Another passage from Lakoff, with my interpolations. From page 68:
In its moral basis and its content, conservatism is centered on the politics of authority, obedience, and discipline. This content is profoundly antidemocratic, whereas our country was founded on opposition to authoritarianism. Yet conservatism also lays exclusive claim to patriotism. There is a contradiction here. How do conservatives get around it?
The answer can be found in the word “conservatism” itself. Those who call themselves by that label typically say they are in favor of conserving the best of past traditions. —
We could stop right there. Remember that democracy, American style, was a radical idea in its time, just as, somewhat in parallel, the discipline in thinking introduced by the Enlightenment, another radical idea compared to millennia of supernatural thinking, brought about a scientific revolution. It seems that conservatives want to conserve *older* ideas. Their yearning for an authoritarian past is therefore anti-American. The South’s yearning for its “way of life” that was built on slavery is anti-American. And their yearning for the protocols of religion is anti-Enlightenment. Conservatives would turn back the great advances, in terms of their benefits to humanity at large (and not just one group), in human history.
Sure they say the “best” of past traditions. But look at what they want to preserve. Returning to Lakoff.
— Yet contemporary “conservatives” are often quite radical, wanting to impose near-radical values where they had not been before, such as eliminating habeas corpus and other safeguards of liberty, eliminating checks and balances and supporting the power of the “unitary executive,” [in order to ignore legislative decisions] abolishing public education, and so on. Fiscal conservatism used to be seen as holding back on government spending, but today it means accumulating an astronomical deficit as a way to justify cutting social programs and government protections, while supporting militarism. That is hardly “conservative” in the traditional sense of preserving.
Conservatives presumably would deny doing this intentionally, but it always seems to work out that way.
And this takes us to the conservative idea of the mythical golden age they would like to return to.
In place of the reality of conserving the best of the past — public education, the balance of powers, the separate of church and state, habeas corpus — many right-wing radicals have created mythical narratives governed by radical conservative values that they want to go “back” to. One such narrative is “originalism” in judicial decisions, where “meaning” is a supposed “original meaning.” The “original meaning” is somehow always in line with radical conservative values….
Whereas, given the Enlightenment ideals the founders were trying to instantiate, it seems more likely their meaning was certainly not consistent with modern “radical conservative values.” Further, what modern conservatives more often latch on to in the Constitution are areas about the modern world that the founders had no clue about. Thus goes the reasoning of some Supreme Court Justices: no rights can be found about anything not mentioned in the Constitution.
There is the narrative of American exceptionalism, in which America is inherently good and has an evangelistic duty to spread its way of life — and when it fails or harms people, it is because it was betrayed from within by “defeatists,” by cowards who would “cut and run,” by “leftist extremists,” and so on. Mythical narratives are the stuff of politics, and contemporary conservatism is rife with them.
Clearly conservatives have different ideas about the best of the past than do progressives like Lakoff. And here we see that conservative ideas map to the basics of primitive, tribal morality, where leadership by a single strong-man, and belief in a common mythos, was paramount for survival of the tribe. (Alas, Lakoff seems to have no interest in understanding *why* his two modes of political thinking exist, or how they came about.)
(Carl Sagan also wondered “what are conservatives conserving?” in his book BILLIONS AND BILLIONS, reviewed here.)
