Liberal, Conservative, Fascist

  

I am a liberal, not in the sense of being a member of the liberal party, but in terms of what I believe is good for society.  It’s remarkable how great the variety of  ideas there are about what is good.  But at the same time there are universal moral rules that we can mostly all agree on, whether we are liberal or conservative, like: do not lie, steal, injure or kill.  Liberalism prioritizes the value of free speech, economic competition, and democratic representation.  Liberals believe that as a society, we ought to acknowledge and tolerate a multiplicity of voices, cultures, religions, and traditions.

   

Conservatism is about conserving ways of life, traditions, and religious practices.   Conservatives tend to value small government, supporting business enterprise, are less tolerant of a multi-ethnic society but more tolerant of the fusion of church and state, i.e.  favoring certain traditional religious sects over others, integrating them into the political system and identifying them with the nation itself.  Some will insist that the United States is a “Christian Nation”.  A good example of this are the six conservative members of the current U.S. Supreme court, who together voted to overturn Roe vs Wade, and allow states to ban abortion, on largely religious grounds.

In spite of the fact that science leads to a better understanding of our world, as well as the development of new technologies, which ultimately drive our economies, science is under attack by people who see the more open-minded objective stance of science as threatening their Biblical world view.  Trump and Co.’s systematic  defunding of scientific and medical research, Maga harassment of individual scientists, and Trump’s ongoing degrading and undermining of higher education will cause severe long term damage to America’s economic system, threatening Americans’ health individually and collectively.

With the advent of Trump and the extreme right wing we see the resurgence of white supremacy in the face of the diminishment of white cultural, political, and economic power. In America, the move to authoritarianism, where laws favour an elite group, and everyone else is legally exploited,  can easily tend towards Fascism, where racial and cultural homogeneity is enforced by a powerful secret police, backed by the state, along with a network of concentration camps to segregate outsiders from “real Americans”. With Maga, the idea of the public good vanishes - it’s all about wiping out L’ancient regime. (in this case: the liberal rules-based order.) 

  Trump’s particular brand of fascism is what you get when you begin by over-emphasizing fear and intolerance.  That makes people more susceptible to believing lies, and tolerating lying.  Ultimately it has led to dehumanizing people and putting them into concentration camps, just as it happened before in Nazi Germany.   

 There are two strong impulses battling it out in our human nature - the impulse to include and the impulse to exclude. Where we have multiple societies and ethnicities, civilization works best as inclusive,  where we practice civility towards each other and we do our civil duties to uphold the law,  refraining from favoring certain groups over others in public institutions, and sanctioning those who would treat certain groups as less than human.  When we over-emphasize exclusion we get war, death, and the destruction of civilization. Shipwrecked sailors  were more likely to survive when they took care of each other rather than leaving it to “every man for himself”.  Intolerance and exclusion will only diminish us and may well reduce our chances of survival as a species.