The Moral Corruption of Conservative Ideology

Conservatives love to portray themselves as the champions of equality—true equality, fair equality, not the skewed, perverted versions espoused by the left. Their most basic and unshakeable premise is that everyone, no matter what their circumstances, should begin the race at the same starting line. Winners and losers, they contend, must be separated on merit, not by the dictates of do-gooders either in or out of government. Channeling their best Herbert Spencer—he coined “survival of the fittest,” not Darwin—they insist that only by creating a true meritocracy can society move forward.

And that will be best for all, because none but the true winners will have the ability and the will to properly power the economic and social engine that will provide wherewithal for those who lagged behind. (Spencer, of course, would have been happy to let them rot, but most modern-day conservatives feel somewhat inhibited in voicing these sentiments, Stephen Miller being a notable exception.) If society chooses to artificially elevate those who do not deserve both the privilege and the opportunity to lead, no one will suffer more than those at the bottom of the pyramid, for they will lose their potential saviors.

American conservatives categorically reject that these views are racist or misogynistic. How can that be true when the competition for riches and power is open to all? (No one is more emphatic in this view than Black Republicans.) In addition, for them, true equality is synonymous with “liberty.” If some citizens are prohibited from exercising their liberty because of some government bureaucrat’s attempt to contort society in his or her image, those citizens, by definition, become unequal.

On its face, this all sounds reasonable…until you go back and take a closer look at the first assumption, the equal starting line. Conservatives’ protests to the contrary, an equal starting line is not at all the same as an equal chance to win. There are any number of ploys to render a race grossly unfair despite an equal starting line, and American conservatives use them all.

Take for example conservatives’ assertion that a “facially neutral” law is not fundamentally discriminatory. This principle was the cornerstone of Supreme Court decisions in the late 19^th and early 20^th century that stripped constitutional guarantees from the 14^th and 15^th Amendments and ushered in Jim Crow. It is now used to buttress similar decisions by the Court eviscerating the Voting Rights Act.

In 2013, the justices ruled 5-4 in Shelby County v. Holder that “special coverage areas,” specified in the Voting Rights Act to protect Black voters where discrimination had been rampant, were unconstitutional, because after almost fifty years, conditions had so improved that the realities were vastly altered. It was thus no longer fair to single out white officials for discriminatory practices when there was no longer evidence of their existence.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a brilliant rejoinder, agreed that racial discrimination at the ballot box had decreased, but that was precisely because the law had remained in place. “Throwing out pre-clearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes,” she argued “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

But conservatives, not irony, won that case, as they have in Brnovich v. DNC and Callais v. Louisiana, which fully reduced the Voting Rights Act to hollow verbiage. Republicans in Congress and state legislatures seized on those decisions to reinstitute the very practices the VRA had been enacted to prohibit.

The same starting line reasoning is used to buttress decisions upholding gerrymanders that prevent a single Black person from being elected to Congress in a state where perhaps a third of the residents are Black. This is not racial discrimination, conservatives insist, but simply political expression, the victors of a free and fair process enjoying the spoils. If Black people want representatives in Congress, conservatives scold, let them start winning elections. If you fail to win elections, you don’t get to make the rules. But they neglect to acknowledge that there is scant hope of winning subsequent elections when the winners make sure to set the rules specifically to make it virtually impossible for the losers to win subsequent elections.

Conservative justices, especially Samuel Alito, continue to rely on this Möbius strip reasoning to form the basis of opinion after opinion while Republican legislators continue to enact laws that undercut their justification. Their contention that this jurisprudence is a return to fairness, a remedy for past injustice, would be headshaking if one believed that conservatives had an ounce of sincerity in their views.

But they do not. Bob Dylan once asked, “How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?” Conservatives’ answer is “That is why we don’t turn our heads.”

It is difficult to decide which is worse—the unapologetic use of bare-knuckle power to reverse two centuries of slow progress in creating a nation that is trying to live up to the ideals on which it claimed to be founded, or the straight-faced claim of the moral high ground while doing so.

A key part of that claim is that, although their actions may be offensive to the sore losers on the left, conservatives in Congress and the courts are speaking for a majority of Americans who share their views but have been stifled by the “administrative state,” or the “deep state” or creeping socialism, or some other left-wing plot.

But the evidence is overwhelming that conservatives are their own deep state, imposing their extreme views on the rest of us, that the extreme right has corrupted political institutions to allow an anti-democratic minority to bend the system to retain power in spite of the public will.

Many of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, most notably James Madison, expressed fear that the United States would succumb to what became known as the “tyranny of the majority.”

Tyranny of the majority may be a threat to democracy, but tyranny of the minority is no democracy at all.