Saturday, May 26, 2018

Trump’s War on the Federal Workforce


The data on government workers suggest that lower skilled positions are better compensated in government service than in the private economy.  On the other hand, positions requiring considerable skill, training, or educational attainment are less well paid than similar positions in private industry.  Pay and benefits for public employees are closely associated with policies first implemented in the economically healthier postwar years.  Unions were more common then and they played a role in establishing floors on wages.  Those more egalitarian times also worked to keep wages at the top end of the spectrum at modest levels, a practice long forgotten in the private sector.  Private companies have many mechanisms by which they can diminish wage and benefit levels for their non-union employees.  Governments, however, can’t declare bankruptcy or go out of business and reconstitute themselves, consequently they are much more constrained by past practices.  Conservative politicians have been much less successful in destroying the union movement in the public sector than in the private, further providing stability in compensation for public employees.  It seems that as voters, government workers are able to exert leverage on employment policies at least at state and local levels.

The manner in which this situation, and government workers in general, are viewed seems to be determined mostly by political viewpoint.  Liberals will be proud of decent benefits for all workers and respect the financial sacrifices made by modestly paid experts who keep the government—and society—running.  Conservatives, who resent anyone they cannot control, will view these same workers as being coddled by excessive benefits and wages, and view the government’s experts as lazy incompetents who would be unable to find a real job in the private sector.  Given this divergence of perspectives, one might expect that federal employees would experience changes in the work environment when a new administration takes control in Washington.

Evan Osnos has provided a startling look at what the Trump administration has been up to since taking control.  His article appeared in The New Yorker under the title Trump vs. The “Deep State.”  He opens with this lede.

“How the Administration’s loyalists are quietly reshaping American governance.”

Osnos provides this perspective.

“Every new President disturbs the disposition of power in Washington. Stars fade. Political appointees arrive, assuming control of a bureaucracy that encompasses 2.8 million civilian employees, across two hundred and fifty agencies—from Forest Service smoke jumpers in Alaska to C.I.A. code-breakers in Virginia. “It’s like taking over two hundred and fifty private corporations at one time,” David Lewis, the chair of the political-science department at Vanderbilt University, told me.”

Since administrations change every four or eight years it is necessary that the vast majority of these government employees be protected from major upheavals when a new president arrives in town.  These workers are mostly performing the tasks already approved by Congress and are not involved in ongoing political debates taking place on the margins about what tasks should be eliminated or which new ones are needed.  Continuity is required for stability.  However, the leaders of these agencies are often political appointees who may have little relevant expertise yet can exercise considerable influence over technical and personnel policies.  The number of political appointees has been growing over time.  This has the dual effect of providing a president with the potential for more power in implementing an agenda, but it also makes it more difficult to assemble a team with unassailable competence—a fact Trump has already learned.

“Trump’s struggle to attract competent people reflects a broader problem. For decades, Presidents and Congress have created a steadily increasing number of political appointees. Kennedy submitted two hundred and eighty-six appointments for Senate approval; Trump is allotted more than twelve hundred. Stier [of Partnership for Public Service] said, ‘The system we have now is crazy. It’s unique among democracies. There is an entourage of these special assistants, special counsels, confidential assistants, and others. To insure that the President’s policy is carried out, the number of appointees could be in the dozens or the hundreds.’ He added, ‘We have a resurgent spoils system. It is the breaking of an organization that was already under stress. It is unmanageable and dangerous in a world when crises are happening in the blink of an eye’.”

Trump is in a poor position to personally evaluate people for positions because he has so little experience in governing and no particular philosophy of governance.  His major criterion for a candidate is that he/she be absolutely loyal to him personally.

“….Trump has elevated loyalty to the primary consideration. Since he has no fixed ideology, the White House cannot screen for ideas, so it seeks a more personal form of devotion. Kellyanne Conway, one of his most dedicated attendants, refers reverently to the “October 8th coalition,” the campaign stalwarts who remained at Trump’s side while the world listened to a recording of him boasting about grabbing women by the genitals.”

However, loyalty as a substitute for competence can be extremely dangerous.

“A culture of fealty compounds itself; conformists thrive, and dissenters depart or refuse to join. By May, the President was surrounded by advisers in name only, who competed to be the most explicitly quiescent. Peter Navarro, the head of the White House National Trade Council, told an interviewer, ‘My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters’.”

The first place where competence is required is in the vetting of potential appointees where Trump and his crew of loyalists have shown little of it. With about 4,000 total jobs to fill, some of the administration’s efforts have been cringe-worthy.

“The White House brought in an array of outsiders, who, at times, ran into trouble. As an assistant to the Secretary of Energy, the Administration installed Sid Bowdidge, whose recent employment had included managing a Meineke Car Care branch in Seabrook, New Hampshire. Bowdidge departed after it emerged that he had called Muslims ‘maggots.’ In December, Matthew Spencer Petersen, a nominee to the federal bench, became a brief online sensation when Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, asked him a series of basic law-school questions, which revealed that Petersen had never argued a motion, tried a case, or taken a deposition by himself. Embarrassing details came out about other judicial nominees: Brett Talley, who had never tried a case in federal court, wandered cemeteries hunting for ghosts; Jeff Mateer had called transgender children part of ‘Satan’s plan.’ All three nominations were withdrawn.”

Having put little thought into governance, Trump is at the mercy of others for filling most positions.  He has little choice but to follow the guidance of Republican Party leaders and the herd of special interest groups in alliance with them.  Trump’s major contribution seems to be in excluding anyone who didn’t support his election.

“Republican think tanks and donors succeeded in installing preferred nominees. The earliest wave arrived from the Heritage Foundation; subsequent ones came from Charles and David Koch’s network of conservative advocacy groups and from the American Enterprise Institute. But the White House maintained a virtual blockade against Republicans who had signed letters opposing Trump’s candidacy.”

Rogue presidents have always believed that the federal workforce should serve their political needs.  Those who would not adhere to that principle were expendable. 

“Richard Nixon’s aides produced an eighty-page manual on the removal of ‘undesirable’ careerists, which proffered a system for grading civil servants on political ‘dependability,’ ranging from ‘L’ (for ‘Let’s watch this fellow’) to ‘O’ (for ‘Out’). To marginalize the troublesome ones, it suggested a ‘New Activity Technique’: create an ‘apparently meaningful, but essentially meaningless, new activity to which they are all transferred.’ Such an activity, Nixon’s aides wrote, could serve as ‘a single barrel into which you can dump a large number of widely located bad apples’.”

Trump’s administration has resurrected this policy.  Osnos provides an example from the State Department under Tillerson.

“….in a kind of revival of Nixon’s New Assignment Technique, hundreds of State Department employees have been banished to a bizarre form of bureaucratic purgatory. Last October, Tillerson’s office announced the launch of a ‘FOIA Surge,’ a campaign to process a backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests, which would require three hundred and fifty State Department staffers. The work was rudimentary (‘You could do it with smart interns,’ one participant said), but the list of those assigned to it included prominent Ambassadors and specialized civil servants. They quickly discovered something in common: many had worked on issues of priority to the Obama Administration.” 

Post-Watergate when many of Nixon’s methods were revealed, Congress passed a law aimed at prohibiting discrimination against federal employees based on “political affiliation, race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, age, or handicapping condition.”  The State Department action should have generated protests against these types of activities.  How did the Trump administration deal with this?

“Civil servants who think that they have been mistreated can appeal to a semi-judicial agency called the Merit Systems Protection Board. By law, though, the board needs two members to function, and one left just before Trump’s Inauguration, so for sixteen months it has issued no judgments. For a while, the staff continued to work—reading complaints, marking them with notes—assuming that a new hire would arrive soon. (Since 1979, the board had never been without a quorum for longer than a few weeks.) But, as complaints kept coming in, the staff was forced to store them, unresolved, in vacant rooms of the office, which occupies part of a commercial building in downtown Washington.”


Between attacks on the integrity of parts of the government, and threats to cut financial support, the moral of the workforce has plummeted, and numerous people are either being forced out or choosing to resign.  Consider the State Department as an example.

“….Tillerson dismantled large parts of the department: as the White House proposed a thirty-one-per-cent budget reduction, the department accepted the lowest number of new Foreign Service officers in years. Sixty per cent of the highest-ranked diplomats have departed.”

Applying data like that to multiple government agencies whose leaders are determined to reward the faithful and punish any malcontents indicates a veritable exodus is occurring.

“Amid a strong economy, large numbers of employees are opting to leave the government rather than serve it. In Trump’s first nine months, more than seventy-nine thousand full-time workers quit or retired—a forty-two-per-cent increase over that period in Obama’s Presidency. To Trump and his allies, the departures have been liberating, a purge of obstructionists. ‘The President now has people around him who aren’t trying to subvert him,’ Michael Caputo, a senior campaign adviser, told me. ‘The more real Trump supporters who pop up in the White House phone book, the better off our nation will be’.”

Trusting his ample gut, Trump has surrounded himself with an astounding cast of characters, nearly all of which have demonstrated blatant acts of either incompetence, or ethical malfeasance, or both.  Particularly troubling is the fact that Trump’s disregard for the truth has crept into our governance.

“In one agency after another, I encountered a pattern: on controversial issues, the Administration is often not writing down potentially damaging information. After members of Congress requested details on Carson’s decorating expenses, Marcus Smallwood, the departmental-records officer at HUD, wrote an open letter to Carson, saying, ‘I do not have confidence that HUD can truthfully provide the evidence being requested by the House Oversight Committee because there has been a concerted effort to stop email traffic regarding these matters.’ At the Department of the Interior, the Inspector General’s office investigated Zinke’s travel expenses but was stymied by ‘absent or incomplete documentation’ that would ‘distinguish between personal, political, and official travel.’ According to Ruch, of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, when environmentalists filed suit to discover if industry lobbyists had influenced a report on Superfund sites, they were told, ‘There are no minutes, no work product, no materials.’ Ruch added, ‘The task-force report was a product of immaculate conception.’ He believes that the Administration is ‘deliberately avoiding creating records’.”

Osnos skewers a number of Trump’s loyalist appointees, but none as savagely as John Bolton, the recently appointed national-security advisor.  He provides the insight of Lawrence Wilkerson who was Colin Powell’s chief of staff during the Bush administration.

“Bolton, known in Washington as a maximalist hawk, is arguably the most volatile addition to the Administration since its inception—an unrepentant advocate of the Iraq War who has also argued for regime change in Iran and in North Korea. ‘He lied repeatedly during his time at State,’ Wilkerson told me. In 2002, when Bolton was the department’s top arms-control official, he planned to accuse Cuba of developing a secret biological-weapons program. When a lower-ranking intelligence official, Christian Westermann, spoke up to say that the accusation was unsupportable, Bolton tried to have him fired, telling his boss that he wouldn’t take orders from a ‘mid-level munchkin’.”

“To Wilkerson, Bolton’s arrival at the center of American national security is alarming. He recalled an encounter in 2002, when Bolton was publicly calling for Bush to confront North Korea. At the time, Wilkerson, who had served thirty-one years in the Army, cautioned Bolton that an attack on Seoul would result in enormous casualties. ‘John stops me mid-sentence and says, “Wait a minute, I don’t do casualties and things like that. That’s your bailiwick’,” Wilkerson told me. ‘The man has no comprehension of the young men and women that have to carry out his goddam wars.’ He continued, ‘He thinks it’s right to shape a narrative that’s false, so long as that narrative is leading to a “better” purpose’.”

To Wilkerson, all the talk of the “Iran menace” is reminiscent of the buildup to the invasion of Iraq.  Osnos finishes his article by providing a comparison between the incompetence and the self-serving misuse of facts of that earlier era and the manufactured truths of the Trump era.  He likens the Trump White House to the Green Zone (ultimately known as the Emerald City) from which Bush loyalists mismanaged Iraq.

“As the problems accumulated, so did the vacant offices in the Green Zone, because people in Washington were unwilling to join. The Administration turned, more than ever, to loyalists. Officials screening new American prospects sometimes asked whether they had voted for Bush and how they saw Roe v. Wade. A cohort of recent college grads, recruited because they had applied for jobs at the Heritage Foundation, were put in charge of Iraq’s national budget. The rebuilding of the stock market was entrusted to a twenty-four-year-old. ‘They wanted to insure lockstep political orientation,’ Wilkerson recalled. ‘And what we got out of that was a lockstep-stupid political orientation’.”

“Similarly, the mistakes that the Trump Administration has made are likely to multiply: the dismantling of the State Department; the denigration of the civil service; the exclusion of experts on Iran and climate change; the fictional statistics about undocumented immigrants; and the effort to squelch dissent across the government. Absent a radical change, the Administration has no mechanism for self-correction. It will not get normal; it will get worse.”

Osnos ends with this assessment.

“Midway through its second year, Trump’s White House is at war within and without, racing to banish the ‘disloyals’ and to beat back threatening information. Bit by bit, the White House is becoming Trump’s Emerald City: isolated, fortified against nonbelievers, entranced by its mythmaker, and constantly vulnerable to the risks of revelation.”



Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Understanding Trump’s Base


When the label “conservative” comes up in political discourse, we have been conditioned to think in terms of individual psychological characteristics such as resistance to change and intolerance for new ideas.  Corey Robin has provided a startlingly different view of political conservatism in his book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump.  In Robin’s view, political conservatives are quite willing to embrace change provided change is used to maintain an inequality in which the majority is kept subjugated to a presumably meritorious elite.  Robin explains.

“….many of the characteristics we have come to associate with contemporary conservatism—racism, populism, violence, and a pervasive contempt for custom, convention, law, institutions, and established elites—are not recent or eccentric developments of the American right.  They are instead constitutive elements of conservatism, dating back to its origins in the European reaction against the French Revolution.  From its inception, conservatism has relied upon some mix of these elements to build a broad-based movement of elites and masses against the emancipation of the lower orders.”

From this perspective, conservatism is all about maintaining power for elites.  The political history of the past two centuries can be thought of as a sequence of revolutions as the poor and dispossessed attempted to lessen their subjugation by those in the higher classes, while conservatives plotted counterrevolutions that would maintain the subjugation.  Conservatives are quite willing to change as needed to maintain the notion that the better man will always be superior to the lessor man.  The definition of who was superior could change as conditions changed, but the ideal society for a conservative was one in which there was a hierarchy of subordination where each person could view himself as superior to those below him and inferior to those above him.

Conservatism works as a political philosophy by convincing large numbers of people that they are, in fact, members of the elite even though they know that not all elites are equal.  The most formidable conservative political appeal is to convince a voter that he is in danger of losing his position of superiority over another person.  Since the Nixon era, Republicans have focused on race as a means of creating fear of loss of status in white voters.  Over the years they have dealt in misogyny as they encouraged men to continue to feel superior to women both in the economy and in family life.  They have also captured evangelical white Christians by providing them refuge from secular and scientific ridicule.  Patriotism is another ploy used to convince those with little else to provide them comfort that they are members of the greatest nation on earth, and therefore they are superior to all those from lesser nations.  A slogan such as “Make America Great Again” would resonate with many.

The success of Donald Trump in taking over the Republican Party was, in Robin’s view, not an aberration, but a logical next step in the evolution of conservatism in the United States.  People were so startled by Republicans’ acceptance of Trump as a viable candidate that they began associating his popularity with that of Hitler.  A much more valuable comparison would have been with George Wallace and his candidacies. Wallace brought a southern cultural message of white dominance and god-fearing religion coupled with a populist economic thrust that was welcomed then by the same people in the North who would rush to support Trump.  Middle to lower class whites welcomed both Wallace and Trump and would explain Trump’s ultimate victory.

It might be difficult for some to comprehend the degree to which the Republican Party has changed since the time of Nixon.  Nixon was a master of race baiting and his quest to capture southern whites was so successful that more moderate members had to look elsewhere for a home, leaving the party to be dominated by the racist southern democrats who soon became racist southern Republicans.

It is not possible to comprehend politics in the United States without focusing on racial issues.  Consider Robin’s statement on Nixon’s strategy.

“Pioneers of the Southern Strategy in the Nixon administration….understood that after the rights revolutions of the sixties they could no longer make simple appeals to white racism.  From now on, they would have to speak in code, preferably to one palatable to the new dispensation of color blindness.  As White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman noted in his diary, Nixon ‘emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks.  The key is to devise a system that recognized this while not appearing to.’  Looking back on this strategy in 1981, Republican strategist Lee Atwater spelled out its elements more clearly:

“You start out in 1954 by saying ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’  By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you.  Backfires.  So you say stuff like forced busing, states rights and all that stuff.  You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.  And subconsciously maybe that is part of it.”

The issue of race has driven our culture for over 400 years, particularly in the South, where elites developed the master plan that would keep the masses of poor whites faithful to the “Southern Way,” now the Republican Way.

“The genius of the slaveholders, wrote Daniel Hundley in his Social Relations in Our Southern States, is that they are ‘not an exclusive aristocracy. Every free white man in the whole Union has just as much right to become an Oligarch.’  This was not just propaganda: by 1860, there were 400,000 slaveholders in the South, making the American master class one of the most democratic in the world.  The slaveholders repeatedly attempted to pass laws encouraging whites to own at least one slave and even considered granting tax breaks to facilitate such ownership.”

“In the words of Calhoun: ‘With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.”

Slavery was not kind economically to poor whites.  Yet when the Civil War came, they were willing to die to preserve a system that provided them only the privilege of believing they were superior to blacks.

One might argue that this was only a southern thing and has no relevance for the nation as a whole, but southern attitudes did not stay localized in the South.  There came a vast dispersion of southern whites—and their culture— throughout the remainder of the nation. James N. Gregory, a history professor at the University of Washington, presents relevant data and conclusions in The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (2005).

“In the Great Migration era of the early twentieth century, when African Americans moved north for the first time in large numbers and established much-noticed communities in the major cities, less-noticed white southerners actually outnumbered them roughly two to one.  The margins became larger after 1950 and still larger as the century drew to a close.  Over the course of the twentieth century, more than 28 million southerners left their home region—28 percent were African Americans, 68 percent were non-Hispanic whites, and 4 percent southern-born Latinos, Tejanos mostly, who had been joining the flow north and west since World War II.”

“In doing so, they changed America.  They transformed American religion, spreading Baptist and Pentecostal churches and reinvigorating evangelical Protestantism, both black and white versions.  They transformed American popular culture, especially music.  The development of blues, jazz, gospel, R&B, and hillbilly and country music all depended on the southern migrants.  The Southern Diaspora transformed American racial hierarchies, as black migrants in the great cities of the North and West developed institutions and political practices that enabled the modern civil rights movement.  The Southern Diaspora also helped reshape American conservatism, contributing to new forms of white working-class and suburban politics.  Indeed, most of the great political realignments of the second half of the twentieth century had something to do with the population movements out of the South.”

Southerners did not create racism in other parts of the country, but their attitudes made racism more politically correct and encouraged open expressions of racial bias.  One can track migration paths from former slave states and correlate conservative politics with the number of southerners who settled in a given location.  The Central Valley of California supports political attitudes not too different from those of the many immigrants from Oklahoma and Arkansas that settled there during the Depression. 

When the Ku Klux Klan came organizing it found fertile ground among whites in the North and West.  When George Wallace later came with his southern politics he was welcomed by many whites.  When Donald Trump came campaigning with a similar message to Wallace it should have been no surprise that he was welcomed by the same class of people.

Robin provides an explanation for why Trump was so much more successful than believed possible.  He believes Trump’s success derived from a disappointment on the part of whites in the promises not kept by the Republican Party, and from the outrage associated with living with a black man as president for eight years.

“Trump’s ascendency suggests that the lower orders are no longer satisfied with the racial and imperial privileges the [conservative] movement has offered them.  The right has reversed many of the gains of the Civil Rights movement: the schools that African Americans in the South attend today are more segregated than they were under Richard Nixon; the racial wealth gap has tripled since 1984; and in several states, voting rights for African Americans are under attack.  Yet a combination of stagnating wages, rising personal and household debt, and increasing precarity—coupled with the tormenting symbolism of a black president and the greater visibility of black and brown faces in the culture industries—has made the traditional conservative offering seem scant to its white constituents.  The future of the United States as a minority-majority nation exacerbates this anxiety.  Racial dog whistles no longer suffice; a more brazen sound is required.”

“Trump is that sound.”

Just as hundreds of thousands of poor whites were willing to die during the Civil War for a system that abused them economically but provided them with racial superiority, Trump’s supporters seem willing to follow him anywhere.  There appears to be no crime, no act of malfeasance, that will weaken their support for him.

Of particular interest is the degree to which evangelical Christians support this most unchristian of politicians.  Robin attributes this again to racial issues.  It is only white evangelicals that support Trump.  Michael Gerson provides a deeper look at the relationship between Trump and evangelicals in an article in The AtlanticThe Last Temptation: How evangelicals, once culturally confident, became an anxious minority seeking political protection from the least traditionally religious president in living memory.  Gerson is a white Christian who has considered himself to be proud of the evangelical label although he is struggling to maintain that pride given the behavior of evangelical leaders with respect to Trump.  He also recognizes the primacy of race in the religious response.

“….consider the contrasting voting behaviors of white and African American evangelicals in last year’s Senate race in Alabama. According to exit polls, 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Roy Moore, while 95 percent of black evangelicals supported his Democratic opponent, Doug Jones. The two groups inhabit two entirely different political worlds.”

He fears that evangelicals are risking their Christian reputation by supporting Trump.

“For some of Trump’s political allies, racist language and arguments are part of his appeal. For evangelical leaders, they should be sources of anguish. Given America’s history of slavery and segregation, racial prejudice is a special category of moral wrong. Fighting racism galvanized the religious conscience of 19th-century evangelicals and 20th-century African American civil-rights activists. Perpetuating racism indicted many white Christians in the South and elsewhere as hypocrites. Americans who are wrong on this issue do not understand the nature of their country. Christians who are wrong on this issue do not understand the most-basic requirements of their faith.”

“Here is the uncomfortable reality: I do not believe that most evangelicals are racist. But every strong Trump supporter has decided that racism is not a moral disqualification in the president of the United States. And that is something more than a political compromise. It is a revelation of moral priorities.”

Why are white evangelicals so grateful to Trump for his political shelter?  Gerson suggests that evangelicals lost there way when they doubled down on the rejection of evolution after the Scopes trial.  They emerged from that conflict as a national joke.  Rather than change, they assumed the posture of a “besieged and disrespected minority.”  Trump decided to treat them with respect, something they found hard to come by.

“It is true that insofar as Christian hospitals or colleges have their religious liberty threatened by hostile litigation or government agencies, they have every right to defend their institutional identities—to advocate for a principled pluralism. But this is different from evangelicals regarding themselves, hysterically and with self-pity, as an oppressed minority that requires a strongman to rescue it. This is how Trump has invited evangelicals to view themselves. He has treated evangelicalism as an interest group in need of protection and preferences.”

“Having given politics pride of place, these evangelical leaders have ceased to be moral leaders in any meaningful sense.”

“If utilitarian calculations are to be applied, they need to be fully applied. For a package of political benefits, these evangelical leaders have associated the Christian faith with racism and nativism. They have associated the Christian faith with misogyny and the mocking of the disabled. They have associated the Christian faith with lawlessness, corruption, and routine deception. They have associated the Christian faith with moral confusion about the surpassing evils of white supremacy and neo-Nazism.”

And they seem willing to stick with Trump to the bitter end.

We are at a very dangerous—but perhaps inevitable—juncture in our history.  A violent Civil War and a violent Civil Rights revolution failed to resolve our racial issues.  What will it take?


The interested reader might find the following articles informative:









Thursday, May 10, 2018

Understanding Conservatism: Power for the Elite and Subjugation for the Masses

Often pundits will turn to psychology and the traits that its practitioners catalogue in an attempt to understand the mind of a conservative individual.  This usually leads to conclusions that a conservative is uncomfortable with change, and resistant to new ideas.  This is of course true at a psychological level, but does this information provide any useful insight into conservatism as a political ideology, or explain why given classes of people tend to vote for avowed conservative candidates?  Corey Robin has provided a startlingly different view of political conservatism in his book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump.  In Robin’s view, political conservatives are quite willing to embrace change provided change is used to maintain an inequality in which the majority is kept subjugated to a presumably meritorious elite.  Robin explains.

“….many of the characteristics we have come to associate with contemporary conservatism—racism, populism, violence, and a pervasive contempt for custom, convention, law, institutions, and established elites—are not recent or eccentric developments of the American right.  They are instead constitutive elements of conservatism, dating back to its origins in the European reaction against the French Revolution.  From its inception, conservatism has relied upon some mix of these elements to build a broad-based movement of elites and masses against the emancipation of the lower orders.”

In the recent past, this might have seemed a harsh assessment for a party with a history of fiscal solvency, support of the principles of a democratic form of government, and the avowed intention to maintain the Constitution.  However, with the election of Trump and his embrace by the Republican Party, the masquerade is over, and the true nature of the present Republican Party has been revealed: “racism, populism, violence, and a pervasive contempt for custom, convention, law, institutions, and established elites.”

Is there an inconsistency in claiming conservatism is a movement of elites against “established elites?”  Not at all.  Robin tracks a constant theme through Burke, Nietzsche, Hayak, and even the ever-popular Ayn Rand: elite status must be earned, not inherited.  Elites are identified and rewarded for success in conflict, whether, in war or business, or in social or political battles.  Successful elites, with no more battles to fight, will grow complacent and weak and must be replaced when the next insurgency from the “lower orders” emerges and must be quelled.

The picture of political conservatism provided by Robin is compelling.  It is also dark and frightening and is redolent of fascism.  History, particularly since the French Revolution, can be seen as class struggle as those in a subjugated state—serfs, laborers, slaves, women and wives— seek the means to limit their degree of subjugation, while those in power strive to maintain the power to subjugate.  Conservatism and libertarianism are often conflated, but to the conservative, society is not an assembly of individuals, but rather a hierarchy of groups in which each has a place of superiority to those below and inferiority to those above.  Society will fail if this chain of subordination were to be broken.

“….the conservative position stems from a genuine conviction that a world thus emancipated would be ugly, brutish, base, and dull.  It will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse.”

“This vision of the connection between excellence and rule is what brings together in postwar America that unlikely alliance of the libertarian, with his vision of the employer’s untrammeled power in the workplace;  the traditionalist, with his vision of the father’s rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth.  Each in his way subscribes to this typical statement, from the nineteenth century, of the conservative creed: ‘To obey a real superior….is one of the most important of all virtues—a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of anything great and lasting’.”

This notion of society being driven by a few truly exceptional people who must contend with masses of unexceptional people is at the heart of the conservatives’ reverence accorded Ayn Rand’s fiction.  It is the basis for the acceptance and even praise of inequality as an indication of a just society that characterizes political conservatives.  Robin provides this quote from one of Rand’s protagonists.

“The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all of those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time.  The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains.  Such is the nature of the ‘competition’ between the strong and the weak of intellect.  Such is the pattern of ‘exploitation’ for which you have damned the strong.”

Such notions are profoundly antidemocratic.  If one must live with universal suffrage, it is a conservative’s duty to eliminate as many as possible of those in the “lower orders” from the log of eligible voters.  Such notions are also profoundly antichristian.  At one time, the adjective “Christian” referred to people treating others in a kind and generous fashion.  There is no place for such a concept within conservatism.

“When Rand inveighs against Christianity as the forebear of socialism, when she rails against altruism and sacrifice as inversions of the true hierarchy of values, she is cultivating the strain within conservatism that sees religion not as a remedy to, but a helpmate of, the left.”

Given that conservatives must exist in a democracy, and a very religious one at that, how does the conservative approach appeal to the masses of voters?  It is very simple.  The desired hierarchy of subjugation can be presented as a means of preserving the right of one group within that hierarchy to maintain its right to subjugate those below them.  There is no mystery as to why a political philosophy that promises that whites can maintain their supremacy over non-whites is popular with whites.  The antichristian nature of conservatism is even extremely popular with evangelicals who have lost any concept of a Christianity that implies responsibility for the wellbeing of others.  Patriotism remains a refuge of scoundrels.  The war-loving statist conservatives loudly proclaim the exceptionalism of the United States as a means of convincing the weak of mind that they are themselves exceptional—and superior to others—as a member of the mightiest nation on earth.

“Conservatism is an elitist movement of the masses, an effort to create a new-old regime that, in one way or another, makes privilege popular.  Sometimes, conservatism has multiplied the ranks of privilege, creating ever-finer gradations between the worse off and the worst off….Sometimes, conservatism has simplified those ranks into two: the white race and the black race of the white supremacist imagination.  Sometimes, it has offshored societies inequalities, seeing in the people of an imperial state a unified rank of superiors….subjugating less civilized peoples abroad.  And sometimes it has turned elites into victims, encouraging the masses to see their abjection reflected in the higher misery of those above them.  Regardless of the means, conservatism has always found a way to conscript the lower orders into its regime of lordly rule.”

If one is to contend with a political movement, one must first understand that movement.

“People who are not conservative often fail to realize this, but conservatism really does speak to and for people who have lost something.”

“It used to be one of the great virtues of the left that it alone understood the often zero-sum nature of politics, where the gains of one class necessarily entail the losses of another.  But as that sense of conflict diminishes on the left, it has fallen to the right to remind voters that there really are losers in politics and that it is they—and only they—who speak for them.  ‘All conservatism begins with loss,’ Andrew Sullivan rightly notes, which makes conservatism not the Party of Order, as Mill and others have claimed, but the party of the loser….The chief aim of the loser is not—and indeed cannot be—preservation or protection.  It is recovery and restoration.”

And conservatism always will have an advantage over the revolutionaries of the left.  It will always be easier to recover something recently lost rather than to create something new.

“Unlike the reformer or the revolutionary, who faces the nearly impossible task of empowering the powerless—that is, of turning people from what they are into what they are not—the conservative merely asks his followers to do more of what they always have done (albeit, better and differently).  As a result, his counterrevolution will not require the same disruption that the revolution has visited upon the country.”

Understand your enemy.  Then do battle.

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