Being Conservative -- Jane Smiley's View

Jane Smiley goes on another rant at Huffington Post and gets in some pretty good ones. It's interesting that she kicks off the post with a hat tip to my favorite guy, Paul Krugman and his latest column. Here are the best parts:

The root problem of conservatism is that it is tribal--conservatives cannot or will not believe in such basic concepts as epidemiology, ecology, or even Keynesian economics (not to mention brotherly love). But even though conservatives have been fighting interconnectedness forever, it continues to exist (that "reality has a liberal bias" sort of thing). Regulations and benefits like healthcare and diplomacy exist not out of soft-hearted liberal guilt, but because taking care of matters before they get out of hand is cheaper, while hiding your head in the sand, clinging to us-and-them beliefs, and arming yourselves to the teeth is ever more expensive. In Bleak House, Charles Dickens pointed out to a ruling class that was reluctant to assume the expenses of public sanitation that smallpox could not be excluded from the houses of the rich simply because the rich disdained the poor. That was a hundred and fifty years ago, and we are still having to point the same thing out today. You don't have to recognize the connection (as in smallpox, as in global warming) in order for it to be there.

The fight, since Reagan, has been literally for the soul of the US. Conservatives are determined to define the nation as a hierarchy in which white Christian men are at the top, unchallenged by other groups, but able to extend favor to nonthreatening men or good-looking women as individuals. They want to define the world as a place where what America says goes, no matter how far away other countries are, or how much they disagree with our policies. Liberals assume that our nation is a place where work, citizenship, and simple humanity can claim certain rights and where no single group should predominate under the law. They assume that the world is never going to be a uniform place, but that other nations don't lose their humanity just because they disagree with or distrust us....

The case is frequently made that conservatives and liberals have different temperaments, and this is surely so. Cheney's 1% Doctrine is the quintessential conservative idea--the world is so dangerous that if there is a 1% chance of an attack on America, then we have to go all out to stop it. There is a sort of surface bravery about this idea, but beyond that, it makes absolutely no sense tactically or strategically. It is like going to the track and betting the house on a 99 to 1 shot.