Is there a Conservative sense of Fairness?

According to Dan Meegan, author of America the Fair: Using Brain Science to Create a More Just Nation and an Atlantic article, Conservatives Have a Different Definition of ‘Fair,’ liberals miss the point when they presuppose that “fairness” should be defined in terms of need, so that those most in need—the poor, the disenfranchised, the physically or mentally challenged—are most deserving of government assistance. Liberals fail to appreciate that conservatives have an alternative view of fairness: conservatives care more about equity or proportionality, so that for them your benefits should depend on your contributions. Any helping hand, then, would be unfair unless we somehow earn that assistance. There’s no universal right to government assistance just because we’re in need of it if we’ve failed in life; on the contrary, in that case we’ve earned the barriers that result from those failures, given this conservative value of equity, of deserving to receive no more and no less than the fruits of our labour.

This appeal to conservative values—along the lines of Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory— allows Meegan to explain why the Tea Party, for example, used to defend the Medicare health insurance program even though this program provides aid to those most in need, such as the elderly. Medicare is also equitable since it’s funded by a payroll tax, so that working people expect the program also to reward them for their contributions. Social Security in the US is likewise funded by a payroll tax so that while the poor receive more than they contribute and the rich receive less, the middleclass receives equitable benefits, more or less proportional to what they contributed from their personal earnings.

Meegan points out that, “This conservative version of fairness is wired deeply in the human brain, and liberals ignore it at their peril.” In experiments, primates will reject a reward if they see another monkey receiving a superior reward for the same effort. A monkey would rather throw away a meager reward than concede to the unfairness of arbitrary or free-loading extraction of benefits. For Meegan the genetic message is clear: “Don’t take advantage of me [in the future], and don’t help yourself to more than you deserve.”

The Absence of Conservative Values

But there’s a giant flaw in Meegan’s analysis, which is that so-called American “conservatives” save their objections to the free-loading poor, as though the rich earn every penny of their millions or billions of dollars. You hear a “conservative” rail against the welfare state when the issue is whether the government should redistribute tax dollars to help the needy poor (since the conservative rejects this liberal sense of fairness). But you don’t find the conservative repudiating unearned, inherited wealth or the lobbyist-concocted financial system that multiplies wealth through monopolies and rent-seeking behaviour, which conflict with the value of equity. If you have a monopoly, for example, you engage in price gouging not because your efforts or contributions increase to justify the higher price, but because you can take advantage of the lack of competitors. Nor do you find the conservative castigating the rich with anything like the vitriol he or she reserves for the poor, despite the obvious fact that all private concentrations of wealth are created in part by luck, which means no fortune is ever wholly earned.

Perhaps less obvious, but no less devastating to Meegan’s account is that we typically amass wealth also through unethical failures to avoid becoming greedy, sociopathic monsters, as a result of our character’s having been corrupted by our access to power. In so far as the rich increase their profits by exploiting or dominating others or by seeking out Machiavellian advantages, their rewards are forcibly taken but not in any sense earned. Discarding such lofty notions of value, the Machiavellian realist, after all, is beyond good and evil. All that’s left is the cold clash of impersonal mechanisms: if they’re clever and heartless enough, the strong will dominate the weak, which would explain the inequality of wealth without in the least justifying the existence of multimillionaires. On the contrary, this realist factor would dispose of the very notion of justice or of fairness as an epiphenomenal fairytale.

If Meegan and Haidt were onto something, “conservatives” would have to be consistent in applying their alleged sense of justice-as-equity. So the conservative would defend benefits only to the extent that they’re earned, any unearned portion—whether given to the poor by the government or whether accruing to the rich through rent-extraction, luck, or predatory domination—being unfair according to this supposed conservative value system. On the contrary, American conservatives, at least, have a blind spot in their sociopolitical criticisms: they demonize the poor and lionize the rich, despite the fact that neither earns all the benefits they receive. One reason for this blind spot is obvious: the Republican Party agenda is set primarily by the richest one percent of Americans. Historically, Republicans have used culture war wedge issues to persuade the working class to vote against its economic interests, as shown by Thomas Frank. This is largely why the election of Trump as president represents a wisening-up of blue-collar conservatives to this scheme: what American conservatives evidently want is a leader who will be every bit as vicious as his rhetoric. Another reason for the inconsistency is the dream of every American to have a reasonable chance of becoming rich: you wouldn’t want to condemn anyone for occupying a position as privileged as the one you intend to hold one day.

However, there’s a more fundamental reason, which is that we’re dealing here not with a value system, but with the primitive basis for the worship of the strong as gods. In an artificial setting, such as an experimenter’s lab, monkeys may display egalitarian tendencies, but in the wild, primates and most social species are forced to organize themselves into dominance hierarchies in which the group’s weaker members concede the leader’s right to more of the resources than he’s individually earned with his contributions. The leader dominates the rest of the group, driving home the power imbalance with petty displays of the subordinates’ inferiority. This happens until the leader shows weakness or the inequity becomes intolerable and the corruption at the top poses a threat to the group’s survival, in which case a beta challenges the alpha to fight for chief dominator status. When in the wild an omega male monkey receives only scraps from the carcass, that monkey is hardly in a position to complain about the inequity. To do so would invite the alpha male to terrorize the weaker member, to maintain group cohesion.

Our species takes this instinct and runs with it in our imagination, as we project the alpha dominator into our concept of the gods and goddesses we worship for allegedly being responsible for natural processes. So-called conservatism is just the rationalization of that instinct with myths and specious moralistic rhetoric. Conservatives condemn the poor and idolize the rich because their “values” are animalistic rather than humanistic. The inconsistency at issue is due to the nonrationality of the instinct at the root of their “political philosophy.” This instinct is just to fear the tyrant, because surviving the brutal wilderness dictated some such amoral expedient. The jungles and swamps and tundra and deserts were plainly godless and unfair, so we had to invent supernatural gods and monsters, along with their earthly representatives or avatars (kings and priests) to compel strangers to cooperate in great feats of cultural imagination. We flourished in the Neolithic period by using our intelligence to manage our envisioning of more and more audacious excuses for civilized assaults on nature.  

You know you have a true “conservative” on your hands if you find this impostor heaping scorn on the parasitic poor, while making excuses for the unearned wealth of the super-rich. What’s most conservative about this inconsistency is its betrayal of the primitive fear and prejudice behind the conservative rhetoric and “values.” The conservative, Paleolithic instinct is to surrender the human potential to transcend nature, in favour of the natural way of surviving by dividing the group into a dominance hierarchy. Such a power structure is ineffective if the social status of each member is unclear due to mixed signals. Thus, the poor must not only be kept poor, but they should be berated and mocked for their failures, while the rich in turn must just as unfairly be idolized for their exaggerated, sometimes bogus (e.g. lucky) successes. The wealth gap must be maintained to announce to the world that in the “United States,” a tiny minority dominates the majority, as dictated by jungle law, the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and whatever genetic and psychological mechanisms are responsible for conservative authoritarianism.

To pretend that conservatives have an alternative concept of fairness is to give credence to the empty rhetoric that dresses up the bestiality of conservative behaviour. As is apparent from the social Darwinian consequences of their “policies,” conservatives would have us all living like animals, with no “socialist” or humanitarian basis for civilized cooperation in government regulations, nothing but theocratic myths such as those that sustained faith through the European Dark Age. For example, there’s no conservative justification for science or for technological progress, since objectivity and progress depend on the humanistic vision of transcending natural limitations, of seeing farther than is required to complete our biological life cycle. (Technoscientific progress in the Middle Ages occurred in spite of the Church, since that progress was inspired largely by the rediscovery of ancient Roman humanism and by the infiltration of classical Greek texts which challenged defeatist Christian dogmas and sowed the seeds of the humanistic (i.e. liberal) Renaissance.)

The Bestiality of Conservative Governments

The most authentic conservative political system is the monarchy or totalitarian dictatorship, in which, together with the confederates who administer his or her commands, an alpha figure dominates the majority. The absoluteness of the king’s “divine right to rule” is inherited not from any god but from the practical necessity in the wild of submitting to the group’s strongest member for the sake of surviving in an indifferent, often hostile environment. All forms of government that depart from some such top-down power structure are progressive, meaning the opposite of conservative. Again, any system for maintaining group cohesion that’s prevalent in social species of animals is politically conservative. Human forms of these systems include oligarchies, autocracies, tribalism, feudalism, and plutocracy via runaway capitalism.

Republics, democracies, and socialist or anarchical societies that rein in the power of the privileged few at the top or that prevent the emergence of private concentrations of power are anti-conservative. This is because these progressive systems that typically enshrine their humanistic values in a constitution are forward-looking in seeking to transcend natural, animalistic regularities with a vision of how the world should be. Whereas a conservative society capitulates to nature’s tyranny over animal life, surrendering our godlike potential and existential, promethean responsibility to revolt against the monstrosity of a living-dead, self-creating universe, progressive, liberal, or otherwise humanistic societies represent an emergent layer of complexity in the universe. Anti-conservative societies posit human rights and values, liberties and responsibilities that ought to baffle an authentic conservative (a true opponent of human progress).   

What this means is that the notion of a “conservative party” in a democratic nation is oxymoronic. The conservative politicians are foxes guarding the hen house or wolves in sheep’s clothing. They’re either confused about their beliefs, contradicting their avowed humanistic principles with authoritarian tendencies or policies, or they’re only pretending to be civilized, being in secret so many subcriminal, social Darwinian sociopaths. Some Americans are evidently just now beginning to learn from the Trump “administration” what’s been at the heart of “Republican values” for decades, namely inhuman authoritarianism. The American conservative’s Orwellian effrontery begins with the misnomer, “Republican,” since according to the primary definition, a republic vests power with the voters, whereas the Republican’s “free market” economic policies strip away that power and award it to the wealthy who capture the government and form an effective plutocracy.

Alternatively, were “republic” taken to be synonymous only with “commonwealth” and to refer just to a group of sovereign states associated by choice (states which might choose to be dominated by plutocrats, for example), the Republican could theoretically repudiate humanism and democracy without contradiction, although such un-American convictions would have to be kept secret. Likewise, were “republic” taken to mean only a state in which the head of government isn’t a monarch and doesn’t inherit that title, Republicanism would be consistent with modern forms of oligarchy (such as with kleptocracy or kakistocracy, as in Donald Trump’s regime). Although plutocrats typically pass their wealth on to their children, their money had to have been generated at some point by labour, which means their economic power doesn’t derive just from (the myth of) royal blood.

Still, in practice a Republican, Tory, (most ludicrous) Progressive Conservative, or any other modern conservative politician who has some such minimalist concept of republicanism in mind and yet who campaigns to be voted into high office has a wildly incoherent belief system. If your goal is to form a plutocracy via crony capitalism and yet your power as a “conservative politician” in the interim derives from the voter, you must be only going through the motions in campaigning for those votes and in promising this or that to your constituents. Tories in Britain and Canada, for example, supposedly uphold “the supremacy of social order as it has evolved throughout history,” as the Wikipedia page puts it. That social order has evidently evolved as a result of progressive, humanistic, anti-dogmatic and anti-traditional ventures, so that the Tory must therefore be both backward- and forward-looking, as it were, a contradiction in terms. Thus is modern, democratic conservatism a charade, and Meegan’s account of a conservative sense of fairness is part of that pretense that all members of modern democracies are equally respectful of the humanistic enterprise.