterous the position may be given the context (see Fox News pundits complaining about their Twitter follower count in the wake of the siege at the capitol). In short, they throw a tantrum and then fall into a sulk.

But the elites can’t survive by scoffing at the simple logic of the peasantry alone and sulking, they need to come up with some measure of an argument for themselves.

Thus Conservatism as a political movement exists.

Forced out of sulking, the Right eventually bandage their injured egos by constructing alternate realities (or alternative facts). Their self-pity and self-preservation breed wilder and wilder fictions — myths — and multiple different worlds in order to justify their sense of crisis and victimhood. Trump constructs a myth about the election being stolen from him because he cannot concede defeat and feels entitled to have won. Nigel Farage constructs a myth about the big bad EU dictating to the once-grand Empire — something that Margaret Thatcher also indulged in during her tenure.

They might not have the facts for their claims of victimization, but boy, do they have the commitment and passion. As Robin neatly summarizes it: “Conservatives have asked us not to obey them, but to feel sorry for them — or to obey them because we feel sorry for them”.

Myth-Making

The propensity to myth-making may get stronger the further to the Right you go, but in truth, you don’t have to travel too far along the spectrum to feel the grasp of reality loosen significantly. While Timothy Snyder points out that it is Fascism’s mainstay to tell you that “facts don’t matter, all that matters is The Myth”, Conservativism is the gateway drug. As mentioned above, Conservatism can only truly justify its existence as protector of privilege by creating myths and alternative facts. As Thatcher pointed out: “the other side has an ideology, we must have one too”.

With the myths duly constructed, the Right simply needs to find the right language to communicate those myths. Luckily they don’t need to look too far, as they’ve historically found they can simply steal it from their opponents on the Left. As entrepreneur Henrik Vanger says to journalist Mikael Blomkvist in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: “Isn’t it fascinating that Nazis always manage to adopt the word ‘freedom’?”

Much like her angrier more overtly racist political cousins in Germany, Thatcher also claimed the word “freedom” from the Left. Her government took that word and stripped it of all sense of social responsibility (we know full well what Thatcher thought of society). Freedom instead came to mean “freedom to exploit others in an unfettered, unregulated free market and to take as much as one can from everyone else”.

In a sense, what Thatcher did was to hollow out the substance of the word (much like she carved out the heart of the UK community) and replace it with Adam Smith’s vacuous myth of “the invisible hand of the market”. Similarly, Reagan’s big myth was “the war on drugs”. Bush (Jnr)’s big myth was “the war on terror”. And Trump? His myth was, of course, MAGA.

Bye Bye to the Right

The problem with a political movement that has no real values and ideas of its own (a movement that must invent enemies against which to lead everyone into battle ) is that it is woefully inadequate at dealing with real crises.

As COVID-19 rolled out across the globe, every Conservative government proved completely incapable of mitigating against it.Bolsonaro, Trump, and Boris Johnson all strove initially to downplay it. Leaks to the media suggested that “herd immunity” was a popular idea floated between the US and the UK. Years of stripping health services and privatizing national infrastructure meant that, once again, the Right turned to the market looking for answers because the respective governments had none of their own. And the market kind of shrugged and said “hurry up and let us open up to make more money again”.

In Ireland, the centre-right government coalition of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail buckled to pressure from the business lobby to lift restrictions over Christmas, ignoring health advice. As a consequence Ireland now has the highest infection rate in Europe, and its health service can no longer handle the surge.

Of course, when governments did eventually listen to the experts about how to tackle the pandemic, right-wing pundits dutifully found a way to object from a position of feeling victimised. Peter Hitchens lamented lockdowns as the death of freedom (there’s that word again), and tinfoil-wearing groups all over Europe popped up insisting it was all the result of a big conspiracy — though which one precisely isn’t clear. It could be 5G, it could be a plan to have us all vaccinated with microchips in the brain, it could be QAnon.

Many of the Right harangued and harassed the very police officers they would typically be so desperate to see more of on the streets to enforce “law and order”. In Ireland, one notorious conspiracy theorist by the name of Gemma O’Doherty set her mob on one police officer for stopping her during the lockdown ( he subsequently ended up committing suicide as a result of the abuse he received).

The problem now is that the Right-Wing’s incoherence, ineptitude, and vacuousness is now metastisizing. Certainly, Trump’s approval ratings dropped considerably over 2020, as did Boris Johnson’s. And sure social media has finally banned Trump from its platforms, and eCommerce platforms have shut down MAGA stores. However, the tumour at the heart of conservatism in the US now has a bloated orange face and has not only grown, but has started to completely decimate the Republican party.

It seems fair to say that the year of COVID has seen Conservatism start to consume itself, and that what we have left is just it’s pure crazy essence. How long this insanity will run for is anyone’s guess — and it’s likely it will only get worse before it gets better. But my prediction is that it will get better, precisely because Conservatism (and it’s rightwing buddies) — with its climate change denial, its poor COVID response, its continued capitalist worship — has revealed itself to be arcane and inadequate for the 21st century. So while it must make up for its inadequacy with strident noise and violence, it ultimately cannot distract from its fragility and emptiness.

The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson believes that this marks the end of the Conservative party as we know it. James Comey, former head of the FBI, believes on the other hand that the madness will return the US, eventually to sanity and an appreciation of the founding values of the Republic.

I’m inclined to believe they’re both right: the Conservative movement may be caving in under the weight of its incoherence, but foot-stomping and tantrum throwing can no longer sustain the Right. The COVID-19 iceberg has set the ship sinking.

A Suggestion for a New Political Landscape.

And beyond that? What will the political landscape look like?

I suggest that we no longer conceive of political beliefs as existing on a spectrum that draws a line neatly (and equally) from Left to Right. That we no longer regard them as two opposing forces necessary to retain balance and symmetry in society.

Instead, I believe we should tilt it, and regard it as a downward slope: with progressive politics at the top, and right-wing (regressive) politics at the bottom. A slippery slope, if you will, where every right-wing suggestion — based as it often is on zerosum logic — is merely a regression, a retreat into primitive, reactionary, tribal fear and ignorance.