CONFUSED CONSERVATISM

MODERN-DAY conservatives celebrate small government, lower taxes and personal responsibility. These are people who believe that the government that governs the least is the government that governs the best. They believe in the free market and oppose any kind of regulation. They argue that people should be allowed to make their individual choices, based on their reason to which no government should meddle.

And this is where conservatism is doomed to become contradictory. For an ideology that has metamorphosed into one that, in theory, privileges individual choices, it is now the powerful driver of what has become forms of blatant infringement into the rights of individuals to make choices. Adherents to the conservative ideology vehemently oppose women taking charge of their own bodies and reproduction. They oppose abortion rights. They also deny people the right to choose their own sexual preferences and how to live their lives and pursue happiness. They are against same-sex marriage, even as they frown upon the dissolution even of bad marriages.

Conservatism is in this predicament simply because while it is against state control, its privileging of personal responsibility is coupled with their affinity for the preservation of traditional institutions such as the family and the prevailing cultural constructs. They endorse control that is embodied in law, embedded in state regulations, but are totally blind to the more insidious, more internalized rituals of tradition that have the power to negate individual choices and personal responsibility.

Thus, we see conservatives sounding the alarm when governments enact laws that would make health care universal and mandatory, and would rather prefer that this should be left to private individuals and their insurance companies. They even refuse to wear masks or oppose any move to make vaccination a mandatory requirement to gain access to certain facilities and services. And yet, these conservatives are the same driving force behind conspiracy theories and the propagation of alternative, even unscientific, narratives that would oppose modern methods. They become efficient fearmongers as they weave narratives that oppose government intervention into individual choices, yet, at the same time, prevent individuals from making rational choices.

What makes conservatism an anomaly occurs when one considers the fact that most problems of our modern and contemporary lives are due to people making irrational choices, or are products of massive market failure, or simply require governments to intervene. The environmental crisis is an example of this, where natural resources all over the world have been depleted to a point that the life of the entire planet is now jeopardized. And yet, you have conservatives who oppose state regulation of activities that are threatening the environment, even as they are also the most vocal climate change deniers, peddling unscientific diatribes against pure logic and reason.

If there is any problem that we confront that requires concerted state action, where massive funds have to be spent and where personal responsibility which conservatives love to celebrate may not be enough, it would be in our fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Yet, what we are now witnessing are conservative voices that oppose mask mandates, complain against state overreach that allegedly infringe on individual rights and are against vaccination.

It cannot be denied that liberalism has its own failures. But it is equally undeniable that conservatism has its failures too, even more epic and more dangerous. Conservatives hate strong and intrusive governments and have condemned liberals for making governments bigger in their fight to advance human rights and development. Yet, conservatives are the very same people who elevate and enable strong leaders with tyrannical tendencies, from Donald Trump to Rodrigo Duterte. Conservatives may also hate state interventionism, but if there is one area where they would welcome state action, it would be in the area of declaring war on perceived enemies, both foreign and domestic.

Conservatives oppose universal health care and treating drugs as a public health issue, which ironically would have been more consistent with the conservative ideal of personal responsibility. But they would support using state resources and taxpayer’s monies to wage a drug war, even if it means killing drug users and petty dealers.

Communism is being touted by the conservative right as a threat to national security. Yet, it can also be said that conservatism has become a threat to human security. It is the ideology that supports the violation of human rights. Conservatives oppose government overreach and celebrate individual responsibility and choice, even as it enables the deployment of the state apparatus to inflict political violence on people who are simply expressing their individual right to

their political beliefs.

One just has to look at how the Republican Party in the United States has been transformed from Ronald Reagan’s compassionate conservatism of small government, lower taxes and individual choices, to what has become a political cult celebrating Trump, even putting up a golden image of his likeness to complete the idolatry.

The Philippines may not have a strong political party system, and whatever party system we may have does not embody any welldefined ideological substance. Ideologies appear unarticulated, inchoate and invisible. And this is where it becomes even more perilous for our political development. We may not have the narrative of parties bearing ideologies that may have transmogrified into mere shadows of what they should — like what the Republicans have become as a cult party of Trump.

But what we have is more dangerous. What we have is a political landscape dominated by a kind of conservatism that is already organically rooted in idolatry, bereft of any history of a past that is at least doctrinally and theoretically coherent and consistent. And in our case, it is no longer just about any political party. There is no conservative political party like a Republican Party. There is just us, as we face the frightening but unrecognized reality of a confused conservatism that festers in our entire moral and political fabric.