I am not a liberal. I am also not a conservative. I think my politics are best described as “eclectic”. I like “pragmatic” but that term has become debased in recent years by being confused with opportunism or a lack of principles.
That having been said I took a certain amount of umbrage at Kate Batchelder’s Wall Street Journal op-ed listing “The Top 10 Liberal Superstitions”, not because I disagreed with them but because it was so one-sided.
I agree that there are certain things that are articles of faith among progressives that have little empirical support or little basis in human nature. For example, the belief in a straightline relationship between education and income. I think that’s a vast oversimplification. There are relationships between education and job protections via regulation and jobs protections via regulation and income but the relationship between education and income is not nearly so strong.
What bugged me is that it’s not as though conservatives don’t have their own superstitions. One of them is that cutting taxes will ipso facto result in economic growth. I think the evidence for that is actually pretty weak and at this point what is taxed is probably more important for economic growth than that you cut taxes.
Or that Ronald Reagan was what today’s conservatives would think of as a conservative but that’s treading on hallowed ground.
Consequently, I’m perversely accepting nominations for the top 10 conservative superstitions. To qualify a nominee would a) need to be something actually believed by many conservatives and b) demonstrably untrue or at least with substantial evidence that it’s untrue. Things about which there are merely differences of opinion don’t qualify.
Not sure if all of these meet your criteria but here’s my list:
1.The tax cutting fallacy you already mentioned
2. That GOP is “pro-business” (they are corporatist and generally not any better for small business than are the Democrats.)
3. That the poor are lazy and could improve their lot in life if they were willing to work hard
4. Entitlements encourage laziness and irresponsible behavior (not entirely untrue but this concern is overblown by most conservatives.)
5. That corporations will behave responsibly toward the environment without regulations
6. That American exceptionalism justifies any means
7. Any criticism or questioning of American foreign policy is unpatriotic
8. That the budget could be balanced if Democrats would agree to cut “wasteful” spending
9. That common sense always trumps academic credentials (too much reflexive distrust of elitism, leading to embrace of simpleminded candidates like Palin.)
10. That healthcare could be fixed by adopting a free market system
#8 and #10 are certainly good candidates. The belief in 10 is actually a bit more complicated—something along the lines of if it weren’t for Medicaid and Medicare we’d have a free market in healthcare.
I don’t know if I can improve on CStanley’s list much. But I think I can add the, it seems to me, number 1 superstition-myth I hear from many who identify as conservative: If only the Republican party would nominate a real conservative (read Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, Mike Lee, etc.), the scales would fall from the eyes of the American people and the New Jerusalem would be upon us.
(Maybe this one subsumes all the others.)
1. That reducing the size of government can be done without governing.
[Similar to the notion that progressives cannot expand the size of government without competent governance, but more directed towards the idea that stunts like 10% across-the-board cuts, doing all of the same things in the same way will get you anywhere but discredited]
2. That the U.S. is a Christian nation, at least in any sense that such a phrase means majority support for any given social conservative policy.
I meant “doing all of the same things in the same way [with less]”
(Maybe this one subsumes all the others.)
Yeah, I think that is meta in the same way that you could say the overarching superstition of the left is that socialism and/or technocracy/meritocracy can create utopia if we could only get the right people elected.
I like all those suggestions. I’ve got one of my own, but I’m having trouble expressing it succinctly enough:
That voting for self-admittedly awful candidates will make America a better place.
I’m seeing so many conservatives right now state things like, “Sure, Boehner and McConnell suck on things that matter most to you (e.g., corporatism, immigration), but if you vote for them America will get better than if you vote for Pelosi & Reid, who believe in the exact same things.”
Also that I’m a traitor for not voting for people that will vote the opposite of not only how I want them to vote, but opposite of the way the people calling me a traitor want them to vote.
It’s the Underwear Gnome Model of Politics:
1. Vote for awful, disingenuous candidates who will do the opposite of what I believe to be right;
2. ????
3. Utopia!
I guess I should call the the Underwear Gnome Model of Republican Politics. #TUGMORP
Ironically I agree with Sam’s selection, regarding electing a “real conservative,” the most of anyone’s examples. IMO, extreme attracts extreme, including government leadership, and that’s what we have going for us today, leading to polarization rather than productive legislation. IOW, electing someone like Ted Cruz would be divisive rather than wonderful.
As for CStandley’s list, it’s reflective more of how liberals simplistically interpret conservative philosophies and policies than anything else. For example:
#2 Small business is attracted to small government approaches, as it has fewer bureaucratic entanglements in which they can grow a business. Consequently the majority of small business people favor center-right policies more than those espoused by the liberal left. Corporate giants support anyone who has the power — R or D.
#3 Poor and lazy are what libs tack on conservatives. However, why then is there a disproportionate amount of aid going from the right to the disadvantaged than there is coming from liberals, if this was an “article of faith” held by the right majority? The left, basically sees government as the source of all things, while the right see themselves as part of the equation of personally helping others.
Jan- do you really believe that the GOP has been the party of “small government”, in it’s actions rather than just it’s rhetoric? That is what I’m getting at. I’d say they are marginally better the Democrats (especially at state and local level) but that’s not good enough when the mantra is pro-growth.
As for the “poor are lazy” I don’t think that’s an article of faith for all conservatives- in fact it is much less so among social (religious) conservatives.) But I think there are enough conservatives who feel this way, and enough who do don’t but think that the private charity is always the answer, that it gets in the way of good policy.
CStanley, the libertarians are the absolute worst on “the poor are lazy” belief. They truly want a free market on healthcare because they’re hoping all the poor people die.
There should probably be a list like this for libertarians, too. There should be something in there about a belief that all lawyers, professors and government workers are useless except when they’re Glenn Reynolds. And then they’re a Heinleinian superhero of Jimbino proportions – with a deep-fryer!
“They truly want a free market on healthcare because they’re hoping all the poor people die.”
Uh-huh. The ghost of Reynolds…..
There is too much absolutism and mind reading going on here.
I run into lots of libertarians around the web. To a person they believe that all people that aren’t pulling in at least $80,000 a year are worthless freeloaders who deserve nothing. And these folks full well understand that completely free market healthcare would price a good chunk of people at the bottom end right out of the market. It’s not that hard to connect the dots, Drew. Next time I remember, I’ll ask one of them if they prefer publicly funded vaccinations or not. That ought to settle it. Or we can ask Jimbino next time he shows up.
On this social conservatives are much better.
OT: spaceflight is hard.
Conservatives and especially libertarians have created a fantasy world. They assume that rather than that the world would be a safe secure suburb without government intrusion. The reality is quite different. The wild west was limited government with a free market.
If you want free market capitalism, go to the criminal world. If you want limited regulations, go to the criminal world.
If you do not want something that free or unlimited, try a third world country. Everything is for sale. Every price is negotiable. Every sale is final. Laws are flexible. Quality is questionable. Nobody is sympathetic to your sad circumstances. Almost everything is your fault – too bad, so sad – tough luck. I mean everything. Murder – wrong place, wrong time. Rape – wrong crowd. Run over by a car – did not look both ways. Food poisoning – did not pray.
I would love to drop a few loud mouth conservatives off in Mogadishu, Somalia or even better Bidou. After you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, give me a call. (Hint: Eat a fucking rat if you can find one.)
“Hat tip: eat a fucking rat….” Oughta be on a tee shirt!
That their guys in politics are not just rent seeking opportunists just like the liberals. They’re after the same thing, power. Only singing a slightly different song. What sets this country apart is the constitution and the courts that protect it. Not the flavor of your politics.
I’d say immigration is a big one to add to the list. Conservatives seem to think that the way to control it is to build an East-German wall along the southern border.