We’ll get to the election Wisconsin Republicans insisted occur during a deadly pandemic in a minute.
Paul Rosenburg on Monday reposted this 2018 observation about conservatism by Frank Wilhoit (the composer, not the late political scientist):
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.
Conservatism had no name for millennia, Wilhoit asserts. The proposition originated in the divine right of kings: “The king can do no wrong.” Naturally, that privilege extended to the king’s friends and select allies. Others the law punishes. We have fewer kings in the 21st century, but the same privilege still benefits friends of the powerful today. The aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse proved that definitively.
Everything from conservative think tanks to racks of books to stacks of white papers — “an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy” — is intended to obscure conservatism’s nucleus.
Wilhoit’s observation echoes what I’ve written for years. Unconsciously, conservatives are royalists:
At the end of the Revolutionary War, there were an estimated half million Tories in this country. Royalists by temperament, loyal to the King and England, predisposed to government by hereditary royalty and landed nobility, men dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal.
After the Treaty of Paris, you know where they went? Nowhere. A few moved back to England, or to Florida or to Canada. But most stayed right here.
Take a look around. Their progeny are still with us among the one percent and their vassals. Spouting adolescent tripe from Ayn Rand, kissing up, kicking down, chasing their masters’ carriages or haughtily looking down their noses at people they consider inferiors.
At out-groups, at Irresponsibles. That’s how conservatism views them, especially racial minorities. Case in point: conservative opinion writer Star Parker. “Personal responsibility,” Parker wrote one month ago, is one of the last things black liberals want legitimized.
Out-groups
Sachin Chheda, director and co-founder of the Fair Elections Project, tweeted Tuesday about Republican calls for more “personal responsibility” from Wisconsin voters. They mean out-group voters the law should bind but not protect.
Reid J. Epstein of the New York Times describes how conservatives view voting by out-groups:
Tuesday’s mess of an election in Wisconsin is the culmination of a decade of efforts by state Republicans to make voting harder, redraw legislative boundaries and dilute the power of voters in the state’s urban centers. [read: black and/or Democrat]
The Republican-dominated state legislature, which has held a majority since 2011, due in part to gerrymandered maps, refused to entertain the Democratic governor’s request to mail absentee ballots to all voters or move the primary. Then the State Supreme Court, which is controlled by conservative justices, overturned the governor’s ruling to postpone the election until June.
For Republicans, Democrats of any color are out-group. The acting president made that clear on Monday by saying Democrats “shouldn’t be allowed to win” this fall’s election. Thus, voters can expect worse this fall wherever Republicans hold power.
It’s been said one reason for Donald Trump’s popularity with his conservative base is he is not politically correct. Trump says the quiet parts out loud. But Trump is sui generis, as Digby observes. Most officials on the right still know better than to speak so bluntly.*
But not everyone. In his disastrous 2013 “Daily Show” interview, North Carolina Republican Party official Don Yelton used overtly racist language the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained (in 1981) conservatives largely abandoned by 1968. The party shifted to “more abstract” expressions, Atwater said, like forced busing or states’ rights. And to advocating “totally economic things” like cutting taxes, “and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
Yelton (still a conservative Democrat when I met him) defended North Carolina’s voter ID law, saying, “If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.”
“Personal responsibility” is how politically correct conservatives say “bunch of lazy blacks”. Abstractly.
This morning’s online headline at the Washington Post reads, “The coronavirus is infecting and killing black Americans at an alarmingly high rate.” Wisconsin Republicans on Tuesday made them stand on line in Milwaukee for hours to vote during a deadly pandemic. That will show them.
Understanding the in-group/out-group core of conservatism, Wilhoit writes, tells us what anti-conservatism must be, whether we call it liberalism, progressivism or whatever: “the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.”
* Mimicking Trump’s style in an attempt to please him cost Trump’s acting navy secretary Thomas Modly his job yesterday. Modly traveled halfway around the world to show the sailors of the USS Theodore Roosevelt who’s boss after they’d cheered and applauded the captain he fired.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.