My recent posts have been railing against the moral degeneracy of “conservatives.”
A long time ago, I decided that the complete moral bankruptcy of “conservatism” was the most dangerous thing about it. The increasing normalization of “conservative” moral deviancy from the cynical Southern Strategy of the late 1960s, through the blatantly hypocritical takeover of the Republican party by “evangelicals” in the 1980s, through the horrendous viciousness of Newt Gingrich and the Ayn Rand Republicans of the 1990s, through the violent anti-democratic war-mongering of the Bush/Cheney eras in the 2000s, through the racist Tea Party of the early 2010s, to the Trumpist outright fascism of our time, “conservative” immorality has burgeoned into a worldwide threat to Enlightenment progress—and now to humankind itself.
But one of my favorite writers, Umair Haque, has reminded me that it’s not just “conservative” immorality that threatens the world. It’s also “conservative” stupidity.
We all know that “conservatives” are stupid. No matter how intellectual they try to be, no matter how clever they are at debating, at demagoguery, at political shrewdness, they are essentially and irremediably stupid because they are idiots in the original Greek sense of the term. That is, they care only about themselves and not at all about the society which sustains them and makes their selfish lives possible.
No matter how smart you are, no matter how much you know, no matter how well you speak and write, if you don’t understand that everything good in human life begins with human sympathy and cooperation, you are the stupidest of human beings.
Umair has reminded me that “conservative” immorality is only one of the dangers posed by these antisocial idiots. “Conservative” stupidity is at least as dangerous, and probably even more so. Here is Umair from a recent article:
Here you have a simple example of a Very Old Problem. Fanatics take charge — they lie and cheat their way into power, making promises they can’t deliver, scapegoating innocents, and so forth. But when they get into power? Being fools, lunatics, crackpots, and aggressively willful ignoramuses . . . they have no idea what they’re doing. Ruin proceeds, and gathers a momentum all its own.
Umair points out that this is happening all over the world. Britain has become a far-right country, much to the dismay of British heirs of the Enlightenment, and earning Britain excoriating criticism and punishment from the European Union. But that Union itself is being racked by the rise of “conservative” fake populism in France, Spain, Italy and other countries as the vicious “conservative” liars in those nations become ever more virulent, imitating American Republicans. In Israel today, “conservatives” have destroyed democracy by making the legislature superior to the courts. That is a rejection of Montesquieu’s essential insight that legislators are not competent to be judges of their own actions. If the courts are not allowed to review legislatures, you no longer have democracy. You have despotism by legislature.
The red states in America are becoming stupider and stupider faster and faster. That means they are becoming more unjust, more racist, more homophobic, more anti-education, more anti-history, and more anti-social. Florida now thinks that it can rewrite history to the extent that slavery must be interpreted for students as a benefit to slaves. Arkansas thinks it can just ignore an order from United States Supreme Court to fix their Republican-impose racist Congressional District maps. Red states all over think they can stop their citizens from traveling to other states to get abortions. The whole of red America now thinks it can behave as though the Federal Government does not exist when it is not controlled by their benighted clansmen.
This rocketing increase in stupidity in America is making the nation spin out of control. We cannot deal with real problems like climate change, gun violence, drug addiction, infrastructure, and world government because “conservatives” are pushing their stupid imaginary fears to the top of the priority list. Stupidity piled on stupidity piled on selfish, antisocial “conservative” fears.
Until decent Americans put a stop to “conservative” near-parity in our elections, the stupidity of “conservatives” in America will continue to destroy our lives.
There isn’t much time to achieve this. We have maybe one or two more elections to send “conservatives” into the political wilderness before they achieve tyranny of the minority.
And if they do, the rest of the world will imitate America, as it has done for so long.
We decent Americans owe it to the world to understand the true danger of “conservative” stupidity and to stop it here.
Because if we don’t, the entire world will descend into tyranny the like of which most of us cannot imagine.