Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
On February 10,
Republican Presidential front-runner Mitt Romney gave a speech at the
Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C. in which he
referenced the one time in his life he has ever held an elective office: as
governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007. “I fought against long odds in a
deep blue state,” Romney said. “But I was a severely conservative Republican
governor.” In the same speech, he also recalled how he had responded to the
landmark decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Court that same-sex couples had
a legal right to marriage equality by invoking an old state law to bar same-sex
couples from out of state from marrying there. “On my watch, we fought hard and
prevented Massachusetts from becoming the Las Vegas of Gay marriage,” Romney
said. “When I am President, I will defend the Defense of Marriage Act and I
will fight for an amendment to our Constitution that defines marriage as a
relationship between one man and one woman.”
Romney was
rewarded for his defense of the Right-wing faith (in more ways than one) by
winning CPAC’s annual Presidential straw poll, with 38 percent to 31 percent
for his nearest rival, former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum. He was also lampooned
by writers like Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist and op-ed
contributor to the New York Times, who
responded with a column quoting Molly Ball of The Atlantic as saying that Romney had “described conservatism as
if it were a disease.” Krugman also quoted Mark Liberman, linguistics professor
at the University of Pennsylvania, as saying the words that most commonly
follow the adverb “severely” are “disabled,” “depressed,” “ill,” “limited” and
“injured.”
I generally have
a high respect for Paul Krugman as author and thinker, but this time he got it
almost totally wrong. When Romney invoked “severe” as a definition of his
conservatism — to an audience of the kinds of people he needs to convince of
his Right-wing bona fides not only to
get the Republican Presidential nomination but to arouse the base of voters,
volunteers and small contributors he needs to beat Barack Obama in November —
it had nothing to do with disease. Instead it had to do with a value that is
transcendent in the thought of the radical Right, a single word that brings
together all the strands of Right-wing thought and reconciles the otherwise
incomprehensible contradiction at the heart of their philosophy: the gap
between their economic policies, which are total lassiez-faire and call for the government to end regulations on
business and “unleash the private sector,” and their social policies, which
seek government intervention in the most intimate details of our personal
lives: whom we love, marry, have sex with and how we deal with the consequences
therefrom.
The word is discipline, and it occurs early on in the Merriam-Webster
Online Dictionary’s definition of “severe”:
“1. a: strict in judgment, discipline, or government. B: of a strict or stern
bearing or manner: austere. 2. Rigorous in restraint, punishment, or
requirement: stringent, restrictive. 3. Strongly critical or condemnatory:
censorious.” The online dictionary goes on to give five other, similar
definitions of “severe,” of which only one definition, plus one subdefinition,
have anything to do with illness or disease. The list of synonyms for “severe”
the dictionary gives is “austere, authoritarian, flinty, hard, harsh,
heavy-handed, ramrod, rigid, rigorous, stern, strict, tough” — all
characteristics it’s easy enough to find in the rhetoric of Romney and his
principal rivals for the Republican nomination: Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich
and Ron Paul. There’s an even more revealing note in a user comment on the Merriam-Webster site which suggests that one possible word origin
for “severe” is the Latin “se vere”
— “without kindness.”
What was most
striking about Romney’s description of himself as “severely conservative” was
its dramatic contrast to the way another Republican governor — a sitting one,
rather than a former governor like Romney — described himself in his own
Presidential candidacy just 12 years ago. When George W. Bush emerged as a
Presidential candidate, he called himself a “compassionate conservative.”
Anxious to project a moderate image — especially once his Democratic candidate,
Al Gore, seemed on many issues to be running to Bush’s Right (in the campaign it was Gore who called for a highly
interventionist “nation-building” foreign policy and Bush who was the voice of
restraint!) — Bush wanted to soften his “conservative” image and put what his
father had called a “kinder, gentler” face on his views.
But that was
then, and this is now. These days, the Republican electoral base has become so
hard, harsh, heavy-handed, stern, strict, tough, flinty — in a word, so severe — kindness and compassion have become major
liabilities. Newt Gingrich suffered the first of his several near-death
experiences in the campaign when he dared to take on Congressmember Paul Ryan’s
(R-Wisconsin) plan for privatizing Medicare and denounce it as “Right-wing
social engineering.” Rick Perry’s campaign started to unravel when he said that
anyone who didn’t support allowing the foreign-born children of undocumented
immigrants to stay in the U.S. so they could attend college or fight in the
military “didn’t have a heart.” And well before the nation learned of Herman
Cain’s sexual peccadilloes, he’d already turned the stomach of the Republican
base when he said that if his granddaughter were raped and got pregnant by her
rapist, he would respect her “choice” whether to bring the pregnancy to term or
have an abortion.
It’s this
obsession with discipline — severe
discipline — that unites the Republican base and holds together the two wings
of the party, which otherwise would seem to have little in common. In economic
matters, Republican discipline manifests itself in a fervent commitment to lassiez-faire and a belief that The Market should be allowed to
work itself out for good or ill. If General Motors was so badly managed that it
found itself on the edge of going out of business, the radical Right’s creed
says, let it go out of business — no matter how many workers, not only at GM
itself but at all the companies that produce parts for it and service its car
loans and sell meals and clothes to its employees, would lose their jobs as a
result. If people don’t voluntarily buy health insurance (since requiring them
to do so is an assault on their precious “freedom”) and they get a catastrophic
illness, either let them die (the response of two Tea Party activists in the
audience at a notorious Presidential debate in Tampa, Florida September 12,
2011) or hope they can get help from churches or private charities (the answer
given by Ron Paul, the candidate who was actually being asked that hypothetical
question by debate moderator Wolf Blitzer of CNN).
The ultimate
advocate of the free-market absolutism of today’s radical Right was the author
and philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982), whose 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged has taken a place just behind the Bible among the
sacred texts of the radical Right. Paul Ryan, who as chair of the House Budget
Committee has more power over the federal purse right now than any other
Republican, requires everyone he hires for his staff to read it cover-to-cover
before they start work. The plot of Atlas Shrugged deals with a group of super-capitalists who, in
Rand’s view, have created all worth and value in the world (a deliberate
reversal of Marx’s idea that labor, not capital, was the source of all value).
They react to an increasingly collectivist U.S. government by withdrawing to a
redoubt in the Colorado mountains, from which John Galt, their leader and
spokesperson, emerges to give a long lecture expressing Rand’s philosophy. The
message was summed up by Ludwig von Mises, co-founder of the so-called
“Austrian school” of lassiez-faire
economics, who blurbed Atlas Shrugged by saying to Rand, “You have the courage to tell the masses what no
politician told them: you are inferior, and all the improvements in your
conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who
are better than you.”
So the
modern-day radical Right’s message about the economy is that the government should
just stay out of it and let the capitalists rule. Allow what Austrian (but not
Austrian-school) economist Joseph Schumpeter called the “creative destruction”
at the heart of capitalism to roll over and kill old industries to make way for
new ones — no matter how many people were put out of work, how many lost their
homes in foreclosures or their life savings in failed banks, how much of the
environment was destroyed, how many people were died or injured in industrial
accidents the capitalists didn’t consider it worth their while to protect
against, or how much other collateral damage all that “creative destruction”
wreaked in its wake. (Ironically, Schumpeter himself, though not a socialist,
believed that a transition to socialism was inevitable because workers wouldn’t
stand for having their jobs repeatedly “creatively” destroyed. Boy, was he
wrong.) On economic issues, the radical Right says, we are to be subject to the
“discipline” of a “severe” marketplace …
… while, in the
management of our private lives, we are to be subject to the “discipline” of
the same government the radical Right doesn’t trust to run or regulate the
economy. The most severe (that word again!) restrictions the radical Right
would impose on us all seem to have to do with our sexuality. Virtually all the
world’s religions have tried to control people’s sexual expressions, and
Christianity’s origins as an apocalyptic cult have made it perhaps the most
anti-sexual religion in the world. The early Christians preached against having
sex at all; they weren’t worried about propagating the race because they
thought Christ was coming back in their lifetimes and therefore propagating the
race wouldn’t be a problem. When it was clear Christ wasn’t coming back in their lifetimes, they moderated their
anti-sex position just enough to be practical: it was O.K. to have sex, but only if you were a married heterosexual couple and only for purposes of reproduction.
It’s that
tradition Rick Santorum was coming from when he recently said, “Many in the Christian
faith have said, ‘Well, that’s O.K. Contraception’s O.K.’ It’s not O.K. because
it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is [sic] counter to how
things are supposed to be.” Santorum’s idea of “how things are supposed to be”
is that it’s only moral to have sex if you do it to make babies, and even then
only in the context of a mutually monogamous heterosexual marriage. Birth
control and abortion are both wrong because they allow straight people to have
sex without making babies, and homosexuality is wrong because by definition it
can’t make babies. The radical Right’s message to women, especially unmarried
women, is if you don’t want babies, don’t have sex. Ironically, it’s a message
that would have appalled Ayn Rand, an atheist and a (hetero)sexual libertarian,
but the radical Right has mentally edited out those parts of Atlas Shrugged just as they’ve mentally edited out the parts of
Jesus’s teachings that talk about the meek inheriting the earth, the
peacemakers being blessed and the only law being to love thy neighbor as
thyself.
And on foreign
policy, the radical Right never seems to have met a war it doesn’t like, unless
a Democratic president got us into it under some pretense of “humanitarian
intervention.” Right now, in addition to promising to renew the U.S. troop
presence in Iraq and reverse President Obama’s decision to withdraw from
Afghanistan by 2014, the major Republican Presidential candidates (except for
Ron Paul) are calling for bombing Iran, attacking Syria and throwing our
military weight around the entire world. Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive
Republican well before that became an oxymoron, famously said that in its
foreign policy the U.S. should “speak softly and carry a big stick.” The
Republican Presidential candidates of today believe in swinging the big stick
without talking at all.
Fascinatingly,
there was a figure during the last Great Depression — the one that began with
the collapse of an overvalued stock market in 1929 — whose rhetoric coupled the
lassiez-faire discipline of The Market
and the idea that the American people needed a dose of state-enforced
“morality” more eloquently than the members of the radical Right today. His
name was Andrew Mellon, he was secretary of the treasury under President
Herbert Hoover, and his chief claim to fame was that he relentlessly opposed
even the half-hearted government interventions with which Hoover hoped to help
bring back prosperity. Though he never said this publicly, his private advice
to President Hoover was to let the Depression take its course and make no
attempt whatsoever to use the government to help people hurt by the economic
catastrophe.
“Liquidate
labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Mellon
told Hoover (according to Hoover, who quoted him in his autobiography). “It
will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high
living will come down. People will work harder, lead a more moral life. Values
will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less
competent people.” The fact that modern-day Republicans are openly advocating
for the sorts of policies Andrew Mellon felt safe discussing only in confidence
in the office of the President shows what they have in store for us: a world in
which uppity workers and consumers are “disciplined” by the Market and the
buccaneering Randian entrepreneurs of an “unleashed” private sector, and people
who live the “wrong” kind of life, and particularly people who have the “wrong”
kind of sex, are disciplined by morality enforcers not that different from the
ones in Iran or Taliban-led Afghanistan.
That’s the kind
of future the Republican Party has in mind for us, and it’s the real meaning of
Mitt Romney’s boast that he was a “severely conservative” governor and will be
a “severely conservative” President.
