Understanding the right

I devoted decades to difficult good faith discussions with conservatives, trying to see past my own lefty sensibilities to understand them on their own terms.

I heard the right warn that history teaches the bitter lesson that equality is a dangerously seductive political ideal which leads to ruin. I heard the right grumble that the left dominates and silences them with the immense power we weild.

These last several years finally revealed the logics which animate these claims which seem utterly absurd to us on the broad left.

The right’s frustration with liberal “dominance” is not delusional. The right live in a society where most of the rhetorical touchstones of our political culture conflict with their most fundamental sensibilities. Some on the right understand themselves well enough that they resent how that conflict forces them to lie, but I believe that most on the right cannot name that conflict even to themselves and just feel something stuck in their throat.

The right do not fear the unintended consequences of egalitarian politics. The right hate the intended consequences. The right find equality morally disgusting.

One can no more ask the right to articulate why they oppose equality than one can ask the left to justify equality. These are axioms. The moral principle runs too deep to explain. Recall “we hold these truths to be self-evident”, refusing to dignify alternative core principles with an argument.

The right find equality so repulsive that they assume that people on the broad left must secretly feel the same way. Hence the right’s baffling insistence on the left’s hypocrisy, on the left’s denial of the “obvious” truth of “human nature”, on the injustice of the left “silencing” them. Hence the right’s casting of “equality” as the thinnest possible faux fairness, their rejection of robust egalitarianism as a naïve misunderstanding of what equality means.

I have a distant sympathy for that frustration. My own assumption that everyone ultimately wants equality blinded me to what really drives the right. But now I know.

An aphorism

A later addition of a thing I keep saying about conservatives’ insistence that they understand “human nature”:

Conservatism says, paradoxically, that we must exercise the strictest possible measures to maintain a social order which is obvious and natural … since civilization will easily collapse if we do not.