Feelings-based Conservatism

DEA agent pulling weeds. Image courtesy the US Drug Enforcement Administration.

I'm still pissed off about Texas and the state's continuing marijuana prohibition. I can go to a local store and buy pounds of tobacco, gallons of liquor, and all the pharmaceuticals I can convince a doctor to prescribe, but if I want a bit of the forbidden flower, I have to sneak around and worry about incarceration and asset forfeiture.

That's an example of how conservatism can lead to stupid results. Marijuana prohibition started in this country about 100 years ago. At the time, that was a progressive action, because it was a change in the way we manage society. Like a lot of changes, marijuana prohibition was eventually adopted as a conservative position, despite the fact that it caused the kind of unintended consequences a conservative should be wary of.

And that's the state of affairs in Texas today. Lots of old, white men who see nothing wrong with filling your lungs with tobacco smoke or drinking yourself blind still oppose weed because to them it "feels" like the conservative thing to do.

There's a lot of feelings-based conservatism in America today, and that's a Bad Thing. Conservatism is about preserving the good ideas of the past, and it has to be empirical if it's going to properly assess those ideas.

Progressives can dispense with empiricism, because their job is to push envelopes and test boundaries and create new ideas.Conservatives are supposed to be the ones governed by facts.

Do you see a lot of fact-based conservatism these days? I don't. I see a lot of emotional pseudo-conservatism that's based on emotions and stories rather than a sober assessment of the evidence. That's why the Republican/Tea Party has been in a state of confusion in recent years. The party has abandoned the bedrock principles of American conservatism and turned into a weird sort of mean-girls clique that governed by its daily dose of angry media.

That's why the party can't be rational about most issues these days. The conservative media tells them to be furious that unemployed people are doing drugs, so they get furious. They ignore the fact that their own anti-drug programs show the problem is virtually nonexistent.

The conservative media tells them to be furious that the nation is suffering an epidemic of voter fraud, so they get furious. They ignore the fact that they can't find any evidence of this epidemic.

The conservative media tells them to be furious that scientists say we should do something about anthropogenic global warming, so they get furious. They ignore what the global scientific community says, because they've been convinced that being anti-science is the conservative thing to do.

The same thing goes for marijuana prohibition. Oh, sure, some individuals who call themselves conservative will claim to support legalization, but they won't get furious about it, because the conservative media hasn't told them to be furious. Even though prohibition, and the larger drug war in general, has proven to be an expensive, rights-crushing failure whose unintended consequences have damaged the nation and trampled on the Constitution, even though it's exactly the kind of big-government excess today's conservatives claim to oppose, they tolerate it or even support it.

That's why the Republican/Tea Party has become a bad joke. It's not a band of sensible, evidence-based people who want to help improve America by promoting a rational, consistent philosophy based on genuine conservative principles. It's a band of weak-minded emotion junkies, who let the radio voices tell them what being conservative means.

Here's the sad part, or the funny part depending on your perspective. We conservatives used to mock the progressives for being weak-minded emotion junkies. We used to laugh at their inability to face reality. We were so busy mocking that we didn't notice when the conservative media, the multinational corporations, and the religious fundamentalists came in and stole our movement. We didn't notice when those groups broke conservatism.

We can still fix American conservatism, but it's going to require us to quite letting the media tell us what and how to think. It's going to require us to reject politicians who pander to our emotions instead of appealing to our reason. It's going to require us to return to evidence-based reason instead of emotion-based anger.

Conservatism is about preserving the good ideas of the past, and letting your mind be controlled by feelings has never been a good idea.