Friday, October 9, 2009

Conservatism Vs. Racism


Of course the thinking is that if one is an economic conservative, one isn't necessarily a racist. I mean, duh, right? What a convenient ad hominem attack to substitute for serious policy disagreement.

But I'm not so sure.

My thinking is that modern "liberalism" and "conservatism" are really more about views on human nature than anything else. This is why you tend to get such circular positions on so many issues; the details seem to be secondary to the political philosophy. We are not really discussing policy - we are discussing conflicting assumptions.

We all know that while most conservatives are not admittedly racist - or at least not in theory, all conscious racists are pretty much conservative. Why is this? Just some cultural coincidence?

I think not. It occurred to me that the conservative view of human nature - that we are all free agents, acting of our own free will, and personally responsible for our relative successes or failures in life, if true requires a racist explanation. For it is a statistical fact that minorities are quite disproportionately responsible for crime, drug abuse, poverty and general lack of success. To the racist, this is obviously because there is something inherently wrong with their race, or at the very least their ethnicity.

The conservative however, unable to simply blame race, instead defers to the magical substance he calls "free will". Somehow, though free as any other man to not engage in destructive behavior, the minority continues, year after year to make that choice. If this is not profoundly convincing evidence of racial inferiority, I'm not sure what more evidence one would need. Yet consciously admitting to oneself that one is indeed racist is a cognition in dissonance with modern social morality.

So the conservative, propelled as he is into racial hatred by the geometry of his political calculations, crawls deeper and deeper into it's philosophical hubris. Themes such as "freedom" and "markets", impenetrable in their vast shallowness, provide sophisticated cover for what has become an idolatrous cult of majoritarian self-improvement. Like Narcissus, he gazes out over his fellow man, yet only ever sees his own sheltered self. Compassion has been transformed into Onanism: instead of accurately reproducing renditions of the trajectories of others, he draws lines that resemble little more than poorly sketched version of himself, or others like him.

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