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The Psychology of Radical Conservatives

The first step toward an in-depth understanding of adult behavior is to comprehend its origins in childhood. Whether adaptive or maladaptive, the enduring patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that define adult personality begin in the early years of life. In fact, our earliest experiences with caretakers and others, acting on inherited temperament factors, strongly determine our later personality traits, including those expressed in political values and beliefs.

The dispositions of the conservative mind are no exception: his hopes and fears, beliefs and passions, values and morals are in great measure the legacy of his childhood from birth through adolescence. The traits that define who he is are the traits that lead him to pursue particular goals in the political arena and to use particular methods to achieve them.

The radical conservative mind’s goals are now familiar, of course, but another brief summary will prove useful in highlighting their essentially parental and authoritarian nature. To begin with are the single-minded goals of maximzing personal wealth and comfort, achieving the highest tiers of personal social status, celebrating social and political advantages, educating only the favored and fortunate few, and deepening tribal identities and divisions according to social and economic class.

In his pursuit of these goals, he intends to construct elite human families, each one united in bonds of mutual love, concern, caretaking and tolerance in stark contrast to the others. Through draconian government action, the radical conservative seeks the following:

* A powerful parental government to protect the good life of the elite against the needs of everyone else.

* An elite corps of surrogate parents that will guarantee the livelihoods of select families by denying government goods and services to all who cannot afford to pay sufficient taxes, just as demanding parents favor those of their children who “out-perform” their brothers and sisters.

* The preservation of material security achieved by elite families, free from any obligation to acknowledge their privileged condition by sharing any portion with those in need, similar to the way an irresponsible parent ignores the needs of his or her children.

* A form of parental social justice which ensures that all states of deprivation, inequality, suffering, and disadvantage accrue only to those who the state deems to deserve it.

* A guarantee that special rights for the protection of individual liberty will increase inequalities of wealth, social status and power, just as ambitious parents might favor their most aggressive and dominating children with the greatest praise and other benefits.

* Government laws that will encourage excesses by the “haves” through tax breaks and that will require ever greater compensation from the “have-nots” by way of reduced government benefits, just as ambitious parents would do for the children that they favor.

* Government directives from corrupt and avaricious officials that promote favored citizen’s initiatives and industry through more favorable tax loopholes and subsidies, just as acquisitive parents determine the directions of the family’s labors for maximum parental gain.

* Government policy that instructs the people in how to relate to each other politically, just as socially exclusive parents instruct their children in how to conduct themselves in a manner that conforms to their family tribe and that distinguishes and sets them apart from the rest.

* Permissive, but selective, laws passed by self-serving legislators, which decrease the obligations of contracts by the wealthy and increase them for the financially dependent, ease codes of acceptable conduct for the privileged, and relax the burdens of established institutions for those who can afford to pay for the necessary legal fixes, as with problem marriages and adoption procedures, just as indulgent parents do for their privileged children.

* Government welfare programs that free corporations from the responsibilities of adjusting executive pay to performance while reducing overall benefits to the majority of corporate employees, just as irresponsible and acquisitive parents do for or against their favored or neglected children, respectively.

* An international agenda that will enhance the financial privilege and the power of selected and internationally diversified families by disregarding everyone else’s hardships, encouraging favorably aggressive and destructive actions by proxies, and bringing selective parties to the negotiating table according to who helps to satisfy this agenda, just as domineering parents do in selectively promoting and settling family disputes to suit parental whim.

These and other goals dear to the modern radical conservative heart are remarkable for the parental needs they address and the socially developmental needs they ignore. As noted in more detail below, what the radical conservative mind really longs for, as revealed in his political goals, is an authoritarian parent’s relationship to a dominated family whose caretaking compensates him for the injuries he suffered in his early years. He seeks all of this in the contemporary political arena.

The major problem he faces is that a substantial portion of the population is still competent: it is a population that deeply reveres both individual liberty and neighborly cooperation, readily accepts its responsibilities to give as well as receive, and passionately opposes its destruction. It is not about to yield to the radical conservative’s mad dream. Because competent people know that they can direct their own lives and provide for their own security through voluntary cooperation, and because they love a dynamic world of freedom and cooperation in which to live as they choose together with their neighbors and associates, they have no need for, and indeed vehemently reject, the oppressive intrusions of radical conservative government.

What the competent citizen wants, in contrast to the modern radical conservative, is a coherent and dependable structure for ordered liberty and contingent assistance, secured by an appropriate government that respects the autonomy and sovereignty of the individual and protects their property and social rights against selective invasion and appropriation by the personally and politically powerful.

The radical conservative mind rejects this prescription on principle and attempts to overthrow it in government policy. What the radical conservative seeks in order to feel secure is the modern warfare state with its endless military-industrial guarantees and endless engagements. This goal is literally fantastic in its own right. But equally irrational is the method by which he attempts to achieve it.

He is willing to use any kind of government power, including power which destroys the foundations of civilized freedom everywhere, in order to get what he demands: government insured privilege and power over his entire lifespan, along with accommodation to his neurotic demands. He seeks through the state that degree of coercion needed to redress the trauma, injustice, helplessness, and humiliation experienced at the hands of his lessers, among whom may well be his original caretakers. He hopes to do this by passing laws that indulge his impulses and exempt him from the proper obligations of mature adulthood.

Considered in its entirety, the radical conservative’s goal of making the state into his ideal parent/family and his method of achieving it by compelling competent people to do his bidding constitute the radical conservative agenda. Above all, the agenda is a blueprint for the use of irresistible government power. Driven by his irrational needs and desires, the radical conservative mind is more than willing to sacrifice the noble structure of human liberty and neighborly cooperation that originally defined America for the intimidating asylum of the modern warfare state.