Conservatism's Death Gusher

The issue is death -
death gushing at ten thousand pounds per square inch from a mile below
the sea, tens of thousands of barrels of death a day. Not just death to
eleven human beings. Death to sea birds, sea turtles, dolphins, fish,
oyster beds, shrimp, beaches; death to the fishing industry, tourism,
jobs; and death to a way of life based on the beauty and bounty of the
Gulf.

Many, perhaps a majority, of the Gulf residents affected are
conservatives, strong right-wing Republicans, following extremist
Governors Bobby Jindal and Haley Barbour. What those conservatives are
not saying, and may be incapable of seeing, is that conservatism itself
is largely responsible for what happened, and that conservatism is a
continuing disaster for conservatives who live along the Gulf.

Conservatism is an ideology of death. It was
conservative laissez-faire free market ideology - that maximizing profit
comes first - that led to:

• the corrupt
  relationship between the oil companies and the Interior Department staff
  that was supposedly regulating them
• minimizing
  cost by not drilling relief wells
• the principle
  that oil companies could be responsible their own risk assessments on
  drilling
• maximizing profit by outsourcing risk
  assessment that told them what they wanted to hear: zero risk!
• maximizing
  profit by minimizing cost of materials
• maximizing
  profit by failing to pay cleanup crews and businesses for their losses
• focusing only
  on profit by failing to test the cleanup methods to be used if something
  went wrong
• minimizing cost by sacrificing the
  health of cleanup crews, refusing to allow them to use respirator masks
  to protect against toxic fumes.

It is
conservative profit-above-all market fundamentalism that has led other
oil companies to mount a massive PR campaign to isolate BP as an
anomalous "bad actor" and to argue that offshore drilling should be
continued by the self-proclaimed "good actors." Their PR fails to
mention that in Congressional hearings it came out that they all
outsource risk assessment to the same company that declared that BP had
"zero risk." The PR fails to mention that they all use cost-benefit
analysis to maximize profits just as BP did. Cost-benefit analysis only
looks at monetary costs versus benefits, case by case, not at the risk
of massive death of the kind gushing out of the Gulf at present. Death,
in itself, even at that scale, is not a "cost." Only an outflow of money
is a "cost." This is what follows from conservative laissez-faire
market ideology, an ideology that continues to sanction death on a Gulf
scale.

But the facts won't make a difference to
dyed-in the-wool conservatives, since the facts will be filtered through
their ideological frames: when the facts don't fit the frames, the
facts will be ignored.

The conservative worldview says man has
dominion over nature: nature is there for human monetary profit. Profit
is sanctioned over the possibility of massive death and destruction in
nature. Conservatives support even more dangerous drilling off the coast
of Alaska and are working to repeal the President's moratorium on deep
water drilling. Nature be damned; the oil companies have a right to make
money, death or no death.

Directness of causation is a rarely
noticed property of the conservative worldview. What are the causes of
crime? Bad people, lock 'em up, say conservatives. There are no social
or economic causes, that is, systemic causes, in the conservative
universe. So it is with the Death Gusher. Blame BP, the "bad actor."
Look for the immediate cause, but don't look any further, at the
profit-above-all system in which all oil companies operate, a system
idolized by conservatives. Without an understanding of systemic causes,
the causes cited above won't make much sense.

A great many
self-identified conservatives are actually what I've called
"biconceptuals," who have both conservative and progressive worldviews,
but on different issues. They actually share a progressive view of
nature: they love the beauty and appreciate the bounty of the Gulf, as
it was before the Death Gusher. They want to save the environment of
the Gulf and the way of life as it was. But shift the issue to the
culpability of laissez-faire markets, the absolute right to profit from
nature and profit-maximizing corporate practices, and their conservative
worldview is activated. They will not be able to see the causal role of
conservatism itself in the Death Gusher, and in the conservative
ideology of greed and death that has given us the global warming
disaster we now face worldwide.

Incidentally, there are bi-conceptual
Democrats who share the conservative view of the market. Their views
have led to many of President Obama's problems with Democrats in
Congress.

Finally, there is what progressive Democrats
see as a contradiction: conservative advocates of smaller and weaker
government and critics of governmental power trying to pin the Death
Gusher Disaster on Obama for not having and using enough government
power to prevent or lessen the disaster - even though the government has
no capacity to plug oil wells.

The contradiction is logical, from a
progressive point of view, but not from a conservative point of view.
The highest value in the conservative universe is to preserve, defend,
and extend conservatism itself. Anything that helps, or fails to harm,
Obama contradicts this highest principle, since Obama's deepest values
on the whole fundamentally contradict conservative values.
Conservatives, on principle, cannot let a major opportunity to
criticize Obama go by. Of course, it also helps conservatives
politically.

Those who are not held captive by the
conservative worldview should be able to recognize the causal role of
conservatism in the Death Gusher in the Gulf. Many progressive do, but
keep it to themselves.

Progressives have been much too kind to
conservatives on this matter. They have largely accepted the Bad Actor
Frame, criticizing BP but not the whole industry and its practices. No
one should be drilling miles under the sea, where oil comes out at
10,000 pounds per square inch. No matter how much profit is involved.

Conservatism
gushes death - and not only in the Gulf of Mexico.