Home > Right-Wing Hypocrisy > It’s Hard to Be Forward-Looking When You’re Always Moving Backwards

It’s Hard to Be Forward-Looking When You’re Always Moving Backwards

June 28th, 2011

David Frum, on CNN, explains why conservatives now approve of gay marriage more–but in so doing, also lays out how conservatives, who are almost always wrong on social issues, can slowly migrate to more reasonable positions:

Most conservatives have reacted with calm — if not outright approval — to New York’s dramatic decision.

Why? The short answer is that the case against same-sex marriage has been tested against reality. The case has not passed its test.

Since 1997, same-sex marriage has evolved from talk to fact. If people like me had been right, we should have seen the American family become radically more unstable over the subsequent decade and a half.

Instead — while American family stability has continued to deteriorate — it has deteriorated much more slowly than it did in the 1970s and 1980s before same-sex marriage was ever seriously thought of.

In short, conservatives thought that gay marriage would wreck the tradition of marriage, and when it didn’t, many of them can see that now, so they’re no longer afraid of it. (Ah, if only that were always true of how conservatives see things!) This doesn’t change the fact that conservatives tend to rail against most social progress and have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into seeing reason. I’d like to hear Frum’s conservative rationale on why they didn’t simply begin from the assumption that gays could have equal rights.

Of course, we liberals could have told them that gay marriage was not a threat from the start–the arguments that gays would destroy marriage were patently ridiculous, and frankly, even a fool could have seen that (see my rant about that from eight years ago). But I suppose that if your church and your entire political fraternity are shouting at you that it’s going to send everything to hell in a handbasket, it might be hard to ignore.

There are still holdouts, people who refuse to join the rest of the crowd. People like Newt Gingrich, for example, still disapprove, but there are signs of change even there–Gingrich, a twice-divorced adulterer, is now saying that gay marriage “muddles” the institution, which I suppose is an improvement over “destroying” or “threatening.”

The thing is, gay marriage is not the only thing that many conservatives have “come around” on. In fact, conservatism, by definition, is about opposing progress and clinging to the past–and that, in social terms, means that if you are conservative, then you are almost always backwards on social issues. Conservatives hold assiduously onto what has been, usually relinquishing their embrace of the past only when it is indeed past.

In the American Revolution, the conservatives were the Loyalists, who wanted to remain subjects of England. Such people were older, wealthy, established land-owners who had sentimental attachments to their British past. It was only after the war was won that conservatives decided that independence was a dandy idea. In the Civil War, the slave-owners were the conservatives, wishing to maintain the traditions of the past, fighting against the newer wave of abolitionism, and resentful of the controlling government that wanted to tell them what was right and wrong, especially that they could not keep their slaves. Only years after the war did conservatives revile slavery. In the battle over women’s suffrage, conservatives opposed; in the battle over civil rights for minorities, conservatives opposed; in the battle over gay rights, conservatives have and many still do oppose. There is a lag there, from the settling of an issue to conservative acceptance of it. If it’s not in the past, it tastes wrong to them.

Now, regarding most of this history, conservatives will tell you otherwise–that conservatives were all for the revolution, because they wanted to preserve traditional rights for the people; while this may have been true for some, it does not change the fact that on the whole, the opposition to the revolution was predominantly conservative in nature. Right-wingers love to point out that Lincoln founded the Republican Party–but ignore the fact that “Republican” and “Democrat” are political, not ideological affiliations, and have shifted over time. Lincoln was not a conservative in his day. But conservatives take credit for freeing the slaves nonetheless–despite the fact that the party affiliation is about as relevant and meaningful to that as is facial hair or top hats.

Again, when it comes to the battle for civil rights, conservatives love to point out that the South was controlled by Democrats at the time, and therefore it was liberals who opposed equal rights for minorities–a patent falsehood, and again a blurring of lines due to politics. The South was deeply conservative, and it was, in fact, the support of civil rights by the Democrats that helped drive these conservatives into the open arms of the Republican Party.

I have little doubt that, in fifty years or so, conservatives will be proudly boasting about how they supported gay rights all along, and it was liberals who somehow opposed them–they’ll probably bring up Log Cabin Republicans and Clinton instituting DADT as examples of proof. They do love to rewrite history with them always being right.

The tide of history, however, shows that almost always, the reverse is true. Conservatives have and probably always will be on the wrong side of history when it comes to social issues, something that comes part and parcel with trying to move backward instead of forward.

Frum simply laid down one cogent theory as to how the evolution sometimes occurs, in the more peaceful of cases, and with the more reasonable of social conservatives. Unfortunately, it does not apply universally and certainly not immediately, else conservatives would be a lot more reasonable on a whole host of other issues. It’s only after they have fought hard and long and have lost, and then after a decade or so of whining and protesting and foretelling doom, that they look around, see how stupid they look, and start claiming that they were with the “in” crowd from the start.

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  1. Tim Kane
    June 28th, 2011 at 23:40 | #1

    Personally, I think it’s just political chess. One thing to remember, in our system, everything, in the final analysis, comes down to bargaining power. The rich people do there calculus based on that fact alone.

    Some of the most vociferous liberals confronting conservatives are gays. One reason for that is many Gay people don’t have children weighing down their time. Without dependents, Gay people have more disposable money and more time to put towards advancing their cause in politics. By conceding on this issue, Republicans are pruning the bush of liberal opposition.

    They used to say that it was only lunatics and self loathing gays that were Republicans.

    Personally, I think one of the best people on our side is Rachel Maddow. She’s very talented. She’s also gay. Now in Rachel’s case, she might have been liberal anyway, but the elite of the movement conservative movement, I think have decided to remove the structure that automatically created an entire class of opposition.

    The other thing is, the elite’s on the conservative side, aren’t really conservatives. They are really just powerfully wealthy people. The real belief isn’t slowing down or reversing change, their real belief is ever amassing and concentrating wealth. They’ve been real successful at this.

    In fact, they have been so succesful that they are destroying our society. They therefore have to plan for a backlash, even as they move on to concentrate more and more wealth. And I think that’s what they are doing.

    They are conceding on social issues because they’ve already got what they want and are getting more.

    Social conservatives on the other side aren’t the rich people who control the movement. Even in today’s era of the Teabaggers. They are the middle class people who want to keep the social structure and social norms the way it was 60 years ago.

    The rich people don’t give a damn about social conservatives, but they need their vote, so they pander to them. In 2004, Bush ran on protecting marriage from gay people. He got elected. Then he immediately assaulted social security.

    Perhaps the rich feel they want the gays on the inside the tent pissing out, and not the other way around. I would never trust for a single minute, anything going on on the other side.

    I think its great that our society is liberalizing socially. But I never thought that mattered much. There is only one barometer to judge things by, and that’s the size and health of a society’s middle class. A society where the working class can live out their lives with a middle class existence, can do anything. They can, for instance, put a man on the moon. They can split an atom. They can win a two front global war. A society without that can do NOTHING. Period.

    Gay marriage is a consolation prize. A very, VERY hollow victory. It is a celebration of the collapse of American society: “go on, have your gay marriage, we’ve got all the gold, and power and that’s what we came for”. In fact, when the collapse in our society occurs as a result of it being top heavy concentration of wealth (as it did for the Roman Empire), conservatives will blame it on gay marriage (as they did with the Roman Empire). When I told my mother that the concentration of wealth killed the Roman empire, she said, oh no, it was moral lapses. I said, no, they had just turned Catholic. Of course she figured I must be wrong.

    I’m happy for gay people but instinctively, I don’t trust movement conservatives on any social, economic or political issue. In the final analysis they are in it for themselves and don’t really care what happens to society.

  2. Troy
    June 29th, 2011 at 12:31 | #2

    yeah, Tim has it. The gay thing was just a way to rile up the rubes about liberals making your children gay and destroying our biblical-based rule of law, making God remove his protection over us and putting the nation on the path to Sodom.

    It was all bullshit, but that’s what conservatism always is, bullshit, stuff thrown together to oppose whatever the liberals are trying to work on at the moment.

    The PPACA thing is another prime example. Not a single goddamn Republican vote, but if President McCain or Romney had proposed it, they’d all have voted for it, since it is rather conservative in character — since it was not different from what the Republicans proposed in 1993, what the AEI proposed during the Bush admin, and of course what Romney got passed in his state.

    Republicans are rather special people now. Be very glad you have dual (or triple?) citizenship. They’re not through destroying this country, their win in 2010 may or may not have a follow-on next year (eg. retaking the Senate), but if it does, hold onto your hat, things are really going to suck for the US of A. Hell, the yen might go to 50, LOL.

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