Accountability for social conservatives
by David Atkins
This photo which has been going viral around the Internet in the last week speaks something I’ve been writing about here for a while:
There is a twin problem here: 1) a large number of the people who held those views forty years ago still hold them; and 2) there’s no accountability for those who did hold them. It’s all down the memory hole.
Progressives often don’t do a good job of holding conservatives accountable to the judgment of history. Which is weird, because old-school conservatism in our personal lives is seen as equivalent to having a sense of responsibility and taking care of the future, even if it comes with delayed gratification today. Modern conservatism, by contrast, is all about preserving the current power arrangement at the expense of the future. What should happen, then, is that we have an obligation to telescope the future into today, in the hope that those conservatives who aren’t sociopaths (the percentage of actual clinical sociopaths being quite small) will learn a sense of shame or at least become nervous about spouting their retrograde views so openly.
One of the ways we can do this is by simply holding accountable those who are consistently on the wrong side of history. We love to make television shows and do retrospectives of our heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr. But what about the people holding the signs in the picture above? Why not go interview them? Rather than interview the people who were beaten at Selma, why not have some interviews with the people who did the beating? Why not find out the story they told their children about race relations? Why not see how their children and grandchildren feel about their progenitors’ actions, and how they feel about the marriage equality fight in that context?
America is a forward-looking nation in many ways. But to keep it looking forward, it could certainly use a few glances backward not just at its brighter pinnacles but at its darkest depths as well. If only so that those depths can serve as direct object lessons for the continuing retrograde behavior of conservatives today.
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