A Conservative Story posted by Ben

I've been thinking about the conservative vision of America's future, a future where 'tort reform' has allowed businesses to calculate the cost of tiny lawsuits into the practice of systematically abusing their workers and polluting the environment, punishment is meted out for any kind of failure, the social safety net is utterly destroyed, health care is available to those who can afford it, public schools are destroyed and replaced with vouchers that only benefit the wealthy, the minimum wage is a thing of the past, and we live in a state of perpetual war against liberals, war against the poor, and war against the terrorists whom our policies are creating more of every day.

This isn't the future that we hear conservatives talking about publicly. But every one of those elements listed above is an intended consequence of policies like No Child Left Behind, the Clean Skies Act, the push to privatize Social Security, the bankruptcy bill that will likely become law, the war on terror, and so-called tort reform.

George Lakoff believes that the adulation that conservatives hold for these goals is rooted in a 'strict-father' mentality that prizes competition for scant resources, self-discipline, and the core assumption that success justifies itself, or inversely, that the unsuccessful are so because of their own inadequacies. The notion that their policies will create lives for many Americans where opportunity is rare to non-existent is, at best, considered ridiculous and at worst, privately lauded as 'the way that things ought to be.'

I prefer to break it down in terms of power: the only justification that one needs to hold power is that one holds power. People may make all kinds of excuses for why they get to hold power over others, but it ultimately comes down to "I have it and will do everything I can to make sure you don't get it." While this is a problem across the entire political spectrum, the combination of desire for power with a moral worldview that cares little for the underprivileged, other than regarding their potential to create additional income for the powerful, is a deadly element of conservatism.

Story and narrative are some of the most effective tools that we have to counter the message of conservative ideologues. As I was reading this morning, I realized how powerful the story of conservative's vision for America's future can be. Not for their purposes, however, but to illustrate their true agenda.

Imagine a story that follows a working-class man with a wife and three kids in the America that conservatives are trying to create. He is a good man, ethical, trustworthy, but has never been able to increase his family's quality of life. He knows that his children will never be able to afford college, now that government grants and loans are no longer available. He must work two jobs, as must his wife, because of their crushing debt, debt that cannot be cleared by bankruptcy. At his manufacturing job, he is informed that his wage has been lowered. With no unions to protect him, he is forced to accept the cuts. Desperate to understand how he can work himself to the bone and still be told by society that his failure to provide adequate support for his family is the result of his laziness, he seeks out somebody else to blame, because otherwise he would be destroyed by shame. Luckily, there are plenty of candidates to blame for his life. At the local church, the pastor speaks of the gay people who are responsible for harming his marriage, the few remaining liberals in America who are responsible for the awful economy, the terrorists whose actions necessitated losing our civil liberties, the movies which are responsible to teaching his children disrespect, and the secular humanists who want to destroy the church itself. Every Sunday, this man attends church and hears who is to blame for his misfortune. Every night on the radio, he hears the same message from a stable of conservative pundits. And this decent, hardworking man learns how to hate, how to lash out against the people who have made his life a living hell, and how to shift responsibility for his life away from those in power to those who are powerless.

Now wouldn't that be an interesting setup for a movie?