A Sketch of the Case against Conservatism

Welcome to my new blog!

No, it is not a bias to oppose conservatism. There is within range of every mind a place of objective measure, a place too ultimate to be challenged from higher or parallel perspectives. And we all have access to it through a mysterious and largely undefinable power, that of consciousness itself.

This is no easy proposition to prove. Gradually, over the past seventy years, we have come to accept the conservative notion that every political viewpoint is, by definition, a bias, meaning that we are without an objective platform from which to assess them. The moment you take a side, the thinking goes, you have succumbed to a set of blinders and to a motivation to match. This blog, and its principle resource, my paper, Without Mercy and Therefore without Veracity: Conservatism as an Inversion of Basic Consciousness, is dedicated to refuting this idea. [The paper is available in both PDF and web page format linked both here and in this blog’s sidebar.] This post sketches a few of the themes of this paper.

 

Sometimes things evolve so slowly and involve such large numbers of people and occur under cover of such sincerity-inducing ideology that we fail to recognize stark derangement for what it is. Had we just arrived on this planet yesterday after a seventy-year absence and received a one-hour briefing we would demand to know how the normal constraints on conscious perception could suffer such catastrophic failure. As in every criminal trial, attention would quickly focus on whatever dark mental function made the malfunction possible.

The Republican determination to thwart measures to halt climate change have been with us for so many decades that it is now part of the wallpaper; it seldom attracts notice on network television. But, according to the latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the planet is already nearing a warming threshold beyond which civilization itself will be in peril [see also here]. The thousands of experts contributing to this report give us until 2030, just eleven years from now, to cut carbon dioxide emissions by forty-five percent and then reach a net-zero emission level by 2050. The most optimistic scenarios by which this could occur would involve not only drastic reductions in our use of fossil fuels, but also direct removal of carbon dioxide from the air—and there are currently no such removal technologies scalable to the task. That’s another way of saying we’re already past the point unless new technologies arrive to the rescue.

And even if we achieve these objectives, temperatures would still shortly rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (now considered optimistic) above pre-industrial levels, enough to kill up to ninety percent of coral reefs around the world, raise temperatures over land masses more than 1.5 degrees, and contribute even more to sea level rise. Average temperatures, measured over both sea and land, have already climbed by one degree Celsius since industrialization (and more over land) and are now rising at a rate of .2 degrees per decade. Even at the current one degree certain places on the planet are becoming increasingly uninhabitable; a fifth of all corals have died in the last five years; countless life forms are going extinct; glaciers are vanishing; the Arctic Ocean is melting; people are dying because of unprecedented heat waves; Greenland and Antarctica are dumping once frozen water stored on them into the ocean at an accelerating rate; and storms, droughts, coastal flooding and forest fires are becoming ever more severe—here and now.

This is larger and far more probable than any military threat that the nation has ever faced. Meeting it will require a national and international mobilization exceeding that of World War II. The starkness of the science allows for no political opposition if we are to survive. Nature has deprived us of the luxury of any debate over whether the crisis is real.

It would be bad enough if we were simply falling short, but still trying. But instead half the American population votes politicians into office with virtually unanimous dedication to reversing hard-won, science-based regulatory gains against carbon, fighting the efforts of the international community to combat climate change and advocating burning even more fossil fuels than we do now, especially coal, the worst of them all. By behavior and vote half of us are hastening the progress of the planet to the gate of hell—and doing so serenely in broad daylight.

Even that is not the end of it. They are friendly to pollution generally, including the mercury emitted by burning coal, pesticides, nitrous oxide and pages of others, not to mention despoiled landscapes, polluted watersheds and toxic runoff. And beyond the environment, the same mendacity touches every policy domain they touch, be it the miracles that happen when tax burdens on the rich are lightened yet again, the notion that 4,000 terrorists have been streaming across our southern border for want of a wall to stop them; the argument that voting fraud is rampant and preventable only by measures that incidentally make it less likely Democrats will vote; the declarations that calamity would befall the nation if we adopted universal health care as other nations have successfully done; the idea that America’s epidemic of gun-related killing could be solved if yet more people owned military-grade rifles; and the belief that God individually created, from scratch, every species on earth within a week just a few thousand years ago. The magnitude of malfeasance required to hold forth against the whole of the world’s scientific community, it turns out, is severe enough to affect many other directions of travel. There is an underlying—and lying—spirit at work here.

The Republican ability to disbelieve even the most well-established science correlates strongly with their special tendency to find their news from sources such as Alex Jones’s Infowars, given to conspiracy theories, and to condemn as fake all sources distinguished for accuracy. And they have no regrets over having exalted a liar as president, a sign of low regard for basic factuality. Efforts to lend them a hand, such as by providing evidence about climate that they may have missed, tend to backfire, leaving them even more convinced of their position. The most educated of them are often the most committed to denials of reality. Something seems to have destroyed sizeable sectors of their epistemic function, allowing them to break through evidentiary constraints that confine everyone else.

It’s not hard to ask the obvious questions. How could so many not only ignore credible warnings but also floor the accelerator toward the hairpin turn just ahead? Doesn’t normal mental function prevent such behavior? How it is even possible to live in a universe where belief in the obvious is not only optional but invertible? Since when was recognition of fact even voluntary? Such questions tend to emerge from our intuitions about how mind and reality interrelate. We assume that there will be correspondence between the two, given the compulsions of intelligence itself. We intuitively sense that the ability to discern the relevance and weight of facts comes hardwired along with basic awareness and that consensus should therefore be immediate and uncontested, especially when there is an overwhelming consensus among experts.

These intuitions are correct, and for more profound reasons than we may realize. But they don’t necessarily expose a clear contrast, at least theoretically, with how conservatives themselves understand the case. Because they, too, are conscious, these very intuitions bear down upon them and shape the way they defend themselves. Yes, they say, the mind is designed to correlate with reality and that they, not their political opponents, have the correct insight into how reality actually works, thanks to cherry-picked, disarticulated and decontextualized factoids that they have felt compelled to memorize. Outside of explicitly religious interests (which make a virtue of overriding epistemic intuitions) one will not find two diametrically-opposed theories of knowledge. And even evangelicals, despite asserting the virtue of trashing science and reason when necessary, will strive to sound scientific and rational when they see an opening to do so. This speaks to the self-enforcing tendency of universal intuitions, even among the devout, capable of arousing sensitivity to looking like a frosted goofball. Both sides seem to be working from the same set of intuitions—or pretending to.

Ironically, however, it is sometimes the left that lets them off the hook by downplaying native human objectivity. Human consciousness is at best subjective, you see. Everyone suffers from susceptibility to distorting factors. Everyone is biased. Besides, some on the left tend toward relativism, where no declaration of reason is considered absolute and written across the sky. Our native reasoning powers are at best squishy and tend not to yield provably absolute answers. This line of thought makes it possible to disassociate epistemic failings—necessarily ubiquitous in their view—from moral failings; to be wrong is to be normal, not bad, and possibly not even definitively wrong. And so we judge them against their own matrix and find in their sincerity their innocence.

But none of this explains why conservatives are so much more susceptible to distortions of reality than are liberals, a fact borne out in extensive research summarized by, among others, Chris Mooney in two books, The Republican War on Science (2005) and The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality (2012). There is nothing on the left that comes close to matching Republican climate denial. But even Mooney could well be missing the point despite uncovering a sharp epistemic contrast between left and right. He and the research he cites attribute this clear contrast primarily to personality type: conservatives just happen to be a bit more “closed” or “hierarchical” than liberals, thanks to factors beyond their control. But unless personality types are contagious, like the flu, this would not explain regional differences, why, that is, we have a higher density of hardline Republicans in Alabama than in Vermont. What he could well be missing are the historical—and hence contagious—factors in play, such as Alabama’s heritage of slavery and savage racism thereafter (factors that fostered Republican dominance in that state). This would come very close to exposing powerful moral currents distorting the conservative’s capacity to see straight.

But here again, we’re up against problems. First, it is against the rules to judge motives. Mooney, for one, steers clear of such territory. Second, we actually know these people, sometimes intimately. They happen to be more often than not honest, generous, reasonable and idealistic. We do well to be on cordial terms with them. As a Democratic poll greeter on Election Day, 2018, at a North Carolina precinct, I conversed for a number of hours with my Republican counterpart, a precinct chair and member of the local First Baptist Church. Back in the day we all attended there every Christmas to hear a talented performance of Handel’s Messiah. He told me he had been on two church-sponsored mission trips to Haiti to assist in drilling wells and was planning on a third in two weeks. I had no reason to believe he was bragging. He meant all the best to the people of Haiti. I sincerely applauded him. Such behavior is not the place to look for hidden or nefarious motives.

Then, too, conservatism has managed to muscle out any space for objective opposition. Because (1) we personally know them to be virtuous, (2) we hate to take their epistemic shortcomings too seriously, (3) factual violations are purportedly not evidence of moral violations, (4) there is some plausibility to parts of their policy portfolio, (5) it seems that reason is not all that clear in the first place and (5) the malfeasance required for climate obstruction is not widely recognized in other categories of policy, we, as the larger society, have given them space to pull off a major propaganda achievement. Historian Nicole Hemmer, in her book Messengers of the Right, documents how, since the forties, they have steadily convinced the rest of society that opposing them is, by definition, a bias, even if there are objective reasons for so doing. Truth itself, in other words, has, over this period, been increasingly reduced to competing as a suspect political faction. This comes close to annihilating, for everyone, a space for certifiable objective fact. As a result conservatism is currently unfalsifiable. You may not like it, but that is only because of how your gut is arranged in your abdomen. In other words, they have contaminated the nation’s entire epistemic landscape. Thanks to decades of conservative outrage against what they describe as liberal media bias, news anchors have allowed themselves to be confined merely to reporting the controversy, as if objectivity were best found in neutrality, as if truth emerges only as it is nullified, and as if the real problem were the unwillingness of the two sides to split the difference.

This blog, together with my paper, Without Mercy and therefore without Veracity, attempts to restore the legitimacy of an objective space from which reliable judgments—in value as much as in fact—can be made. Conservativism has plenty of critics, but few who operate from within the defined epistemic framework developed here. This project begins with fundamentals. What counts as authority and why? Can values be as objective as facts? What is the meaning of transcendence and where does it come from? By what measure do we decide what is true, reasonable and good? Can such a measure exist beyond range of bias? How can we know? What is there about evil that makes it evil, or good that makes it good? By what capacity do we know and on what grounds? What could God contribute to our sense of good that we would otherwise not know? And, assuming only God can define the right, what would be our defense against patriarchy, polygamy, slavery or a Taliban-like system of retribution now and hereafter—all of which promoted in the Bible?

I assign the answers to these questions to the objective workings of consciousness itself, operating on three integrated levels: observational (as in optical vision), inferential (as in reasoning) and evaluational (as in formation of moral principles). As stated in the theme of this blog, objective consciousness, pre-installed in every normal brain, does impart intuitions favoring accuracy, reasonability and values promoting our common survival—and will do so unless externally subverted.

We have those intuitions not because of culture, religion, education or even evolution but rather because we are conscious. How we acquired consciousness is irrelevant to how it must behave once it exists, given what it is. Silicon chip-based consciousness, should that ever happen, would embody the same set of intuitions. Education and social conditioning can certainly enhance these intuitions, but only by first assuming and drawing upon them. In other words, the thing itself, prior to externally-sourced distortions, cannot be relativized by its developmental history or current context. It is potentially absolute and should, for want of any cognitive alternatives and for all practical purposes, be treated as absolute. If this were not the case, all efforts to discover truth would be pointless, every attempt to persuade or convey information an exercise in manipulation, every news story propaganda, every discussion a farce, and every attack on the objectivity of human consciousness itself subject to being relativized, localized and annulled. No, you cannot deny objective consciousness and at the same time claim for yourself enough objective space to make the point. [For more, see the book In Praise of Reason by philosopher and epistemologist Michael P. Lynch and my review of his book in my paper.]

Values belong in the same objective zone of vision as any other kind of fact; there is a right and wrong and obvious ways to know the difference. As an outward-directed vision not focused on the self (you cannot look at your face as you look at a mountain), objective consciousness gives rise to altruism by using the same powers that enable us to understand anything else. Whether in terms of what we see or what we value, consciousness forces us to live beyond our own skins because it sees beyond our own skins both factually and morally. The entire conscious stack—observation, inference and value—is indivisible. Human consciousness so merges these three that a subverted value system will always break its two companions, basic observation and inference, at strategic points. Lying is never a stand-alone vice. This means that chronic and determined factual error is usually a symptom of something much worse. It means that something from outside the normal workings of our natural capacity for truth is actually at war with a fundamental human endowment, the ability to know.

The operative phrase here is “from outside,” something that is alien to what objective consciousness is. Conservatism is one such outside entity. It is an intruder breaching the boundaries of fact domains such that considerations outside the domain (and therefore irrelevant to what could be concluded from the domain itself) influence assessments of evidence within the domain.

For instance, hatred of taxation, regulation, size of government and government itself (not to mention money and the power that money creates) covertly intrudes into how physical processes heating the planet are interpreted. A desire for authoritarian fundamentalism (which needs to believe that life began just a few thousand years ago) breaks into the process of determining the merits of radiometric dating (which shows life to have existed for orders of magnitude longer). These are violations of self-evident laws of relevance and hence violations of the boundaries of fact domains. And no, this is not the sort of intrusion that happens by random wandering and missing a weed-covered no-trespassing sign. This is directional and willful. An unsubverted mind won’t let you do it. This is generally what we mean by corruption, conflict of interest and ulterior motive.

Corrupt intrusions into a fact domain require some level of malevolence, especially in the face of recalcitrance after being confronted with obvious evidence. Here is why. Values, correctly formed, promote survival and freedom from misery. Survival also depends on fidelity to the facts of reality; ignorance and willful distortions are typically dangerous. Good values will therefore accord great honor to factual fidelity, something we sometimes call honesty. Honesty is not just a virtuous ornament; it embodies the terms of our existence. There can only be bad reasons for breaking into a fact domain with foreign considerations, never, ever, good reasons.

So if the reason for vandalism is never good, what would the actual motivation be? And whatever it is, how could it be reconciled with the personal virtues that most conservatives, in common with the rest of humanity, possess? Within my case against conservatism, their very real virtues are neither an offsetting nor balancing consideration. Virtue, including socially-constructive programs promoted within churches, exists not because of religion or ideology but rather because we happen to be equipped with three-pound brains capable of higher consciousness. Objective consciousness, as an outward-focused awareness experienced by all conscious agents, will confer and enforce some level of idealism. It is sort of like having opposable thumbs, marvelous but not necessarily worthy of special credit.

Because objective consciousness is our default and dominant state and because ordinary conscious intuitions exert real ethical force, conservatism must take the precaution of darkening only specified bands along the broader frequency spectrum of virtue. It cannot profit from an attack on every form of honesty, every call to a higher purpose or every finding of science. Instead it must pose as virtue’s great enforcer, specializing in the discernment of evil or unworthiness, whether (1) real, (2) exaggerated or (3) fabricated. The more evil or unworthy a person can be defined as being, the less mercy need intervene and the more stalwart those making the judgment will appear. Conservatism finds righteous reasons to harm or deprive defined groups of people so as to obtain or retain a larger reward for the worthy and, crucially, an enhanced definition of worthiness itself. Or it may simply seek the satisfaction of applauding authorized pain or being personally authorized to use lethal force, a key motivation for the unfettered right to own a gun. Conservatism uses both plausible (secular) and arbitrary (religious) values against the larger reason defensible values exist (to enable as many of us as possible, through mutual cooperation, to survive in this life), a clear inversion.

There is usually some sort of target for harm in view, people to be shot, executed, bombed, imprisoned, deported, excluded, belittled, dehumanized, denied medical care, denied entry (whether into a bathroom or a country) or otherwise deprived. Of all the threats facing America, the ones conservatives prefer to fear are precisely the ones authorizing exclusion, discrimination, pain, retaliation or destruction. They achieve high levels of fear even for low-probability threats, such as being killed by a terrorist or being overrun by brown-skinned refugees. They do not blink at any level of deficit spending or size of government to defend against such threats. But if, on the other hand, the threat is defined by science, and the onset of the threat is not only probable but certain, with civilization itself at stake, suddenly they lose their fear and denounce the cost and governmental power required to meet such crises amidst false science denying reason for alarm. They mobilized, reordered and expanded major sectors of the United States government and military because three thousand lives were lost on 9/11, but casually accepted the loss of at least ten times that many per year due to unaffordable health care and insurance—and ever since continue to fight bitterly any reasonable attempt to solve that problem.

The disconnect between what they choose to fear and actual life-threatening probabilities tells a horrible truth. Fear itself can be an innocent and constructive emotion. And terrorism is one of many things to be feared and confronted, yes. But if a political party is in business to seek out only the fears that authorize harm and then defines itself by its opposition to confronting threats requiring cooperation, shared resources and mutual sacrifice, there is something in addition to defending public welfare in the mix. This added little ingredient looks like power as its own end, an exhilarating and subrational motivator.

Power is a suspect here because it delivers its most potent payload of satisfaction when deployed negatively, especially if some violated principle can be cited, transforming willingness to harm into an act of discernment and stern moral courage. The power payoff is double, first in the sheer exhilaration of firing the shot (or whatever a particular assertion of dominance consists of) and second in demonstrating the moral fortitude to do so. The pleasures of power tend to be less profuse when the remedy is positive, involving circumstances of equality and mutual care where none are harmed, no superiority is claimed and no other aggrandizing motivators, including claims to wealth, are in play. Wealth, as such, may not begin as negatively-deployed power, but it is a potent means of power nonetheless, and for that reason alone lionized by conservatism. But in addition, sooner or later, defense of wealth will lead to their larger project of negative deployment in the form of delegitimizing people whose plight calls for progressive taxation.

The quest for dominance is the exact opposite of the intuitions of objective consciousness, which is why there can be no rational justification for power as its own end. This is because it inverts the outward focus of objective consciousness, upon which ordinary factuality and reason depend, and redirects priority to the self and the sheer exhilaration of being in control, a subrational motivation. This dark motivation will therefore dement whatever it touches, with a bias toward sanctified cruelty. Motivations of this sort inevitably find themselves on a collision course with fact domains found to be in dire need of outside interference.

But there is much to divert one from detecting the actual destructiveness of this manner of thought. For one thing, large swaths of their portfolio, though compatible with a negative deployment of power, can be defended. Punishment is sometimes necessary; taxation, at some level, could be excessive; certain wars should be fought; regulation can sometimes be counterproductive; limits on charity should exist; national security is essential; individual responsibility is indeed a worthy virtue on which the health of society depends; government agencies tasked to fight terrorism should be adequately funded; personal liberties and property rights do matter; a completely equal distribution of wealth would be neither fair nor productive. Moreover, there is legitimate room for variances of opinion regarding just where the lines should be drawn in any of these areas of policy. This means that a more restrictive stance in any of these policies may not be evidence of a subrational motivation for power.

In fact, the plausibility of these positions and the arguability of precisely where to draw lines reduce the relevance—and appropriateness—of any concern about motive. Who cares if one favors the right thing for the wrong reason if there is also a good reason in play? Besides, isn’t everyone wrong about something? And how could half the population be wrong? Doesn’t nature allocate wisdom more widely than partisans suppose? Could it be that both sides are playing with only half a deck and that society needs both to operate with a full deck? These questions lead the larger society to accord conservatives equal placement at the table, equal representation in discussion, the assignment of the useful role as counterbalance to the left, the protection of classifying their opposition as biased, and the diversion of attributing the real problem to both-sides tribalism and unwillingness to compromise. It’s all yin-yang [as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt states in his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, reviewed in my paper].

No it isn’t. And motivation matters. Half a deck sounds like an innocent metaphor until you discover why half their cards are missing. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason means that even the right thing will be done badly. For example, border security should not mean terrorizing refugees by kidnapping their toddlers. Limits on taxation should not mean one thousandth of the U.S. population in possession of nearly as much wealth as is possessed by nine tenths of the U.S. population. And there are only a limited number of policy domains, such as national defense, with the potential for aligning productively with an underlying lust for power. Medical care is not among them. Neither is environmental protection nor campaign finance reform nor solving the problem of student debt nor affordable housing nor assuring access to clean drinking water.

Moreover, because a desire for power, control, dominance and superiority is subrational, people in this pursuit cannot be reasoned with. Every fact domain standing in their way they will violate because something other than the meaning of the relevant facts has its grip on their steering wheel. Every discussion with them will collapse into the farce of a pointless dispute over facts and factoids where none of the details are relevant to the actual reason they argue as they do. The first line of defense of society’s fund of wisdom, namely, the potential to be convinced of error, is lost. That leaves overpowering them in elections as the only remaining recourse, a fifty-fifty proposition at best. Opposing ideas in the cockpit of a plane, to be resolved only by which pilot is physically stronger, leaves everyone’s fate to random circumstance.

Intruding the heavy hand of a power motive into a debate brings zero added value as a counterweight to those who differ with them. At best, even without this heavy hand, discussions are difficult enough, given the complexity of most issues. Throwing a huge subrational driver into the mix can only lead to a less rational result. To see conservatism as some sort of balancing force completely misses the reality that reason itself is the best of all balancing forces. It is the only qualified agent by which to identify the limits of both the negative and positive functions of government, leaving absolutely no useful role for conservatism to play. Reason requires no political matrix in which to function, but will appear to function within such a matrix—and thus be condemned as a bias—if a political party happens to take up its cause, as have Democrats with climate change. The moment a named group of people adopts a rational policy, that policy is automatically relativized as political and stigmatized as a power grab.

One could object that reason is merely instrumental to ends otherwise determined and thus not a reliable guide in its own right. My whole project is dedicated to the destruction of this self-negating proposition. My central contention is that native human consciousness indeed comes with hardwired directionality toward the true, reasonable and good and that this directionality is not all that hard to apply to practical situations. If not (and to repeat), by what power of mind are we to credit denials that this is the case?

For most of us this level of philosophical abstraction is unnecessary to grasp the situation. They run up debt by tax giveaways to the rich. They concentrate wealth. They authorize brutality. They delegitimize the use of government to solve problems. They reject whatever facts contradict them. They promote the pollution of the world. Their tendency to corrupt fact domains feeds naturally into whatever other kinds of corruption it takes to retain power—as manifested by their implacable opposition to reforming campaign finance and ending voter suppression and gerrymandering and their acceptance of the corrupt practices that obtained from them a president in 2016. The very existence of this world view makes it almost impossible to take even the most obvious and elemental measures to solve problems. Only by expenditure of enormous unpaid civic energy (as I can personally attest) can they be defeated so as to allow anything good to happen, and even that tends to fail in North Carolina and many other states. When something good does occur, such as the Affordable Care Act, the Voting Rights Act or the Clean Power Plan, it is often by the tiniest of margins and/or likely to be reversed. America lives on the knife-edge of perpetual folly and is ever at risk of recovering lost folly. Only by random luck does this country occasionally manage to avoid succumbing to its ideologically-protected dark instincts.

That luck ran out in 2016. Only something as morally and intellectually bankrupt as the American conservative mentality could have elected someone as ignorant, incompetent, cruel, racist, dishonest and given to conspiracy theories as Donald Trump—and then remain loyal to him even after these very traits, on full display ahead of the election, subsequently surfaced so brazenly and frequently as to escape individual attention. He is the window of all windows into the conservative soul. If there remained any doubt regarding the underlying dishonesty, racism, cruelty and quest for raw power of conservatism, look no further than the man that this movement not only elected, but subsequently came to worship. There has been precious little buyer’s remorse, at least as of this writing. Time after time, neither Paul Ryan, then Speaker of the House, nor Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dared lift a finger to Trump for fear of risking their members in subsequent elections, a clear indication of the character of those on whom their political survival depends.

The entry of this apparition has shocked even a few conservatives into trying to account for how their movement managed to yield such a result. Charles Sykes, a conservative commentator, argues in his 2017 book, How the Right Lost its Mind, that conservatism has always been victimized by what he terms crackpotism. But, he also argues, this has been due to an unfortunately extended run of misadventures and bad luck, nudged on by an assortment of cranks, right-wing media outlets and false shepherds out of character with the true majesty of classical conservative thought as exemplified by the great William F. Buckley, once a gatekeeper against the more loony sectors of conservatism. I argue, on the contrary, that this loss of mind, accurately documented by Sykes, is due precisely to what conservativism, by definition, is, with Buckley himself a founder of its intellectual devolution. Despite the elegance of its dress, the erudition of its advocates and the academic trappings of its think tanks, this kind of doctrine will always attract a disproportionate share of cranks, crackpots and other manifestations of factual and ethical deviance, thanks to the darker instincts that it exists to serve and thanks to the indissoluble bond between a motive for power and every other species of irrationality. If a thing must constantly be defended from its orbiting cranks, maybe the thing itself is a crank.

Yes, if one could obtain a readout of the entire spectrum of values held by conservative people, many, if not most of the frequencies would light up normally, even exceptionally well within specific ranges (such as personal generosity). They are, after all, conscious agents. But it doesn’t take long to discover where, along the spectrum, things have gone badly wrong. In fact we already know and go out of our way to keep things friendly by avoiding certain topics in conversation. I was tempted to ask my Republican counterpart what he thought of thousands of children, even toddlers, being ripped from their refugee parents already under the trauma of a harrowing journey, as happened starting in 2017 at the order of the Trump Administration or what he thought of the fact that America has anywhere from five to a hundred times the gun violence of other comparable countries. But instead I watched as he warmly greeted fellow church members who had no interest in my slate cards. They voted for Mark Meadows, leader of the most hardline Republican faction in Congress, an ardent Trump supporter and a foe of the Affordable Care Act, gun control, refugees and any measure to mitigate climate change. Unfortunately, it is precisely that smaller set of inverted values that dictates their vote and the ordering of American life.

In a rational society, why should we find ourselves moved to defeat what at least half the population stands for, expending time, energy and money that our own careers could desperately use? That recurring thought plagued me throughout the last campaign as I knocked on doors, sweating under a hot sun and then on more doors as the fall chill set in. Can reality itself be split in two, so as to legitimize contradiction? Is morality itself up for grabs, making all our choices arbitrary? Can we ourselves, despite our labor, fully embrace the idea that we are actually confronting a profound intellectual and moral crisis? Perhaps the Abolitionists of the nineteenth century and Civil Rights activists of the twentieth asked themselves the same questions.

If I am right, if objective consciousness, possessed in some measure by every sane human being, does in fact bend indivisibly toward the real, rational and good, then there is hope. Because of the force of the intuitions of which this endowment consists, it is inherently more persuasive, in the long run, than any ideology arrayed against it. Conservatives, like the rest of us, are conscious agents and thus involuntarily under larger constraints than their ideology. This means that all of us, even against our will, are capable of appreciating the light and of feeling embarrassment if found to be wanting in what every mind must ultimately know to be true. If truth answers to consciousness itself, some things should be self-evident. In that event, stating the case makes the case—for all.

--Randolph E. Neall