Conservatism is Un-American: And Other Self-Evident Truths

The three interdependent ideals of liberty, equality, and democracy are central to America's identity. Yet conservatives are ideologically allergic to them. They try to play liberty against equality in a zero-sum game and their hostility to democracy is well-documented.

Conservatives are authoritarians who imagine they are libertarians. And authoritarians cannot be happy in a free and equal society. Not only do they disapprove of the "immorality" around them, their sense of authenticity feels constantly assaulted. Yes, conservatives the world over crave a sense of place, both on the map and in the pecking order. But conservatives in other countries are not as haunted by this awkward contradiction. American conservatives feel forever besieged because America's very identity threatens them. As a result, they routinely project and question their opponent's patriotism. Their defensiveness turbo charges their obsession with who does and does not belong.

This also explains their almost comic efforts to co-opt FDR, JFK, MLK, and Rosa Parks. Their ideology chronically puts them on the wrong side of history, thus the desperate necessity of their highly inventive rewrites. From their fantasies about what the founders thought to their absolutely backwards Nazi analogies, this explains all the strange things your Fox News-watching father-in-law swallows.

Finally, many of our Founders thought a rough economic equality was a fundamental to a functioning republic. They had an analysis of where aristocracy came from - filthy rich families. Accordingly, many of the revolution's luminaries, like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, openly advocated capping and/or redistributing wealth. As Noah Webster warned in 1787, "An equality of property, with a necessity of alienation, constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic." And Cato wrote, "liberty can never subsist without equality." To that he added, "In every country and under every government, particular men may be too rich." No doubt this is news to the Cato Institute.