insurgent49

June 3, 2005
Knee Jerks
by Kevin Morford, insurgent49

     Right wing strategists are fond of accusing progressives of being emotional, knee jerk supporters of bad social policy based upon misplaced sympathy for the downtrodden. There can be little doubt that emotions are an important part of life, and that everyone, liberal and conservative alike, is influenced by them in forming their positions on political, social, and economic issues. Yet the reigning champions of basing social policy on appeals to raw emotions (while rejecting rational analysis of the facts) are not the progressives, but the right wing reactionaries who today cloak themselves in the mantle of conservatism. A few examples will serve to illustrate the point.

     It is the reactionary right (aka “neo-conservatives”) who want to return to the good old days of imperial domination of the world, this time with the U.S. as the dominating power. The wars against Afghanistan and Iraq are their first steps in the implementation of that dream. Never mind that prior imperial powers like the British, Dutch, and French lost their empires because the costs of maintaining an empire are far too great. Never mind that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have already required the appropriation of over $390 billion of taxpayer money, with no end in sight. The idea of an empire feels good to them, so they sell it to the public with lies, and with emotional appeals to patriotism, spreading democracy, and getting rid of tyrants.

     It is the reactionary right who want to return to the days of laissez-faire capitalism as it was practiced in the 1800s, by eliminating governmental regulation of businesses (while leaving corporate welfare in place). Using emotional slogans such as “get the government off of the backs of business”, these ideologues ignore the actual evidence of what the elimination of governmental regulation does to society.

     As deregulation of energy utilities has taken place, “Enron”s happen, including massive fraudulent manipulation of energy prices and losses in the billions of dollars. Deregulation of savings and loan institutions has also taken place, and the government ended up bailing out account holders to the tune of $132 billion. Deregulation of ownership of the public airwaves has taken place, and ownership of the mass media has become concentrated in the hands of just a few giant corporations that tightly control the allowable scope of public debate. Certainly there were some areas where government regulation had become inefficient or excessive, but the reactionary ideologues have used emotional arguments to destroy desirable and necessary regulations that had done a good job of protecting the public interest for many decades.

     It is the reactionary right who want to roll society back to the days before Darwin, by attacking the scientific consensus that supports the theory of evolution. These attacks are not based upon science or evidence, but upon emotional appeals to religious fundamentalism, and anti-intellectualism. Evolution is the unifying theory that ties together everything in the biological sciences, but the reactionary right seeks to destroy it by using emotions and pseudo-science as their weapons.

     It is the reactionary right who support an expensive and ineffective war on drugs, based upon emotional appeals to being “tough on crime.” Studies consistently show that drug education and treatment programs are less expensive and more effective than prison time in reducing the prevalence of drugs in our society. Nations that rely upon a public health model for dealing with drug use, such as the Netherlands, have much lower rates of drug use. But the knee jerk reactionaries get emotional satisfaction from dispensing punishment to drug users, and that is more important to them than effective social policy.

     It is also the right wing reactionaries who tend to support discrimination against gays and lesbians, racial minorities, religious minorities, and anyone else who is different from them. While they usually have some form of rationalization for these positions, they are really based upon the emotional desire to feel superior to someone else.

     The true champions of emotion based social policy are the right wing reactionaries. It is time to clearly reject their charge that progressives are the emotional knee jerks.

Kevin Morford is a political activist and an attorney in private practice in the Anchorage area. He can be reached at kmorford@insurgent49.com.

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