The Right's dependence on failure

Let's imagine that right wing anti-crime measures ever actually succeeded, so that there was no longer a major crime problem. Or say their zero-tolerance anti-drug-addiction stuff worked, and people stopped being drug addicts. What would the conservatives do then? Their vote-getting tool, hysteria about crime, would be gone. Their poor-bashing tool would be gone. Their distraction would be gone. Their tool for enriching the jail business would be gone. Political success for right wing anti-crime hysteria depends on the failure of the actual anti-crime measures.
The same goes for social safety nets, unemployment and welfare. Conservatives want to tell us that the poor are poor because they are useless, and simultaneously that market incentives (i.e. making them poorer) will cause them to stop being useless and become active, productive members of society. They want the rest of us to fear and blame the poor (so that we don't pay attention to structural issues, and so that we don't identify with them as humans, and so that we don't speculate on the possibility we could be next), fear that the poor will take too much of our sacred money, and make us feel better by telling us that being selfish and not giving them any of it will be the best thing for them so we should not only not feel guilty for victimizing them, we should feel smug. It's a powerful appeal. But they'd be up a creek if it actually worked—what if the homeless and unemployed went away? What if everyone had jobs? What if nearly all the poor were working poor? The right would lose one of their most powerful tools of “labour discipline”: the threat of joblessness. And they would lose one of their best people dividers. Everyone would be in the same boat, and might begin to realize it. And the few remaining unemployed wouldn't seem like much of a threat, nor would it seem like such an unworkable idea to give them a hand up. The right would be in deep trouble if any of their remedies for joblessness or homelessness actually worked. They depend on the failure of their policies, both economically and politically. And that applies to taxation issues, budget deficits, trade, defence, terrorism, whatever. Their whole approach depends on pointing out danger and then failing to deal with the danger or even adding to it, so they can continue pointing it out. This is one of the drivers of Naomi Klein's “disaster capitalism”.

In that sense, conservatism is a meme. I generally don't like the term “meme”, because it's often used as a buzzword to mean nothing in particular, and because like most trendy ideas it's oversold—I don't think it genuinely applies to most things it's used for—at a minimum, many of the concepts it may apply to don't need it as an explanation. For those of you who aren't up on buzzwords, calling an idea or idea set a meme basically defines it as something people think because it is suited, in an almost Darwinian sense, to getting itself passed around and believed, rather than because it actually fits any facts or is otherwise useful to the people holding the idea. As I say, I don't usually find it a useful concept. People believe lots of things because they're true—you could argue that truth makes ideas more fit to But the general set of right wing ideas are an excellent example. Sure, they're pushed by the wealthy because they are useful to the wealthy, and the wealthy can do a lot of pushing. But it seems like there's more than just that going on—these are ideas which are so far from being useful to most of those who hold them that in fact they would lose their vigour if they did any of what they purport to do. If anything, they seem to be ideas which derive their longevity and success precisely from aggravating the problems they purport to cure, and thus making the problems seem more threatening and more panic-inducing. It's when problems seem big and dangerous and scary that people will embrace simple, direct and apparently vigorous solutions without looking closely.

So next time a conservative, and in Canada particularly a Conservative, starts talking about how dangerous some problem is and laying out some simplistic “solution”, remember: Not only is it intended to benefit the rich, not you; not only is it based on skewed ideas of how the world works, and therefore unlikely to be effective—beyond that, if it were effective he'd be saying something else, because the last thing a Conservative wants is to solve a problem—practically any problem.