The Politics of Fear

The Politics of Fear:

Conservatism and the Dynamics of Change

I have had a good deal of exposure to conservatives and conservatism in recent times. I serve a small church that has within it several people of a very conservative theological and political bent. I have written before about how conservative, literalistic Christianity is brittle. Dislodge just one of its elements and the whole thing collapses. Forty years ago I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on a very conservative Russian civil servant and Over Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. I am presently in the process of turning that dissertation into a book that I might self-publish. The man I wrote about, Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, could tolerate no significant change in the structure of tsarist Russia because, I think, he feared a total collapse of the system he knew and served if much of anything fundamental was changed in it. I just started reading David Remnick’s book Lenin’s Tomb about the last days of the Soviet Union in which among other things he reports on conversations he had at the time with some very conservative Soviet people. Remnick’s neo-Stalinists bristled at the thought of any change in the Soviet structure because to them it meant that their whole world was about to collapse. These days the news media bombard us with Donald Trump’s American brand of neo-fascism. All in all it’s been more exposure to conservatives and conservatism than I would really like.

I am nearly as far from a conservative as you can get myself, so all this recent exposure to conservative personalities and conservative thinking has got me thinking more about conservatism than I would otherwise choose to do. As I have reflected on these manifestations of conservatism some similarities among them have occurred to me. First of all, all of them arose and were expressed in times of radical change in the worlds their adherents had known. Pobedonostsev lived through and even worked a bit on the reforms in the structure of the Russian state under Alexander II. Then he experienced the rise of radical threats to that structure and the state’s desperate efforts to defeat those threats. He spent his life trying to preserve that which was already doomed. Conservative American Christianity arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a reaction against a changing world, a world of higher biblical criticism and evolutionary biology. Remnick interviewed his neo-Stalinists in the world of perestroika and glasnost’ under Mikhail Gorbachev, changes that would undo the world these people had grown up and supported, a world in which they had prospered, at least by Russian standards of prosperity. Donald Trump has arisen out of the hardly admirable world of real estate wheeling and dealing and the even less reputable world of reality television. He has come to prominence at a time when the world is transitioning from modernism to post modernism, a world in which the United States of America is changing radically and rapidly from a world in which straight, white, Protestant Christian men ran the show into a much more diverse America in which those formerly dominant men are losing much of the privilege that raised them above others in their society. These different examples of conservative thinking come from different times and places, but all have in common that they are expressions of resistance to change that these conservatives want to stop.

All of these expressions of resistance to change are grounded in a common emotion, the emotion of fear. Their adherents would most likely not say they were afraid. They might not sound afraid. They would say they are angry, and they would sound angry. Yet anger is almost always grounded in fear, and it certainly is in these cases I’ve mentioned here. How could Pobedonostsev cling doggedly to the belief that the Russian people supported autocracy as he did unless he was terrified of what would happen if that autocracy fell? How can Biblical literalists insist as vehemently as they do that everything in the Bible is and must be factually true unless they are terrified of what would happen if they only truth they know was shown not to be true? How could Nina Alexandrovna Andreyevna and the other neo-Stalinists Remnick interviewed cling to a thoroughly whitewashed view of Stalin and his atrocities, ignoring the factual evidence and holding onto a false history, unless they were terrified of what might happen if the supposedly solid Soviet structure that had nurtured them were shown to grounded in lies and crimes against humanity? How can Americans, mostly white Protestant American men, support the insanity and inanity of Donald Trump about walling off the US-Mexican border, denying entry into the country to all Muslims, and so much more of his vitriol and bigotry unless they are terrified of what will become of them when they lose the privilege they had and just took for granted? I am convinced that the answer to all of those questions is: “They couldn’t.” Fear explains how otherwise intelligent and rational people can cling to the structures and ways of the past when those structures and ways are turning to quicksand under their feet. Fear explains how people can cling to structures and worldviews that are passing into history when all of the available evidence shows how those structures and worldviews are changing and must change. Fear explains how otherwise intelligent and rational people think they can stop the world in its tracks and return it to the idealized past they have constructed for themselves. Fear explains hatred. Fear explains how desperate conservatives can hurl calumny at decent and caring people who see the world better than they do. Across the board conservative politics are the politics of fear.

Radical conservatism is grounded in fear, and it is futile. The old saying that the only constant in life is change is true. All of the people in my examples here tried to stop or are trying to stop that which cannot be stopped. They clung or are clinging to lost causes. Pobedonostsev’s Russia collapsed into anarchy and then totalitarianism only ten years after his death. Fundamentalist, literalistic Christianity is dead because its assumptions are untenable and its consequences are unacceptable. It’s just that some of its adherents don’t know yet that it is dead. The structure of the USSR that Stalin built collapsed completely only three years or so after Remnick interviewed Nina Alexandrovna Andreyevna. Radical conservatism is always a commitment to a lost cause. It is always grounded in a fear of losing what its proponents have and think they know, the only world they have experienced and, sadly, the only world they can imagine. What radical conservatism inevitably fails to discern is that the world to which it so desperately clings first of all never existed and secondly could not be preserved even if it had. It’s frantic effort to prevent change may have temporary successes from time to time, but in the long run it always fails.

You’d think humanity would have learned by now. You’d think that anyone with a high school education in history would see that the world is constantly changing. You’d think they would see that the old guard defenders of what was, or at least of what they think was, always fail in the long run. Our world today is quite radically different from the world into which I was born only seventy years ago. If we look back farther than that we see worlds so alien to ours that we have to work hard in order to understand the people of those worlds. The only constant is change. That seems so obvious to me that I don’t see how anyone can deny it.

Now, of course not all change is good, and not all change is the change leading to a new future. The lesson of history is not that we must embrace any change that anyone advocates. Not at all. Perhaps unfortunately the challenge we face is more difficult than that. We must discern the larger trends of change, not the mere fads of fashion. Fashion changes rapidly, the world changes slowly. Fashion changes, as nearly as I can tell, because of human vanity and to make money for clothing designers, manufacturers, and retailers. The world changes we know not why, but change it always does. On the whole it changes in the direction of freedom. On the whole it changes in the direction of liberation. It has reversals to be sure. The first half of the twentieth century can be seen as one big but temporary reversal. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said that the arc of the universe bends slowly, but it bends toward justice. On the whole I think he was right about that. The task history places before us is to discern how the arc of the universe is bending, then to help it bend. Bend it will whether we like it or not, whether we help it or not. Bend it will even if we try to straighten it out. That’s what conservative ideology always does, it tries to straighten out the arc of the universe. I has never succeeded for long. It cannot ever succeed for long because it works against the dynamics of the universe. Call them the dynamics of God if you like. Whoever’s dynamics they are, they are inexorable; and on the whole they work for good.

The politics of fear always fail. They always have, and they always will. Conservatism grounded in fear is the fight for a lost cause. In our country it fought to preserve slavery, and it lost. It fought to preserve Jim Crow, and it lost. It fought to keep women out of what it thought were male professions, and it lost. It fought and fights to maintain bigotry and discrimination against LGBT people, and it lost, or at least it is losing. Today radical conservatism fights against a truly multi-cultural, multi-religious America, and it will lose. Radical conservatism is grounded in privilege and the fear of losing that privilege. In the short run we must oppose it. In the long run, it hasn’t got a chance. Thanks be to God!