The Conservative Faith: Nothing to Brag About [annotated]

PREAMBLE: PORTRAIT OF A CONSERVATIVE

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William F. Buckley, Jr.: master of snobbish affectation and a lightweight intellectual despite profuse (and incessantly self-promoted) pretensions bolstered by a hefty gallery of sycophants. True to his class, he played dilettante in the US army and even the CIA, where he stayed for 2 years in the 1950s. Typical of his temperamental impudence, in 1954, Buckley co-wrote a book McCarthy and His Enemies with his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell Jr., strongly defending Senator Joseph McCarthy as a patriotic crusader against communism. In McCarthy and his Enemies he asserted that “McCarthyism … is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.” So much for this much admired icon of American conservatism. 
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[learn_more caption=”MR. BUCKLEY AND DEMOCRACY”]

Buckley’s opposition to Communism extended to support of the overthrow and replacement of leftist governments by non-democratic forces. Buckley supported Spanish authoritarian dictator General Francisco Franco who led the rightist military rebellion in its military defeat of the Spanish Republic. He called Franco “an authentic national hero,” applauding his overthrow of Spanish Republican “visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists.”[61] He supported the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet that led the 1973 coup that overthrew Chilean president Salvador Allende’s democratically-elected Marxist government, referring to Allende as “a president who was defiling the Chilean constitution and waving proudly the banner of his friend and idol, Fidel Castro.”[62] SOURCE: Wikipedia. [/learn_more]

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[box type=”download”] Editor’s Note: For a long time and especially in America conservatives have enjoyed a spectacular place in society, one of widespread respect and even admiration, not to mention social envy by many social climbers, as a large number of people correctly associate the word “conservative” with propertied, well established individuals, families and institutions. Many others, either ignorant or socially insecure people mindlessly adopt the label to describe themselves as “conservatives” because they find it “safe” or even “chic” (ie., they intuitively understand that wrapping themselves in such a label will trigger no trouble or controversy, make them sound discriminating, and even project a certain caché, as the whole capitalist status quo and its ruling circles are grounded in conservatism). The problem with such posture is that such individuals are wrong. There is nothing admirable about conservatism in practice, nor in its historical record. In fact, calling someone a conservative should be rightly looked upon as a pejorative, a four-letter word, as a label identifying a social cell viciously opposed to the well-being of the majority, of the social body as a whole. The acceptance this word and the political philosophy behind it receive in American society and elsewhere is largely a product of the social and political power of the propertied class, which dominates all major opinion-forming institutions—from the presidency to parties to universities to media, school curricula, etc.—and not of its intrinsic merit, which is next to none. Fact is, conservatism is a downright ugly, mean-spirited creed. Its adherents have always retarded social progress and caused (to this day) immense unnecessary suffering. In this article Eric Zuesse dissects “conservatism” for what it really is. And just as Archbishop Dom Helder Camera said about capitalism, that to “examine it is to indict it,” so it is with conservatism. Our only critique of this essay is that it takes a lot of space discussing religion-instigated conservatism, and even theories of psychologism to explain the persistence and influence of conservatism, while paying less attention to the conservatism issuing from established wealth, in other words its class origins in accumulated and well entrenched wealth. The main existential problem in the world today is not so much that many nations, from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia, Iran, and even far too many Americans are fundamentalists, and are led (and followed) by many reactionaries; it is that the Anglo-American plutocracy and its European and Japanese vassals are leading the world to utter destruction via constant wars (and the high probability now of a nuclear war) and ecological suicide in pursuit of further wealth and economic dominance. It is therefore the sheer conservatism and non-negotiable savage capitalism of the Western elites that constitutes the main danger.—P. Greanville[/box]

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Social Science Findings about Conservatism

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he great empirical social psychologist who specialized in studying bigotry, Bob Altemeyer, in his 1996 The Authoritarian Specter, and his other writings, reported his exhaustive empirical studies, of more than 50,000 individuals in many countries, demonstrating that bigotries against each and every minority group were the highest amongst the individuals who scored as being the most religious in any religion. In each religion, the more fundamentalist (believing in the inerrancy of some Scripture) one was, the more bigoted one tended to be, not just against non-believers, but against homosexuals, Blacks, and so forth. Religious belief, in other words, causes bigotry. His studies also found that his scale for “Right-Wing Authoritarianism” (RWA) or what’s commonly called conservatism, was exhibited the most strongly by fundamentalists. Moreover, as one would expect from persons of faith (even of an atheistic one; i.e., belief in an atheistic ‘inerrant Scripture’), people of high RWA tended to make incorrect inferences from evidence, accept internal contradictions within their own beliefs, oppose constitutional guarantees of individual liberty, believe more strongly in sticks than in carrots to correct a person’s behavior, and were closed-minded to criticism of themselves.

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In 1992, Altemeyer had co-authored in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, “Authoritarianism, Religious Fundamentalism, Quest, and Prejudice,” which examined “the relationships among right-wing authoritarianism, various indices of religious orientation, and prejudice. Measures of religious fundamentalism … were good discriminators between prejudiced and unprejudiced persons.”

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Three authors — Westman, Willink and McHoskey — published, in the April 2000 Psychological Reports, their study “On Perceived Conflicts Between Religion and Science: The Role of Fundamentalism and Right-Wing Authoritarianism,” and reported that Fundamentalism and Right-Wing Authoritarianism varied together (or tended to be the same group), and that both groups were hostile toward science, and even toward technology.

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Furthermore, a summary, and meta-analysis, of not just Altemeyer’s, but numerous other empirical psychological studies of conservatism, was published in the May 2003 Psychological Bulletin under the title “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition.” This dealt with confirmation bias, which is the prejudice that people have to pay attention to what confirms their prior beliefs and to ignore what disconfirms or conflicts with their prejudices. Conservatives were found to have this bias even more than liberals do. (An excellent summary of this article was “Conservatives Deconstructed,” by Joel Bleifuss, in the 19 September 2003 In These Times. Another was U. Cal. Berkeley’s press release on this study, “Researchers Help Define What Makes a Political Conservative.”) Not only did this research find strong correlations between conservatism and dogmatism, but one of the strongest correlations it discovered was between conservatism and fear of death. Because the meta-analysis was partly funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health — which are federally funded — it excluded any exploration of the correlation between conservatism and bigotry, and also excised religion as a factor. Despite this, Britain’s Guardian reported, on 13 August 2003, “Republicans are demanding to know why” this study “received $1.2m in public funds.” Even though investigation of the links between conservatism, religion, and bigotry was excluded from being researched, the findings still managed to offend conservatives to such an extent that it was unlikely any scientific study of conservatism would be able to be funded in the U.S. in the future, until Republicans decisively lost power in Washington. “Death anxiety” was found to be the factor which was the most strongly correlated with “political conservatism.” Next was “system instability” (meaning anything that endangers the existing cultural order). Nothing else was even close to those two factors in predicting an individual’s conservatism. In other words, it found: Conservatism is driven by fear. (In the case of the superrich, the classical “ruling class,” those fears are compounded by the fear of dispossession of their wealth and social privileges.—Eds).

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[dropcap]A[/dropcap] study by Bouchard and four other authors, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, in 2003, and titled “Evidence for the Construct Validity and Heritability of the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale: A Reared-Apart Twins Study of Social Attitudes,” reported that political conservatism correlated at a stunningly high rate with Altemeyer’s Right-Wing Authoritarianism, and that it also “demonstrated significant and sizable genetic influence,” so that the inclination to be conservative or religious is influenced not only by one’s environment but by one’s genes. In other words, such conservative traits as lack of compassion, preference to use sticks instead of carrots, etc., are partly a reflection of one’s genetic make-up or temperament, and not entirely a result of one’s training. Furthermore, a 17 November 2014 study in Current Biology, “Nonpolitical Images Evoke Neural Predictors of Political Ideology,” showed a huge difference between liberals and conservatives that can be measured by their MRI brainwave activity that results from pictures that are presented to them of mutilated bodies: conservatives consistently are more disturbed by those pictures. That too indicates a physical basis for conservatism, in fear of death.

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Why America is led by scumbags—(Summary)
“It’s a population unlikely to sustain democracy — fundamentally hostile toward democracy, favorable toward aristocracy; more respectful of people who take for themselves than of people who give of themselves; more trusting of people who exploit than of people who serve; more-comfortable being led by the callous than by the compassionate — a fundamentally myth-dependent deceived population…”

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The “Wilson-Patterson C Scale” was introduced by G.D. Wilson and J.R. Patterson in their 1968 “A New Measure of Conservatism,” in the British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. It is similar to Altemeyer’s scale — an alternative to it. The Wilson-Patterson scale was used to measure “conservatism” in that Current Biology article.

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The observation is commonly made that conservatives are driven by fears, such as of “the other,” and are therefore obsessed with military solutions, and police solutions, and with having guns themselves – all solutions which enable them to force their own way, against the will of “the other,” regardless of whether “the other” is “the Jew” or “the Black” or “the socialist” or “the homosexual,” or whatever. Religion is, for its buyer, a way to deal specifically with his fear of death. But for the seller of religion, it’s a way of enslaving buyers to the seller’s personal ends (which can likewise be a craving for salvation — ergo: proselytizing so as to win eternal life).

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The rather blatant ugliness of the personality traits and beliefs correlating with political conservatism (e.g., opposition to equality of opportunity, eagerness to punish people, especially high fear of death, widespread bigotry, etc.) has led some conservatives to attack this entire body of research. For example, the proud conservative John J. Ray, in The Journal of Social Psychology, in 1985, headlined “Defective Validity in the Altemeyer Authoritarianism Scale,” and in a “Post-Publication Update” on the web he said that, “Altemeyer (1988, p. 239) reports that Right-Wing Authoritarians as detected by his scale, ‘show little preference in general for any political party’! In other words, according to the RWA scale, half of Right-Wing authoritarians vote for Leftist political parties! So how can they be rightist if they vote for Leftist parties?” However, Altemeyer wrote what Ray quoted here only as a scholar (in order to appear not to be “biased” against conservatives, in order to mollify them), not at all as a scientist (social or otherwise). Though most of Altemeyer’s assertions were supported by empirical data that he cited, this particular assertion from him was not, and was purely a go-along-to-get-along statement, which here backfired against him. Altemeyer provided no data whatsoever to support that allegation which Ray quoted; and, in fact, Altemeyer promptly proceeded, right after that statement, to assert that his actual studies showed the exact opposite. For example: “In every sample of Canadian students and parents I have studied over the last 15 years” (and he was Canadian himself, so this referred to most of his data), the more conservative party’s “supporters have scored significantly higher (as a group) on the RWA scale than” the liberal party’s “backers.” And, “In the United States, … Republican supporters scored significantly higher on the RWA scale than Democrats at each of six state universities I visited.” So, there was no exception to the correlation between RWA and exhibited political conservatism. Conservatives simply don’t want to know how ugly-charactered they are, but it’s demonstrated consistently by the actual and now massive data, regardless whether conservatives want to see themselves as they actually are, which empirical studies also show that they refuse to do.

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Regarding Ray’s charge of “defective validity” of RWA, numerous independent studies have shown otherwise. For example, “Evidence for the Construct Validity and Heritability of the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale” said that, “the Conservatism Scale” exhibited high “validity. It correlates .72 with RWA, a scale which has been extensively validated … and which is considered by some to be ‘the best current measure of” authoritarianism. A 1991 study was cited as the source of that evaluation.

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Conservatives, such as Ray, have similarly condemned the SDO Scale as indicating anything about conservatism. They don’t say they’re personally insulted by the scientific findings on conservatism; they say it’s no science at all. Basically, they reject the sampling methods, or even, sometimes, the basic mathematical methods: factor analysis, and cluster analysis, of data.

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Research into SDO is in its infancy, as is research into psychopathy. However, research into “authoritarianism” or “conservatism” is in its adulthood, with an enormous scientific literature, having started in 1950 with Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, which was inspired by the then-recent case of Adolf Hitler.

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