Conference Promoting Abusive Conflation (CPAC)

At last week's Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) meeting, Rep. Ron Paul summed up the current political climate in America as follows: "We now have moved in the direction of socialism. We're close to a fascist system where the government controls our lives and economy."

This statement illustrates why I believe CPAC really stands for Conference Promoting Abusive Conflation.

Any educated person hearing Ron Paul speak would know that socialism and fascism occupy opposite positions on the political spectrum - socialism on the left; fascism on the right. But those who took to the podium at CPAC weren't talking to educated people. Their speeches relied on the knowledge that a large number of Americans weren't paying attention when their Social Studies teachers explained political terminology. Thus, they are ignorant of the true meanings of basic political terms and susceptible to being played like a fiddle by charlatans on both the right and the left.

It is those on the right, however, who more often, and as a matter of policy, rely on conflation to exploit the ignorant and to stymie attempts at meaningful political and social reform. They have done so throughout our nation's history and continue the practice today.

This policy of obstructionism stems from the very essence of their political ideology:

conservative |kənˈsərvətiv; -vəˌtiv|
noun
a person who is averse to change and holds to traditional values and attitudes, typically in relation to politics.

Prior to the Civil War, conservative landowners in the Old South conflated the doctrine of States Rights with the American ideal of individual liberty in order to protect and preserve the institution of slavery upon which both their wealth and their privileged existence depended. After the fall of the Confederacy, they used the same stratagem to create Jim Crow Laws, which replaced slavery with segregation to the same end.

Artfully crafted under the Reagan administration to funnel wealth to those at the top of the economic heap at the expense of the middle class, supply-side (AKA trickle-down) economic theory provides a more recent example of how those on the right used conflation to preserve privilege. Selling this patently regressive economic model to middle-class Americans involved a carefully coordinated effort in which conservatives conflated capitalism (an economic system) with democracy (a social system) at every opportunity until opposition to right-wing economic ideology became, in the minds of the duped, an attack on America itself.

That anyone would accept as credible the vacuous objections to president Obama's economic recovery efforts voiced by those who spoke at CPAC would seem to indicate that Americans did not reject Reaganomics because they recognized how they had been duped, but because its effects on their wallets had left them little choice. The persistence of ignorance is the legacy as well as the aim of abusive conflation.

In addition to the two examples above, conservatives have mounted sustained efforts to conflate birth control with abortion, Christianity with anti-gay bigotry, religious freedom with a rejection of science, and a host of other disparate terms in their quest to dupe Americans into supporting their agenda. I will deal with those sacred cows and others in future posts.

Today, elected conservatives like Rep. John Boehner, Rep. Mike Pence, Sen. Mitch McConnell, and Sen. John Kyl rely on Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Counter, and other unelected mouthpieces of the rabid-right to continuously push their abusive, conflated lies because without them - and beyond them - they have nothing to offer that thinking Americans would want for themselves or their country.