American “Conservativism” and the Strange Issue of Faith

So the American election happened and I stayed up to watch it. I stayed up till 8am and my sleep patterns have been horribly messed up for the last few days because of it so that I am now living in UK time but sleeping on American time. Much like that little girl we all saw crying because she was so tired of hearing about the election a lot of people were thinking “thank god it’s over! Now we can go back to living out lives!” but politics is never over and it is continuing to mess everything up. After Fox News’ on air meltdown the debate has now switched to Facts vs Faith, or Nate Silver vs Conservatives which is funny and depressing for a whole range of reasons, and as such it is now time for me to stick my oar in.

A conservative

This whole thing has given us an insight into the mind of the far right in America and generally. I am uneasy about using the word conservative here because to my mind conservatism still means the sort of people who read the Telegraph, who live in the Home Counties or the Cotswolds, whose primary competition is not for control of the state but for the village of the year. The sort of people who are trying to conserve the status quo, the sort of people Edmund Burke was talking about. Most modern Republicans aren't conservatives, they are radicals who want to completely change the system; they are the far right.

I have talked a few times in my podcast (blatant plug) about the way people who are on the far right can’t comprehend that others might disagree with their views. I think I referred to the way that when you meet the type of person who might vote for the BNP and who are raging away against “political correctness” they are doing so because they assume that like them everyone else wants to be able to call gay people faggots and black people niggers. They lack the basic empathy to relate to the fact that for most people the enforced absence of the word “paki” from their vocabulary isn't an issue because they probably wouldn't use it even if they were allowed to.

This lack of empathy feeds into a sort of faith, a blind faith that the way they think about the world is entirely correct and that most other people see it the same way, a blind faith in a “silent majority”. This obviously causes a disdain for facts which disagree with their faith, climate change isn't real, all poor people are poor because they lazy, all rich people are rich because of their hard work, all immigrants are paedophiles who are taking our jobs, all Muslims want to take over the world, also all the Jews, and the Catholics, and the Chinese. Any facts that disprove their blind faith are ignored as fakes or conspiracies.

For any half way reasonable people this is obviously extremely frustrating as issues such as climate change, income inequality, and immigration are incredibly complex to explain at the best of times and even harder when your opponent refuses to acknowledge the facts that prove that you are correct. I think that we here in the UK have an easier time of it because most British people when wanting to find something out will turn to the BBC which at least tries to present things in a reasonably balanced and straight-forward way. In America where people can choose to get their news entirely from sources which already agree with them (looking at you Fox) it becomes almost impossible. They live in an echo-chamber which only re-enforces their faith that most people see things with their point of view.

Fox News: Home of Lego Newsreaders

This brings us back to the US election because here we saw the blind faith and lack of empathy of the far right in full force. There was a presumption from the Fox News crowd that there was no way Romney could lose because they wanted Romney to win and obviously as they felt that was then so did everyone else. They couldn't comprehend that a majority of Americans didn't want Romney because they lacked the empathy to understand how other people felt and the polls and so forth that showed an Obama victory was going to happen therefore had to be false. They found a man to unskew the polls and show them what the real truth was. To the rest of us it looked insane.

Then of course the election happened and for the first time they found themselves proved wrong, this wasn't like climate change or poverty, this had a definitive end and this end was entirely different from the one their faith prophesied. Fox News started fighting itself live on air in a desperate attempt to prove reality wrong while I watched.

This is I suppose the big difference between “faith” and “hope”. I do have faith in god (which a lot of people find odd) but for all other things I have hope. I had hope that Obama would win on Tuesday but I knew there was a possibility he wouldn't  I have hope that humankind will eventually find a way to eradicate inequality and conflict in the world but my knowledge of the world tells me that it is unlikely and that my hopes are to be realised then we have to work damn hard to achieve it. Republicans and their ilk worldwide simply have faith, faith that they will one day be millionaires, faith that the seas won’t rise, faith that they will win every war they fight. It is the faith of the lazy, the same faith that makes people buy lottery tickets, it is the faith of the damned.