The Phantom of Conservatism

                In the 1925 film of “The Phantom of the Opera”, there is an iconic scene in which Christine Daae (Mary Philbin) strips the mask from Erik the Phantom (Lon Chaney, Sr.), thereby revealing that the doting mentor in whom she had invested implicit trust is, in reality, a hideous monster.  Something of the sort has happened lately in American politics, and it is turning society on its head and disorienting and confusing the populace as a whole.

                I have a thesis, to explicate which will tempt me to make use of some metaphors that seem good now and which may or may not disprove their own merit and utility as I develop them.  We shall see.

                Modern man, we are taught, started out as a species of “hunter-gatherer”, with an apparently well-delineated social structure whose roles split cleanly along gender lines.  While there may be no hard evidence for this, there seems to be a commonly held assumption that men, bigger, stronger, and more aggressive, went out to kill animals for the group to eat, thereby extending the limits of their habitable world, while women, not so strong, but infinitely more capable of bearing and nursing children, stayed home and took care of the cave and the kids.  Well, we have survived, so one assumes that this system worked reasonably well.

                An (arguably) analogous arrangement has prevailed substantially in the American political sphere for, to the best of my knowledge, the entire history of our nation.  Two groups, for simplicity’s sake, Liberals and Conservatives, have more or less divided up the political landscape between them, and most of the dynamic activity in the evolution of our governed society can be characterized in terms of the relative influence of those groups.

                Historically, it has been the role of the Liberals to “push the envelope”, to experiment with change, to, in the words of Bobby Kennedy (as borrowed from Bernard Shaw), to “dream of things that never were, and ask ‘why not?’”  In paleontological terms, this would seem to correspond roughly to the male role in hunter-gatherer society, that of pressing beyond previously fixed limits in the pursuit of solutions to problems not previously recognized as capable of challenge or, as frequently, not previously recognized as problems.

                If Liberals have been the “men” in this scenario, that leaves it to the Conservatives to be in the role of “women”, a designation many contemporary conservatives might dispute, but I assert it on the following grounds:  it is the role of the conservative to act as steward and conservator of that which we already possess.  Thus when Ugug the male goes out to see what might be beyond the mountain, it is Ooka the female who reminds him that the prime directive is still to make sure he brings something back for dinner.  Similarly, when liberals have proposed changes in the socio-governmental doings of the nation, it has been the role of conservatives to act as a reality check, a sort of drag chute whose function is to keep our imagination from running away with us, to ask of the proposed change, is it desirable?  Is it safe? What will be its long term consequences?  Is it consistent with the sort of nation that we are? And, always, what’s it going to cost?

                This has constructed a fluid dynamic tension between the impulse to flex our muscles and dash at the solution of new problems, tilting at windmills perhaps, at times, but always looking for something to challenge (liberal) and the instinct to preserve and consolidate what we have, balancing a keen eye for opportunity against a thoughtful regard for risk (conservative).  Over time, the trend of this American (sorry) Evolution can be plotted similarly to the classic chart of the stock market, that of a ball bouncing upstairs: up and down, up and down, but more or less always trending more or less upward. 

                At this point it becomes necessary to define what, in these terms, constitutes “up”.

                In other writing, I have defined civilization as that process by which planet Earth (and the universe in general) is made to be, increasingly, a good place in which to be a human being.  And being a psychologist, I tend to think of the criteria by which this goodness is measured in terms of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, which places physiological needs at the base of a pyramid, tapering upward through safety and belonging to, ultimately, self-actualization – becoming, in effect, the best we can be.  When I say that the trend over the course of our history has been generally “up”, I mean the extent to which government is active in the process of civilization as defined above.  Naturally, there is a lack of unanimity as to what is good for people, especially the question of whether it is good for people to have government actively engaged in taking the initiative in deciding what is good for people.

                The upshot of all this has been a nation whose historical tendency has been in the direction of increasing governmental assumption of responsibility for seeing to it that the citizens are as okay as they can reasonably be, consistent with freedom, self-determination and a realistic assumption of self-reliance.  It has been the liberal role to identify and propose ways of tackling anything that might threaten the basic wellness of the citizenry, and it has been the conservative role to see to it this proceeds deliberately, gradually, cautiously, responsibly.  That such a progression is meet and desirable in a serious, mature nation has never really been challenged.

                Until now.  In recent years, possibly in an hysterical reaction to a pair of historical firsts (an enemy attack on the sovereign soil of the country by foreign functionaries (Pearl Harbor doesn’t count because, although a territory, most people at the time would not have regarded Hawaii as a real part of the United States), and the election of a non-Caucasian to the presidency), conservatism has begun to redefine itself no longer as stewardship of what we have constructed but as an impulse to rewind to sometime in, one imagines, the late Nineteenth Century, tearing down as we go much of what the intervening portion of our history has wrought.  So far from being a conservator of what our energies have created for ourselves, a sort of violent panic has set in among those styling themselves as conservatives, causing them to slash and burn, apparently indiscriminately, striving to destroy such formerly well-established and well-functioning and characteristically American institutions as racial equality, disseveration of church and state, women’s rights, sexual freedom,  public education, and a system of taxation which aims at something approximating economic equity.

                It is unnecessary at this time to attempt to enumerate the specific forms in which this suicidal hysteria has recently manifested itself.  An illustrative example, however, is a recent bill which would have been passed by the Virginia state legislature but for the outpouring of incredulous outrage from women and other thinking persons both in Virginia and across the nation.  This bill, had it become law, would have required that a woman seeking to terminate a pregnancy (a legal act in the United States of America for at least the past forty years) be subjected to a “transvaginal ultrasound”, an imaging procedure which, through the insertion of a sort of wand into the woman’s vagina, produces an image of the fetus for the patient’s viewing pleasure, ostensibly for the purpose of giving the patient the opportunity to be well-informed concerning the medical procedure she is about to undergo, but in bald fact, intended to horrify her with a vision of causing the death of her unborn child.  The idea is obviously to inspire such guilt in the patient that she is persuaded to forego the termination or, at the very least, to make her feel really terrible about it postoperatively.  There are so many things wrong with this concept that it is difficult to know where to start.

                Let us begin with the Virginia Criminal Code which, like most other states’ criminal codes, considers inserting any object into a woman’s vagina against her will and without an established medical purpose to constitute rape.  And the threat of withholding a procedure to which the woman has an established constitutional right clearly constitutes coercion, also under Virginia statute.  Thus, should this be done, a lot of doctors would be prosecuted and, I should imagine, a lot of legislators as co-conspirators in what must certainly be seen as a civil rights violation as well as a class-action gang rape.

                 Now let us consider the notion of informed consent.  Informed consent is for the purpose of making sure the patient has a reasonable grasp of what is about to be done to them and how it is apt to affect them.  Informed consent never takes the form of another medical procedure, for which, presumably, informed consent would also be necessary.   

                Moreover, since the very clear intent behind the inclusion of this unnecessary procedure in the process by which a woman terminates her pregnancy is to punish her and, ideally, make her emotionally worse following the procedure than she would otherwise be, this requirement clearly violates the Hippocratic injunction to “do no harm”.  But that’s okay, because this isn’t done for medical reasons in the first place.  Which is one of many reasons why it shouldn’t be done at all.

Finally, the fact that the woman is required to give informed consent to this procedure as the patient and not in her capacity as the mother of the child implies clearly that the fetus is NOT regarded as a person under Virginia law, and therefore the requirement is simply gratuitously and unjustifiably vicious, and is, in effect, a way of making it more difficult for women to exercise their established constitutional rights.  Virginians like Washington and Jefferson would have known what to think about such attacks upon civil rights under the constitution for which they risked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.  Unfortunately, they don’t make Virginians like that any longer.

                This is but one of numerous efforts on the part of the radical right wing to impose their retrogressive version of morality on a people generally committed with moving gradually forward to better quality of life, a stronger, more humane social contract, and the hysterical character this has assumed has become increasingly marked and increasingly extreme.  It is as though “conservatism” had abandoned the maternal role to the liberals, who also shoulder the paternal duties, which leaves “conservatism” in the role of “rebellious adolescent”, prepared to reject in principle anything the parental element espouses in a childlike flexing of newly-discovered muscles without regard to the damage they do in the process.  Like so many adolescents, the nascent extreme right wing of conservatism are vandalizing decades of social progress purely as an act of indiscriminate rebellion – as though the institutions they seek to tear down were not the product of good-faith efforts by intelligent leaders.  This is analogous to teenagers who wreck themselves on ecstasy and other drugs, confident in the essentially immature assumption that theirs is a higher and more legitimate vision of “how things are” than their elders’.