Fundamental differences in thought between conservatives and the left provide us all the more reason to act.
I think some of the most valuable education you can undertake occurs when contesting your assumptions about the world. Principled focused self-criticism is how we can unsettle stagnant thoughts, grow out of our assumptions, learn the ideas which will supplant them, and become better people, thinkers, and revolutionaries.
In this spirit, I want to challenge one assumption that I think many often implicitly make when engaging with their political opponents. When witnessing the human consequences of imperialist expropriation, colonial violence, and the nature of capital, the vast majority of witness would agree that what is happening in a given situation is tragic and heartbreaking. From there, one may assume that, among those who agree with this statement, their sadness around witnessing this issue compels them to believe that it ought to be resolved, and from there, that they ought to do something to help. This is a faulty assumption.
While socialists might call out the roots of a given problem and fight to address them directly, and liberals might find solace in addressing the issue through a strongly-worded tweet and a vote for the blue team, conservatives will instead look at these humanitarian crises and, despite occasionally conceding that they are awful, decide that they ought not to do anything about it – and neither should anyone else. This moral disengagement is not something that exists in a vacuum; it is the product of a worldview which believes traditional hierarchy is inevitable and good, something which does not personally affect you is often not worth stressing over, and those external to yourself are worth less by virtue of their perceived distance.
In 2019, Adam Waitz et. al. published a paper titled “Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle.” In the study, researchers asked liberals and conservatives about the scope of their moral circles, or “the circle of people or other entities in which [the subjects] are concerned about right and wrong done toward.” The study showed that, while the moral circles of “liberals” tended to include all living things, the circles of “conservatives” tended to be limited to only people they knew personally.
Conservatives tried to spin this as a classic failure of the left to ‘care for their own.’ I instead interpret these findings to reveal tribalism in the conservative psyche; the study did not ask who people cared about the most, rather who all is included in the subject’s moral circles. Conservatives excluding those outside of their own individual spheres indicates that they do not value people they do know to any significant extent. This “sin of empathy” is countered by some conservatives by advocacy for mere sympathy, maintaining distance from the pitiable subject and their experience.
This is not a new phenomenon. For decades, the Southern Strategy was the playbook conservative leadership used in the post-dejure Jim Crow American South to flip it from a democratic stronghold to a Republican one. In an uncovered 1981 interview, Lee Atwater, former Chairperson of the RNC and advisor to presidents Reagan and H.W. Bush, described the Strategy thusly:
Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N****, n*****, n*****. By 1968 you can’t say n*****—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 byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this’, is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N*****, n*****.’ So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.
The class of conservative elite, made up of businesspeople and political insiders, understand that their base is predominantly white and working-class, and so to maintain their support, they need their base to fuel and then feed into cultural war issues like race politics to distract from their economic agenda. For many on the left, the hatred embedded in conservative politics is clear – even without the existence of this interview – but for others, the tactics Atwater pioneered have been so effective that, to this day, even the racist worker doesn’t know if he actually cares about fiscal responsibility or if he just hates Black people.
These tendencies point towards the unwillingness of conservatives to challenge their own assumptions, particularly around hierarchy. The view of hierarchy as innate and good, be it God over man, man over woman, wealthy over poor, or some other such notion. The inevitability and naturality of these hierarchies are essential to conservative beliefs and helps to explain many of their values, including security, chauvinism, and individualism, all fitting within and serving to maintain this common framework. In the mind of a conservative, if you cannot live up to the nation’s vision for you, it is your own failure to meet the standards which ought to define you. Divinely decreed and passed down through generations, these traditional standards graft the working-class conservative onto the corporate elite. These standards also shift the locus of power upwards and cause the worker to develop animus towards others deemed lower than themselves on this social hierarchy, be they Black people, trans people, or even others in their own class.
Liberals are historically not much better, but despite sharing a commitment to the same ideological bases of economic liberalism and American Capitalism, there are still degrees of distinction between their political philosophies. Notwithstanding fundamental disagreements with ‘leftists’ about what is to be done, those in the liberal base can often still at least recognize that wrongdoing requires action. Committed conservatives, however, lack even this basic moral framework.
Take, for example, one of Opinion Columnist Bret Stephens’ pieces in the New York Times. In Stephen’s biography, he describes himself as follows:
I’m often described as a conservative, though I’ve been a harsh critic of the direction of the Republican Party. I believe in free enterprise, free trade, free speech, and the need to safeguard the institutions of democracy at home and abroad. I also think it’s healthy to be able to change your mind and to say so publicly — as I have about Trump voters and climate change.
In Stephen’s response to Dr. Omer Bartov’s guest essay “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It, titled “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza”, he argues that “the first question the anti-Israel genocide chorus needs to answer is: Why isn’t the death count higher?”
His argument boils down to the term genocide only being applicable to systemic ethnic cleansing campaigns on the scale of the Holocaust. As such, because Israel has not killed far more, Stephens argues that we must assume they are operating with restraint and therefore that the destruction of Gaza, which he recognizes “is indeed immense,” must be merely the consequence of war, not a genocide.
Stephens suggests a threshold of a hundred thousand of what Israel might need to have killed before we could have a conversation around genocide. Not only did the death toll likely hit hundred thousand well over a year ago, but Stephens’ number here is completely arbitrary. What if the death toll was “officially” in the six-figure range? What if it was higher? Stephens could always move the goalposts further up, arguing that “genocide” is only applicable to increasingly cruel and mass killing campaigns. He equates Israel’s genocide to US bombing campaigns against ISIS, which killed eleven thousand, and with Allied Forces bombing campaigns on Dresden during WWII, which killed around twenty-five thousand, as though those two things existing justify this third thing, which has killed more than both combined, or as though any of them were acceptable.
For Stephens, though, the numbers don't actually matter. He can point to Hamas and equate them with Nazis, point to the death toll and say it isn’t high enough, point to campus protests and call them antisemetic, and so on. He can disregard the many dozens of thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel, the consensus that Israel is committing genocide from the UN, ICJ, HRW, Amnesty International, JVP, IAGS, and many other such groups, and the culpability of the US in these atrocities, all because these people are outside his moral sphere; he doesn’t have to care about them, let alone empathize with them, and so he doesn’t. To the extent that he does acknowledge the destruction, he passes it off as merely the consequences of war. The possibility that it could be worse, he argues, means that it isn’t that bad as it is now. It’s an easy position to take, and so, at the same time he challenges people to “change their mind[s],” he takes the path of least resistance.
While liberals will gladly return to brunch when a Democrat is elected president, conservatives shore up their politics around their apathy to inhumanity. While liberals pay lip service to solving humanitarian crises, conservatives would rather mock liberals for caring than to do so themselves. While Democrats take solace in appeals to process, decorum, and the most meaningless of actions, Republicans throw all that to the wayside to get whatever they want done. While Democrats serve as the ratchet preventing movement leftward, Republicans serve as the gear spinning ever-rightward. Put simply, while liberals passively permit austerity, conservatives actively facilitate it.
If your reaction to all of this is to conclude that all conservatives are ontologically irredeemable and lack the basic empathy required to build a movement like ours based in compassion, that would be entirely understandable. Still, this, too, is a faulty assumption.
There are a multitude of different ways of seeing and interpreting the world, across space, time, and material condition – and conservative Americans are no different. We cannot naively assume that anyone, even those proximal to us, think at all similarly to us – nor can we assume that they cannot change how they think. Innuendo Studios has dozens of videos exploring this whole subject further, some of which I have embedded in this article, which I would highly recommend to anyone interested.
Some want to construct conservatives as having literal physiological differences based on common neurological differences in cognitive processing. However, this interpretation of the research betrays what the data actually say and disregards the possibility for unlearning behaviors, neuroplastic development, and ultimately transcending one’s old ways. Humanity's capacity for growth is exactly why we ought to take into consideration strategies to turn some of our enemies into allies in the fight for liberation. We must recognize that many of these people are the product of their material conditions and are ultimately trying to pursue a better life.
The vast majority of white working class voters went for Trump. While a few minority groups, like Latino men, showed out for him too, it wasn’t nearly to the same extent. The American conservative base today looks as white and Christian as ever, now with particularly high support from rural and less educated people. Indeed, the footsoldiers for the modern American conservative movement have always looked this way.
Ever since the development of race as a construct, the way we know it today, white workers have been sold the lie that the best way to hang on to what they have is to ensure that Black workers are not afforded a share. This disastrous decree from the ruling class mutated and became reified as the governing philosophy for an uncomfortable portion of Americans, particularly white Americans, turning former strongholds of the labor movement against themselves and their would-be comrades of color, queer comrades, immigrant comrades, and others. It is in the best interest of those who benefit from conservative politics to see the working-class conservative base engage in hyperindividualism and tribalism rather than realize their shared class interests. As such, showing solidarity with working-class people and our problems can help break this cycle and bring in others into the movement – or at least show them that the working-class movement cares more than the autocratic rapist pedophile billionaire does.
We are not well served by viewing these people as an irredeemable basket of deplorables; the working class is diverse and multitudinous, and some in it are deeply misguided. Conservatives exist on a spectrum from unwitting follower to active elite facilitator. There is a difference between Bret Stephens and the people who used his article to justify their apathy. The solution is not to do as the liberals do and simply shun those who have been indoctrinated into ruling-class ideology, rather it is to work with who we can to meet their needs and to help them unlearn the divisive, bigoted ways of thought they have been steeped in for centuries.
This will not be an easy endeavor. There are some who are frankly in too deep, be it through grifting, refusal to grow, or mass psychosis. Nevertheless, there are many others who believe hateful things without fully understanding them, and very often, their hatefulness stems largely from this lack of understanding. Particularly in rural communities, conservative evangelism and ingroup groupthink have a tight grip on political life, steering them towards MAGA – and Tea-Partyism before that, and hawkish neoconservatism before that, and so on. As such, their moral circles don’t expand beyond those who look, sound, and think like them.
In the same manner that ideology overtook these communities, it can be rooted out; these people are still capable of caring about Palestinians, Ukrainians, Black Americans, and their other prospective comrades. Compassion can be taught, hate can be unlearned, and the harm done can be addressed; Ideology can be both implanted and supplanted. We must address not simply what these people think, but how they think. Otherwise, how can we show that there are worthwhile alternatives to the way things are now? If nothing else, how can a working-class movement succeed if we fail to win over the working class? We must not compromise with fascists; we must win over those who want a better world but don’t know how to build one.
There are many whose politics simply mirror those around them. Their views are often not well thought-out, and may even be contradictory. The low-propensity, “normie”, “median American voter” is not particularly well-informed about the political landscape, yet may still self-identify as a conservative because their family does or because they are holding out hope that Trump will fulfill his promises. As a first step, then, when people are made to not merely see the devastation the second Trump presidency has had on disenfranchised communities, but to empathize with those people, they may begin to see their plight in a new light. Sometimes, understanding the humanity of others, breaking free of ignorance, and expanding one’s moral circle begins with human connection.
Politics are not a team sport, and we should not view those “conservatives” with a misdirected understanding of class consciousness as our eternal rivals. Many understand that both parties serve the same interests but don’t know what to do about it. A failure to engage in dutiful political education ends up leaving uneducated, propagandized Americans out of our outreach programs. When people lack a class-based perspective, they struggle to understand the nature of their oppression and its commonality with the oppressions of others, even as they may recognize that, abstractly, they are suffering at someone’s hands. To see yourself as a worker, same as so many around you, opens the door to deconstructing the bigotry that kept this consciousness from you in the first place.
Conservative strategy relies so heavily on culture war politics because they have nothing material to offer their conservative base; it’s easier to whip up a panic about Critical Race Theory or litterboxes in classrooms than it is to propose soft wealth redistribution or universal healthcare to help working-class families. So much as supporting moderate liberal policies is frequently met with accusations of support for socialism from fervent conservative voices, leading their followers to follow suit. It is necessary, then, to speak frankly and clearly about our alternative to the current order; the response to the phenomenon of people agreeing with socialist policies and ideas when you don’t describe them as “socialist” it is not to try to smuggle in socialism, rather it is to decouple people from the culture war and get them to see these positions as part of a class war. For many, the prospect of being able to put food on the table is more appealing than attacking the enemy of the week dictated by the GOP. That’s a start.
There will be many who will, at every turn, reject liberation, likely including vast swaths of the working class. So be it. We cannot wait for them. The movement can never be centered on the white American working class, conservative or otherwise. We cannot bend our commitment to social justice and liberation for all to the perceived will of white workers, nor should we break from our principles in the process of trying to teach “conservatives” that socialism is not when the government does stuff. Still, to see the fundamental difference between the thought of conservatives and yourself and thus see them as unworthy of compassion and effort may mean you are closer to them than you think.
It is awful that so many workers are conservative. I think we ought to do something about it.
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