Pseudo Conservatism

February 10, 2018

Democrats are tilting at windmills every time they hyperventilate about the latest Trump insult to our norms and customs. Saturday Night Live had it exactly right when they performed their fake game show, Does It Really Matter? The answer is it simply does not. Nothing really matters. Lying, wife beating, sexual harassment, incompetence, dysfunction, deficits, and so on mean nothing in the new normal. The Christian Coalition gave Trump a “mulligan” for paying hush money to a porn star, which insults me as a golfer. Professional golfers do not get mulligans, and nor should professional politicians.

The reason Democrats are going after the wrong issues is because of what Richard Hofstader called pseudo conservatism, a concept that goes back to the mid-50’s. He borrowed the term from the study of The Authoritarian Personality. “Although the pseudos believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, they show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word. They are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment. Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways.” These are the angry and disaffected voters.

The donor class, which is also part of the pseudo conservative movement, has successfully aligned itself for years with these disaffected voters for its own personal gain, creating a formidable political force. The Kochs and the Mercers promise that the angry voters will be better off if they join them, but the joke is on the disaffecteds. The donor class gets its massive tax cuts, and the angry voters get is the psychological pleasure of sticking it to the liberal establishment. The Democratic Party needs to reclaim its roots as the party of the people by offering what the angry pseudos are looking for, which is a visible path forward and upward. Railing against the insult of the day will not be effective because the pseudos do not care about our democratic guardrails. They just care about being in power. Ironically, Democrats, which Hofstader describes as the new establishment, may have to align themselves with real conservatives to get back into power. Strange bedfellows indeed.