The unconscious of a conservative

The 1967 Poor People's Campaign, from Ecumenical Women at the United Nations

I've already amused myself more than could be considered strictly necessary, or even entirely sane, with Arizona's attorney general, Tom Horne, who believes that the Tucson high schools' Mexican-American Studies Program was teaching students that they were "oppressed by white people" and therefore "just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it." But I'm not really over it. Anyway, it's Dr. King's birthday...

So what I want to know is: What exactly is it about rightishness [jump]
that makes people say things like that? I mean, analogize segregation in the Jim Crow South to things like ethnic studies or affirmative action programs? What do they think segregation was about--really, keeping black kids out of law school even when they had perfectly good scores on the LSAT? Black people were kept out of everything; how many had a chance to take the LSAT? Or did they use to have White History classes where the white students openly bitched about how oppressed they felt? Civil rights legislation hardly put an end to that. They just called it history class, and by and large they still do.

Is it another case of retroactionary craziness? of seeing some moment as a pivot on which to run time backwards, from the masses in the Mall in August 1963 to the black-and-white kinescopes of the movement's origins, with all the black people more respectably--and respectfully?--dressed, and aiming to please, and then uncomplainingly helping out with World War II, and retreating to the enclaves like Harlem, and nightclubs where a white person always felt welcome, and you could get a really good shoeshine and even some "reefer", quietly, without any of those damn hippies leering at you... No.

It's yet another way of thinking of conservatism as a mental illness, and maybe the one I'll be satisfied with: the radical inability to see another person's point of view. The conservative cannot imagine anything outside of his (usually "his") own experience; so being lynched must be just like not getting into the law school you really liked. No wonder they freaked out when Sonia Sotomayor was nominated to the Supreme Court and seemed to have something calle "empathy". They couldn't comprehend what it is--sounds like a disease!

If you can't imagine what it is that motivates a person that complains about the distribution of power as it is when the distribution of power as it is suits you perfectly well, you will interpret it as a mysteriously malignant personal attack. You will start to see people who oppose you politically as evil; if they associate with one another you may regard them as a conspiracy, of people who want to take your power away, or "redistribute" your income, or suggest that you're not very cool.

And if someone comes up with a way of expressing it that you can understand at last as applying to you, you'll leap on it. "Judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin." Especially if you're unable to tell the difference between the content of your character and your LSAT score.

Which brings me once again to a place I wasn't expecting to visit. It looks like we have to be careful ourselves, not to be like that; to extend our empathy to those poor souls who can never feel it. We should give a thought to the lonely life of the conservative--more to be pitied than censured...