Conservatism, when I hear the word I recoil. Images of fundamentalism, ethnocentrism, and dogmatism come to mind as I hear the word proudly trumpeted. Conservatism obsesses over ethnic and group identity. Everything is always us vs. them. Conservatives will never forget every little transgression against members of the group they associate with by members of another group. Their ideology always judges their group at its best and everyone else at their worst. In America it conflates the responsibility for 9/11 to all include Muslims and in the Middles East it conflates the responsibility for the Nackba to include all westerners. In every case they will be unable to see such events outside of an ethnocentric context.
Conservatives are fundamentalists. They feel threatened by the modern world and withdraw to an intellectually prehistoric existence. They retreat from everything new and unknown into a willfully ignorant mindset. They deny climate change, they cling to a narrow, and selective, interpretation of religion, they stage boycotts of stores who do not use "merry Christmas" in advertising, they listen to commentators and read books that tell them what they want to hear, and they remain absolute in the beliefs they want to hold. They have had to start their own version of Wikipedia because the factually based version was too threatening to their belief system. While liberals reformulate their beliefs to conform to reality, conservatives reformulate reality to conform to their beliefs. They believe what is comfortable to believe and are uninterested in anything that doesn't reinforce their preexisting viewpoints. In short they are almost impossible to reason with.
They are dogmatic. Their political beliefs are defined by words and symbols rather than ideas. Christian conservatives idolize Jesus, yet live a life antithetical to everything he taught about helping the poor, loving your enemies, and making peace. They exalt principles, character, freedom, and liberty, but they have only a vague idea of what these vague words mean. They are so attached to these words that they are more likely to be persuaded by a dictionary than by a logical argument. When Joe the Plumber was asked about his views on taxes, for example, he got defensive, called the interviewer names, and was unable to articulate any argument for his position other than "look up principles in the dictionary and you'll know what I mean."
The brand of conservatism preached by talk radio, right wing bloggers, and some religious figures is a morally bankrupt, intellectually deficient, and factually deprived outlook based more on circumstantial factors than any carefully thought out ideological beliefs, yet it is a dangerous political force that has been a major source of strife and hindrance of progress across the globe.
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