Conservatism Is Not Mental Illness
For the past few weeks I have been absorbed by The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, the 1991 magnum opus by Christopher Lasch. It is a deeply rich and complex book, which makes a case that America has gotten to a place where it simply cannot talk about limits.
This is a problem both for conservatives, who claim that tax cuts will simply make the economy expand ad infinitum, but more severely for liberals, who resent the suggestion that there should be any kind of limits at all -- unless of, course, these are limits on Christianity and the speech of conservatives.
One of the sections of radiant insight describes the relegation of conservatism, particularly religious conservatism, to the category of mental illness. The religion of liberal progressivism believes that the world is on a course of inexorable social improvement. This is, and I am not exaggerating, a credo for the left. It is a faith every bit as deep as the faith of a snake-bitten West Virginia preacher.
To some extend this is justified. In the last hundred years alone, the advances in medicine and technology have been astonishing. Yet with economic and technological progress there can also come moral and social regression. And if there is enough of this type of regression, civilizations can fall. In the last 50 years religious conservatives have not seen bussing, abortion, gay marriage and higher taxes as great advancements for our civilization.
To the contrary, conservatives have held that these things will slowly, over time, destroy the West. Abortion and the contraceptive mentality have already driven birth rates so low in Europe that those countries will eventually be taken over by Muslim immigrants. And history has shown that more than other religions Islam tends towards violence -- as George Weigel once noted, the religion of peace didn't spread from the desert to the rest of the world by handing out pamphlets. Of course, this is an argument based on logic, historic fact and reason, three things which are anathema to the Church of Progressivism.
So for liberals, the response to conservatives is simple: declare that those who disagree with you are insane. From Ed Schultz's "Psycho Talk" on MSNBC to to the incredulous babble of Chris Matthews (he is incapable of talking about conservatives with using medical metaphors) and the contemptuous snark of Rachel Maddow, the game is to state that your opponent is insane and move on. The most extreme example of this is Andrew Sullivan, whose pathologizing of Sarah Palin has itself become pathological. (Someone may even go as far as to suggest that Sullivan's rage towards Palin has more to do with personal and sexual hangups than with politics at all.)
In The True and Only Heaven, Christopher Lasch traces this conservatives-are-nuts meme to a series of books published in the 1950s called Studies in Prejudice. Written by four sociologists and including titles like The Authoritarian Personality and An American Dilemma, the series sought answer the question, particularly pertinent in the wake of Hitler, of why people hate. The answer: bigotry is a disease. Lasch explains, "The purpose and design of Studies in Prejudice dictated the conclusion that prejudice, a psychological disorder rooted in the authoritarian personality structure, could be eradicated only by subjecting the American people to what amounted to collective psychotherapy -- by treating them as inmates of an insane asylum."
The authors "had substituted a medical for a political idiom and relegated a broad range of issues to the clinic -- to 'scientific' study as opposed to philosophical and political debate." Now you know why the hosts on MSNBC never book conservatives to debate them. I mean, why waste time with crazy people? Instead, ideologues like Rachel Maddow and Mary Harris-Perry delve into the psychology of conservatism, its racism, atavism, paranoia. Why have Robert George on to genuinely test your theories when you can dispatch your enemy with a Freudian riff?
The psychotic conservative meme took such hold in the liberal imagination that it became resistant to facts. Thus, when Kennedy was killed in Dallas, liberal writers, politicians and journalists were quick to blame the murder on the "climate of hate" in Texas -- and America. Never mind that Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist. The eggheads and sociologists of the 1950s had issued reports and published doorstoppers proving as much.
Ultimately, however -- and this is explored fully in James Piereson's brilliant book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism -- liberalism became what it was projecting. Devastated by Kennedy's death, it was overtaken by the far left, which, like the old far right, was paranoid, humorless, and dogmatic -- not to mention far more prone to violence.
Watching Chris Matthews melt down at the mention of Sarah Palin is not much different from seeing old clips of John Birchers ranting about fluoridation in water. It's why when congressman Paul Ryan issued an adult and responsible plan to reduce the deficit, the response on the left was to decry him as a "psycho-talker" who want to starve children.
To be sure, there does exist the dumb-ass redneck American. I am writing this from Ocean City, Maryland, where a couple days ago I went to a music festival. I had no idea what the entertainment would be. I was appalled when I got there and found it was country music.
While the religion of progressivism always leads to piles of dead bodies, it was quite different from the progressive development of the soul and intellect on an individual basis. God created us to learn and grow in knowledge and love for Him. When I hear honky-tonk sounds celebrating ignorance, illiteracy and bellicose religiosity, it's like we never descended from the trees.
Many Americans -- the very kind of decent regular folks that Christopher Lasch praised -- have also become proud of their ignorance, as well as infected with the ideology of progressivism. With the economy tanking in 2008, Americans had a choice. They could have accepted that there is no such thing as a perfect world, and that in a free capitalistic society there are bound to be occasional dips.
We could have accepted that it may be years before we right ourselves economically. We could have voted for Mitt Romney, who knows something about business, and hoped for the best. Instead we elected Barack Obama, the epitome of the arrogant elitist who turns politics into emotive therapy and psychologizes his opponents.
A large part of the reason we are dealing with that disaster is that a lot of rednecks in the South did not want to vote for Romney, a Mormon. Contra the experts and the sociologists, their prejudice was not a disease. It was just flat-out stupidity.
