By Kevin Foley
I have wondered for many years why the late William F. Buckley affected a British public school drawl. The father of American intellectual conservatism seemed always to be casually leaning back in his chair like some Oxford don, head cocked skyward, languidly dragging his vowels.
Buckley, of course, was born Irish-American in New York and raised Roman Catholic, so how and why did he come by that British upper crust personae?
I recently discovered Philip E. Agre's 2004 thesis, "What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong With It?" and finally learned what Buckley was up to.
"People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives," the M.I.T educated Agre declares. "Democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth."
Agre, a former associate professor of information studies at UCLA, says conservatism is simply the domination of society by an aristocracy: "Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world."
Throughout history it has been the aim of aristocrats to demand deference from the many toward the few who possess power and money. When successful – as in ancient Rome or medieval Europe, for example - a perfect state of conservatism exists. Public relations, reasons Agre, plays a critical role in reaching for that perfect model in modern America.
"The great innovation of conservatism … has been the systematic reinvention of politics using the technology of public relations," he writes.
In order to prosper, Agre tells us, conservatism must undermine conscience, democracy, reason and language using PR as its primary tool. Agre's take on how conservatives have hijacked reason and language is particularly prescient when viewed through the prism of the Obama administration.
"Public relations aims to break down reason and replace it with mental associations," Agre explains. "(Newt Gingrich) advised Republican candidates to associate themselves with words like 'building,' 'dream,' 'freedom,' 'learn,' 'light,' 'preserve,' 'success,' and 'truth' while associating opponents with words like 'bizarre,' 'decay,' 'ideological,' 'lie,' 'machine,' 'pathetic,' and 'traitors.'"
Note how far right pundits and Tea Partiers routinely use such deceptive and divisive language today when attacking President Obama and Democrats. In the battle over healthcare reform, conservatives in Congress and their media allies blasted Democrats as "elitist" for trying to "take over the best healthcare system in the world" because "they think they know what is best for the rest of us."
In fact, says Agre, conservatives are trying to pin the aristocratic label on liberals when it is they who should rightfully be wearing it.
"Rush Limbaugh asserts that 'they (liberals) think they are better than you,' this of course being a phrase that had historically been applied (correctly) to the aristocracy. The goal here is to make it impossible to criticize aristocracy," Agre says.
That Limbaugh utters this from within his palatial gated home in the aristocratic enclave of Palm Beach is not a little ironic. Indeed, many of his fellow far-right media personalities, from Bill O'Reilly to Anne Coulter, are themselves aristocrat wannabes dutifully pushing the conservative message du jour, no matter how dishonest or undemocratic it might be.
Of course, today's aristocrats are no longer titled nobility but hedge fund managers, war profiteers, health insurance CEOs, foreign media moguls, weapons systems purveyors, investment bankers, oil tycoons, and corporate titans.
Their conservative enablers in Congress accept campaign donations in return for doing the bidding of the new American aristocrats: Starting unnecessary wars, denying access to healthcare, defeating Wall Street reforms, gutting sensible regulations, destroying civil discourse, stopping unemployment benefits, withholding civil rights, and standing in the way of everything else that is truly democratic.
So, when pretending he was Lord Sebastian Flyte, Bill Buckley was actually tipping his mitt and telling us what conservatism really represents.
"Conservatism is as alien (in America) as it could possibly be," concludes Dr. Agre, "Only through the most comprehensive campaign of deception in human history has it managed to establish its very tentative control of the country's major political institutions. Conservatism until quite recently was quite open about the fact that it is incompatible in the modern world. That is right. The modern world is a good place, and it will win."
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Kevin
Foley is president of KEF
Media Associates, an Atlanta-based producer and distributor
of sponsored news content to television and radio media. |