In the spirit of Kendrick Lamar versus Drake, the following discussion is offered as a diss track about conservatives. It may not be as lyrical or poetic, but it does provide some insight into the silly ideas that fuel their perspectives.
As we all learn through the process of aging, change is an intrinsic part of life. Conservative political philosophies seek to deny this truth under the guise of upholding tradition, placing them in opposition to the laws of nature itself. As such, they are inherently irrational, which renders them incapable of forming coherent ideologies.
The American strain of conservatism is a particularly illogical variant that illustrates the point well since the policies favored by America’s conservatives are exceptionally incoherent. They claim to favor small government as a defense against absolutism and authoritarianism, but consistently empower the agencies of the state most likely to devolve into despotism, namely, the ones with the weapons. Throughout history, it has been men trained by their governments in the arts of organized warfare and violence who have seized power or abused those they were charged with protecting.
Julius Caesar did not march on Rome with a mob of disgruntled teachers or tax collectors. He marched at the head of an army trained and equipped by the government he was trying to overthrow. Similarly, it is the militaries of Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Thailand, Turkey, and Pakistan, among many others, that have seized political power in their countries, not their ministries of finance or education. The idea that supporting a strong military is a conservative value contradicts the fundamental logic that is supposed to drive the ideology. Nevertheless, conservatives consistently demand massive military budgets.
They argue doing so is necessary to protect America in a dangerous world but ignore some basic facts when assessing the threat level and the number of resources required to contain it. America is arguably the most geographically blessed political entity that has ever existed. Two of its borders are protected by large oceans, while its north is protected by the Canadian Shield. Its natural defenses and vast lands make it a fortress that has no need for a large standing military. A strong navy combined with a small army consisting of a few mechanized divisions along the southern border and a few light infantry divisions trained in mountain and guerrilla warfare in Alaska, backed by a couple hundred advanced fighter aircraft, a stockpile of 100 or so thermonuclear devices, and a robust air defense network to protect against long-range missiles and space-based weapons would be sufficient to keep America safe.
Despite these minimal defense requirements, America has spent trillions building and maintaining the world’s most powerful military. It fields a lethal arsenal of advanced fighters, drones, tanks, and warships, many of which are positioned in Western Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. Between its fleet of aircraft carriers, forward bases, and airlift capabilities, America can project military power onto nearly every square inch of the planet. It can track and kill anyone, anywhere, using small teams of special forces to hunt down individual targets or it can airlift an entire army halfway around the world within a matter of weeks. It even has enough nuclear bombs to render the planet uninhabitable. America’s military is not designed to protect it but to dominate and control the rest of the world.
Conservatives correctly understand that governments, due to their ability to accumulate power and marshal resources, are the greatest potential threat to a nation’s freedom. But instead of reigning in the parts that pose the most danger, they channel their skepticism towards limiting the state’s ability to provide vital public services like funding education and healthcare or protecting the environment. Unfortunately, their inconsistent ideas extend well beyond the realms of national security and domestic spending.
They also passionately support banning abortions during the earliest stages of pregnancy and denying women access to birth control. These issues touch on some of the most complicated and personal decisions a woman can make. To insert the government into these deliberations by giving it the power to usurp a women’s right to choose represents one of the greatest intrusions of governmental authority imaginable. With respect to childbirth, it takes the decision away from the person in the best position to weigh the unique circumstances that surround each pregnancy, i.e., the mother, and gives it to the government.
Their willingness to ban abortions combined with their refusal to fund public healthcare initiatives show conservatives have a fundamental misunderstanding of the role and purpose of government. Ensuring all citizens have access to the medical care they need is a basic governmental function. No one should die from cancer because they cannot afford chemotherapy. To that end, the government must provide the infrastructure and facilities required to give every citizen access to necessary medical treatment. But giving it control over their personal healthcare choices is an unconscionable expansion of the government’s power well outside its scope of authority. Conservatives would give the state the power to compel life against the wishes of the women who must carry the burden both during and after pregnancy while denying them the resources needed to safely deliver and care for their babies.
They believe the overriding need to save the lives of unborn children outweighs the concerns of the mother. This argument touches on questions that have no easy answer. Some believe life begins at conception, others when the baby is born. The reasonable compromise seems to be that a life cannot be a life until it can survive on its own. Despite this gray area, conservatives have decided life begins at conception and weaponized the courts and their control of various state legislatures to impose their views on their neighbors.
These examples, though very different, show the same thing. Despite the lofty rhetoric about individual rights and limited government, American conservatism is not the product of a carefully considered ideology. It is rooted in a fear of change and the desire for power. America’s conservatives would use their military to control the world and their judges to control women. Their illogical ideas and willingness to use the mechanisms of the state to impose their values on others shows exactly why the exercise of political authority must always be strictly limited, particularly when it comes to matters of life and death like waging war or abortion.
Though many refuse to admit it, America is slowly collapsing under the weight of its contradictions. As its rapidly growing debt of $35 trillion shows, it has overextended itself financially and geopolitically. The inability of its leaders to admit basic facts about their nation’s dire finances and unsustainable military posture have set it on a path to self-destruction. The irrational ideas championed by its conservatives exemplify these trends, but they are hardly alone.
Many liberals also support maintaining a military designed to dominate the world and ignore or whitewash the massacres committed in pursuit of their hegemonic ambitions. They believe the government can and should solve all our problems and that magically printing money will have no consequences. Neither end of America’s political spectrum makes any sense, but its conservatives are especially irrational.
Aside from their blatantly hypocritical views on military spending and abortion, they also believe the US Constitution, a document written centuries ago that once legalized treating human beings as chattel, is inviolable and that rights not explicitly granted by it do not exist. In their quest for power, they have created a cult around a treasonous buffoon who has already tried to overthrow the government once. When America finally implodes, they will shoulder much of the responsibility, though they will likely blame “wokeness” and label any attempts to discuss their toxic role in its fall as “critical race theory” to stifle meaningful debate.
The author is a US Navy veteran and attorney who usually limits his political musings to the Muslim world on his blog, www.mirrorsfortheprince.com. These thoughts were first inspired by his study of its long decline, which is the direct result of the conservative ideologies that have dominated it for centuries. Muslim conservatives vanquished their liberal foes roughly a thousand years ago and the results speak for themselves. In one of the many parallels between the Islamic world and America, the latter’s conservatives are determined to drag their nation down a similar path. Their insane ideas are but one more datapoint that shows America is in the “senile” stage of its development first described by Ibn Khaldun centuries ago, which means the Pax Americana is not long for this world.