These are the individuals who are so "freaked out" (for lack of a better term) by the Obama Presidency, that they have started stocking up on guns, ammunition, and survivalist supplies against the day they feel a revolution will have to take place in order to stop the "socialist" takeover of the United States. In other words, they feel so incompetent in their ability to persuade their fellow Americans of the "wrongness" of single payer healthcare, the continuation of Social Security, and other facets of the "socialist usurpation of American values;" these individuals believe that they will have to violently impose their wills upon the rest of the American people in order to save us from ourselves and the evils of "socialism."
Incompetence and arrogance: a very bad combination.
"Peace through strength!" is the motto of these conservatives on international affairs. There is an assumption on the part of conservatives that if another nation does not do what the United States wants it to do, it should be punished. This includes the use of force, up to and including nuclear weapons.
Their belief system extends to domestic matters, where they believe they have a need to carry a firearm to be safe outside their own home. They are in denial about the facts of most mass murders in the last several years: that it is someone with a mindset similar to their own, using their Second Amendment guaranteed right to own a gun, to visit death and destruction on the innocent. The recent shooting at the base PX at Fort Lewis in Washington state, home of the Army's elite Stryker Brigade, demonstrates that weapons alone do not insure your safety.
Unlike Voltaire (and I will paraphrase here) who once said, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it;" the modern conservatives' attitude is, "I disapprove of what you say, and I will kill you if you try and say it." This is being demonstrated by the Astroturf conservatives' reaction against healthcare reform, by disrupting, sometimes with violence, town hall meetings of Democratic members of the House and Senate.
Violence, or the threat of violence, has always been a staple of conservative reaction to political and economic reform, going back at least to the time of the late Roman Republic. The murders of the Brothers Gracchi, Fulvius Flaccus, Saturninus, Marcus Livius Drusus the Younger, Publius Clodius Pulcher, and Gaius Julius Caesar (to name a few), at the instigation of the Roman Senate's most conservative members, did more to undermine Roman law and tradition than any action of its reformers.
In this country, most of the "race riots" up until the 1960's were mobs of whites rampaging through the "colored" part of town. It was conservative Southern Congressman "Bully" Brooks who walked into the United States Senate, and nearly beat abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner to death with a gutta-percha cane. It was conservative (actually fascist in my opinion) business leaders who attempted to covertly overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt in the summer of 1933. It was the extremely conservative J. Edgar Hoover who denied the existence of Organized Crime for thirty years; because the Mob helped the power elite maintain control over the nation's poor and minority communities.
While many individual conservatives may be highly moral individuals, conservatism as a political, social, and economic force is morally bankrupt. It is based on everything staying as it is in our social, political and economic systems, when the world is changing faster than we can imagine. Conservatism is overly reliant upon expediency and the use of force to maintain the status quo, turning a blind eye to the realities of a changing world. Its members are against spending any money out of their own pockets, or on any program that is not to the immediate benefit of themselves or their associates. Charity they say begins at home, but their own charitable inclination, at home or out in the world, is inversely proportional to the actual wealth they possess.
If you should actually make some headway against their belief system, watch out! They will attack you, most probably verbally. But if you hit too close to one of the beliefs that lies at the foundation of their world view, physical violence, or at least the threat of it, is possible.
This is especially true concerning the government. Many conservatives are adamantly opposed to the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, which made a woman's choice to terminate her pregnancy a private matter between her and her physician, stopping government interference in the matter, with limitations as the fetus came closer to being viable. (I would strongly suggest that if you have not done so, read Woodward and Armstrong's book The Brethren concerning the difficult choices made by Justice Blackmun in drafting Roe v. Wade.) Many of these same conservatives are the same people whose strongest objection to a system of national healthcare is that it will come between them and their physicians. If you bring up this contradiction, be ready for a fusillade of insults from your conservative antagonist, the least of which is "socialist baby killer."
The real problem with too many conservatives is that they tend to have a very strong streak of authoritarianism in their souls, as demonstrated by their love for hierarchical systems and their intolerance of people with ideas different from their own. John Dean wrote of these individuals in Conservatives Without Conscience, and Karen Stenner did a more detailed study of this phenomenon in her book The Authoritarian Dynamic.
This is coupled in many cases with a contrary desire to believe themselves almost wholly autonomous individuals, whose social responsibility ends with themselves, their family, and perhaps a very small circle of those who believe as they do. So their submission to authoritarianism is not to the government, but to the opinion of their friends and neighbors, family, business associates, and those they have been told they should listen to because of that politician or commentator's political, economic, or social beliefs. This, in my opinion, is a far more insidious form of tyranny than any "tyranny of the majority," simply because it is not obvious.
Immanuel Kant wrote in his Universal Natural History, that human beings have an "unsocial sociability," with conflicting inclinations to live both in society, and outside as an individual. The conflict arises, Kant continues, from human beings wanting to have company, but also wanting to have everything their own way. Only by their use of reason can human beings overcome this conflict: of living freely with others, while allowing others to live freely as well. To resolve this paradox through the use of reason must invariably involve compromise.
The real misfortune is that many (if not all) of these conservatives have no interest in listening to or using reason.
The most frustrating aspect of these conservatives and their way of thinking is the wide gulf between the facts they believe they "know," and factual reality. Let me give you some examples.
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