Why Conservatives Tell Stories and Liberals Don't

Rhetoric, Faith, and Vision on the American Right

David M Ricci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317248965
• Print ISBN:
  9781594518737
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism

Why do conservatives tell stories? Because it helps them win elections and assail liberal policies like health care reform and economic stimulus. "Why" is important, but the "what" and the "how" behind the stories that conservatives tell are equally interesting, and in this new book, David Ricci reveals all. He shows how conservative activists and candidates tell many tales that come together to project a large-scale story; a cultural narrative; a vision of what America is and what it should do to prosper socially, economically, and politically. Liberals, by contrast, tend to look for theories rather than stories, for mathematical explanations rather than theological axioms, for data rather than anecdotes, and for statistics rather than homilies. The difference is paradoxical. Liberals are unlikely to fashion sweeping narratives that capture the public s attention and commitment. Yet conservatives may tell attractive stories like the ones that got us into Iraq that momentarily capture voter support but end up costing the country more than it can afford."

PART I

RHETORICAL PLOYS

CHAPTER ONE

REJECTIONS

We begin with a practical difficulty. Right-wing thinking is neither inscribed in a catechism nor expounded by certified practitioners. Moreover, it does not inform the platform of a national party with card-carrying members who can be asked how firmly they believe in what that platform proposes. Consequently, scholars have no technique that can reveal exactly what American conservatism is. In fact, we cannot always say for sure who is a conservative and who is something else, because some political thinkers, elected officials, voters, and activists, no matter how conservative they may seem to neutral observers, insist they are not.¹

The Conservative Story

Accordingly, one can offer only a plausible interpretation of the subject.² To that end, we may start by noting that in books, articles, research reports, talk shows, speeches, sermons, and judicial decisions, American rightists promote a fairly consistent story of how their country got to where it is and how it should move beyond that point prosperously. On the one hand, the conservative story praises capitalism for stimulating economic growth and facilitating scientific progress, and for enabling Americans to acquire private property that helps them resist governmental encroachments on freedom. On the other hand, it recommends tradition and long-standing values, which are important to personal well-being but can also inspire Americans at work and in business—that is, within the framework of capitalism—to treat other members of their community decently.³

Basic Propositions

George Bush I may have believed that a “vision thing” could emerge from this conservative story, but scholars would call the same story simply a “narrative.”⁴ Of course, it is not a straight-line affair like Little Red Riding Hood. It is, instead, a matter of returning repeatedly to propositions that appear in what conservatives say, in many forums, about American history and current events. It is the propositions that create a story line, that make one right-wing item after another seem to support many of the rest, that help the public to understand that conservatives have a vision of what America has been and can be in the future.

A typical example of such propositions appeared in 1955, when William Buckley Jr. founded National Review. Buckley promised in the inaugural issue that the Review (1) would strongly oppose “the growth of government,” (2) would refuse coexistence with the “satanic utopianism” of communism, (3) would resist the “cultural menace” of “intellectual cliques” (liberals) in education and the arts, (4) would ferret out “Fabian operators” (liberals) intent on controlling America’s major parties, (5) would combat “politically oriented [liberal] unionism,” and (6) would oppose “fashionable concepts of world government” embodied in “Liberal elite” support for the United Nations.⁵ After the Soviet Union collapsed between 1989 and 1991, the Review targeted radical Islam as America’s chief enemy abroad. Other than that, Buckley and his colleagues after 1955 stuck to their story line, showing the Review’s readers again and again, via Buckley’s original precepts, what was right and wrong in America and how conservatives should relate to both.

A later example of right-wing propositions, also projecting important parts of the standard conservative vision, appeared in Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, Contract with America (1994).⁶ Gingrich and Armey claimed that five principles form what they called the “basic philosophy of American civilization.” These are: “individual liberty,” “economic opportunity,” “limited government,” “personal responsibility,” and “security at home and abroad.” Assuming that the Republican delegation in Congress endorsed the same principles, Gingrich and Armey proposed advancing them in a right-wing legislative agenda. Thus Congress should enact a “Personal Responsibility Act” that would prohibit welfare payments to unwed mothers under the age of eighteen, a “Taking Our Streets Back Act” that would authorize police to gather evidence in ways not now permitted by the Supreme Court, a “Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act” that would cut the federal capital gains tax for those who own corporate stocks, and a “Common Sense Legal Reforms Act” that would limit the amount of damages citizens might claim in court from manufacturers of dangerous or defective products. Similar propositions abound in other conservative writings.⁷

Democracy

Two common denominators underlie this tale. First, it is inherently democratic. Early American conservatives, such as Russell Kirk, James Burnham, and Richard Weaver in the 1940s and 1950s, did not believe that mass voting is likely to express political wisdom.⁸ They thus resembled classic Europeans on the right, like Edmund Burke, Louis De Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, Matthew Arnold, and James Fitzjames Stephen.⁹ But since Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964 encouraged grassroots organizing on his behalf, most American conservatives have praised democracy¹⁰ and exhorted ordinary people to support candidates committed to capitalism and traditional values. Therefore, this point of principle now inspires writings by conservative politicians, preachers, scholars, activists, talk show hosts, journalists, and others.

Truth

Second, the conservative story projects what its advocates regard as permanent truths. Religious rightists, of course, assume that such truths are available via theology and should spur citizens to shape public policy accordingly. Thus Ben Kinchlow says that “[w]e need to restore truth to the people. Do you know that most of our children have no idea about the true history of America?” Such children cannot fulfill their civic responsibilities, Kinchlow believes, because “[t]hey have no idea [that for the Founders] … Christianity was the order of the day.”¹¹ Or consider Charles Colson, who insists that in public life “Christians ought to boldly maintain the reality of absolutes.” There are, he says, “laws for human behavior just as there are laws for the physical world,” as compelling as the “effects of gravity.”¹² To embody such laws in public policy is Colson’s goal, and H. Edward Rowe agrees with him. “In a certain sense there are only two classes of people” says Rowe, “those who live by the truth and those who do not.” It follows that “[t]he movement to apply Christianity in our nation will succeed because it is rooted in basic reality—the truth of God.”¹³

In less theological terms, secular rightists also promote what they regard as always true. Thus Barry Goldwater declares that his classic book, The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), “is not written with the idea of adding to or improving on the Conservative philosophy. Or of ‘bringing it up to date.’ The ancient and tested truths that guided our Republic through its early days will do equally well for us.”¹⁴ That being the case, “[w]hat is required of us,” says Frank Meyer, “is a conscious conservatism, a clearly principled restatement in new circumstances of philosophical and political truth.”¹⁵ Or, as Jeffrey Hart advises his compatriots, “We don’t need new ideas nearly as much as we need new techniques to spread tried and true ideas.”¹⁶

Rejections

In general terms, conservatives offer to Americans a large story, or vision, about freedom, efficiency, private property, individual responsibility, and so forth. We will return to that story especially in Chapters Five and Six, where we will discuss why conservatives are effective at storytelling while liberals usually have little inclination or talent for that practice—in which case the liberals are seriously disadvantaged in politics today. For now, however, and especially in Chapters Two, Three, and Four, we should linger on our way to the later discussion in order to get a sense of what sorts of propositions conservatives talk about and thereby project as eventual building blocks for their larger story.

Let us note, then, as a point of departure, that the conservative conviction that people in their camp expound what is True has a corollary, which is the belief that a liberal view of the world must be False—that is, it must misrepresent or misinterpret some elements of reality that, in the right-wing view, are known and immutable. Accordingly, Albert Hirschman claims that conservatives since the Enlightenment have opposed many liberal projects—intended to improve social and economic life—in order to achieve three aims.¹⁷ These are (1) to forestall perverse results, (2) to avoid jeopardy, and (3) to abstain from futility. Here is a starting point for the conservative vision in that to seek such ends, as Hirschman points out, is to warn, firmly and repeatedly, that, no matter what liberals may hope to accomplish, their proposals are either dangerous or useless and therefore worthless.

Perversity

Hirschman cites arguments advanced mainly by Europeans such as Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, Herbert Spencer, and Gaetano Mosca. As he points out, though, the same arguments appear in some American conservative writings today. Thus Hirschman explains that, in both the Old World and the New, the assumption of perversity suggests that attempting “to push society in a certain direction will result in its moving all right, but in the opposite direction.”¹⁸

Accordingly, Milton and Rose Friedman observe that late nineteenth–century legislators designed the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Sherman Anti-Trust Law to promote competition. Unfortunately, they continue, these efforts at reform “had perverse effects,” such as when existing industrial firms persuade government regulators to prevent new firms from entering the market.¹⁹ Similarly, Edward Banfield claims that most proposals for reforming urban public schools “may be expected to produce results exactly the opposite of those intended; that is, hasten the movement of the well-off from the city, increase unemployment and poverty, [and] widen the chasms of class and race.”²⁰ And James Wilson notes that “[t]hings never work out quite as you hope; in particular, government programs often do not achieve their objectives or do achieve them but with high or unexpected costs.”²¹

That things get out of hand is inevitable according to what Wilson and Gertrude Himmelfarb call “the law of unintended consequences.”²² For example, New Dealers may have wanted to help people stricken by the Great Depression. But because to do so FDR’s colleagues fostered what conservatives regard as undesirable growth of government, Larry Burkett concludes that “the short-range benefits given to the thirties’ generation were provided at the expense of future generations.”²³ Similarly, liberals who enacted Medicare and Medicaid aimed at extending health insurance to millions of Americans who had none. But by authorizing government agencies to pay doctors’ bills, says David Frum, they unintentionally inflated medical expenses and thereby produced “the most gargantuan example of unintended consequences in the whole sorry history of modern welfarism.”²⁴

Good Intentions

Concerning such cases, conservatives often hold that good intentions are inadequate.²⁵ As Friedrich Hayek says, “Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavor consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals [social compassion], we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite [government oppression] of what we have been striving for?”²⁶ Rush Limbaugh agrees. It is counterproductive, he says, to enact “policies that have the superficial appearance of compassion, but do nothing to solve the problem, and often make it worse.”²⁷ Bill O’Reilly reinforces this point by naming victims. “The road to hell is paved with good [liberal] intentions,” he says, “and you know what? Those intentions are being paid for big-time [via taxes and affirmative action] by all working Americans.”²⁸

Welfare

Welfare programs are particularly likely, say conservatives, to produce perverse policy results. Thus people on the right claim that when government provides financial support for the “undeserving poor”—that is, for those whom conservatives describe as able but unwilling to work—it encourages them to shirk personal responsibility, live on the dole, and behave so haplessly as to perpetuate a culture of poverty. Marvin Olasky, for example, who prefers private to public philanthropy, argues that giving aid to poor people is not enough. Only private agencies, he says, often based on religious faith, can provide the steady and personal contact between giver and receiver that will inspire the receiver to mend his or her ways, leave sloth behind, and become a productive and successful member of the community. Aid lacking such contact only perpetuates dependency.²⁹

Charles Murray describes the culture of poverty as, in his opinion, based on perverse incentives, that is, on paying people not to work, on rewarding them for bearing children out of wedlock, on encouraging the unemployed to regard themselves as victims of discrimination, and so forth. That being the case, weaker members of society remain sufficiently poor to be miserable but insufficiently ambitious to make their way in modern life.³⁰ During many years of government aid to the poor, says Murray, “things got worse rather than better.”³¹ Consequently, he concludes that “the entire federal welfare and income-support structure for working-aged persons” should be scrapped, leaving such people “with no recourse whatsoever except the job market, family members, friends, and public or private locally funded services.”³²

Restating the point, Michael Bauman suggests that Americans who promote government welfare programs are like “dangerous Samaritans,” who “unintentionally injure the poor.”³³ The problem here, says Gertrude Himmelfarb, is that welfare entitlements send the wrong “message.” For example, some people stop feeling responsible for elderly paren...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Rhetorical Ploys
• Part II Articles of Faith
• Part IIII Reality Checks
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author