Ashok Dhillon
May 20, 20207 min
It is befitting these strange times that ‘American Conservatism’, which has traditionally been tied so closely to ‘Christian Values’ and should stand for love, tolerance, honesty, sober reflection, measured responses, deep sense of tradition, fair-play, responsibility and duty, consistent monetary and fiscal discipline, and unity; instead, is reflected by racial and religious intolerance, hypocrisy, untruthfulness, the rejection of civility and decency, gross lack of human empathy for average people, disregard for deficits (even before the pandemic), irresponsible governance, deliberate sowing of division, anarchy, cronyism, criminality, embracing of radicalism and rejection of institutional tradition.
This faux ‘American Conservatism’ has led to disastrous wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by even more disastrous economic meltdowns in 2008, and now in 2020.
While ‘COVID-19 pandemic, and the subsequent economic standstill, was certainly not the current administration’s doing, but the grossly bungled and childishly (against expert advice) rebellious response, definitely led to the US becoming the poster child for the spread and deadly toll that followed, by the viral pandemic. And, instead of the national crisis uniting the people, as in most national crisis, the bizarre and chaotic response of the ‘Conservative’ Trump administration was to further fan the flames of toxic partisanship by defying logic and common-sense, and by the ludicrous blaming of previous the administration whose safe guards against global pandemics this administration had deliberately dismantled, ironically and unfortunately just prior to the COVID-19 breakout. And by rejecting all sane advice, while indulging-in and encouraging dangerous denials and rebellion to internationally accepted preventative actions amongst the population, this conservative administration made the impact far worse than it needed to be. These juvenile actions further split the already divided nation, from those with some common-sense, and those with none (mainly from the conservative camp).
The defying of and the rebellion against expert advice, of course catapulted America to the very forefront of all countries in the number of infections and deaths from the Corona Virus, and contributed greatly to the cratering of the US economy. No amount of denials could prevent the virus from taking its toll there.
Conservatism, and Christianity within conservatism, has lost its way and unfortunately sowed widespread rancor and chaos in these troubled times, in the US and across the world.
One wonders if one was to apply the ‘Test’: ‘What would Jesus do in the current conditions? How would the conservative Christian America fare?
It would be fairly accurate to say that today’s conservative America would be an abject failure across the board to the ‘what would Jesus do’ response test. Let’s contrast the current actions and policies of the current conservatives in government, and in their support base, against the hypothetical question - what would Jesus do in the present day America:
Jesus would not be for the rich, he would be for the poor;
Jesus would not be arrogant but be empathetic towards those that were hurting the most;
Jesus would stand for the people, not for the wealthy and the big corporations and their lobbyists;
Jesus would not lie daily;
Jesus would not sow discord for personal power, persecute and shun the suffering, while anointing the wrong doers;
Jesus would be humble and not be proud and boastful;
Jesus would not be selfish, but share open heartedly;
Jesus would certainly not be for guns, but would promote peace, love and harmony;
And, Jesus would not destroy the environment, and His Father’s creatures great and small. Jesus would attempt to save the Earth and everything in it and on it.
This lack of Christian principles and sober, responsible, and enlightened leadership has had severe consequences. Today, due to the rejection of somber thoughtful leadership, dominated instead by brutish, cultish self-serving authoritarian personalities, during this global pandemic, America leads the way in being ‘The Most Infected Nation’ in the world.
Currently it has almost 1.5 Million cases of Americans infected, and almost 87,000 dead (and the numbers are still rising keeping in mind these numbers represent inadequate testing). America is followed by Russia with over 250,000 infected, and reportedly 2,500 dead (a number that no one believes), and a similar modelled Brazil with 220,000 cases and almost 15,000 dead and rising, and the UK, with 240,000 infected and over 34,000 dead and still rising.
What these four countries have in common, is that all of these ‘Democratic’ countries have elected ‘Conservative’ authoritarian, power-hungry, un-empathetic and arrogant leaders (even Putin [yes he is ‘elected’ even though no one credible is allowed to stand against him]). These conservative ‘Right Wing’ leaders have shown little empathy for the people, even during a global pandemic, but have a deep need for personal power, with dangerously autocratic tendencies that made them lax in their initial response to the pandemic, declaring it not significant, and thus exposing their populations to maximum risks and infections.
Today, these four countries are among the most infected in the world. And during this pandemic, all four countries have performed very poorly with atrocious leadership riddled with dishonesty, arrogance, the lack of preparedness, contempt for science and expertise, and an open disregard for public safety. Thus they have become the models of ‘pandemic failures’.
But back to America.
It is not the failure of the leadership alone, the ‘Conservatives’ in the US all more or less profess to be fiscally responsible while tolerating successive Republican governments that are far less fiscally responsible than Democrats, consistently.
They profess to have ‘Christian Values’ (more or less) but have NO empathy for the millions of innocent civilians lives their economic hegemony, regime change or ideological wars have destroyed in foreign countries.
They profess love of human life, especially for pre-birth life, but have callous disregard for post-birth human life, as they consistently and irrationally put guns, of all kinds, before human lives nationally (even when their school children are regularly shot in mass school shootings), and in US led wars, internationally.
They are decidedly more intolerant of race and other religions, favour guns over human lives, Wall Street over Main Street, criminally indicted Flynn and Manafort over any law-abiding Democrat, and a morally and ethically bankrupt, compulsively and irrationally lying, provably incompetent Trump, to the demonstrably intelligent, provably competent, far more empathetic and accomplished, globally admired Barack Obama.
We understand, among the publicly ‘Christian Values’ espousing Republican lawmakers and most of their supporters, racial bigotry is theologically un-Christian, but in practice that racial bigotry, especially against Afro-Americans has been the mainstay of white American conservatives since the beginning of America’s history. And it manifests itself currently in the ongoing often lethal bias of police shootings of innocent black young men (and the most recent fatal shooting of a young black man just out jogging, by two white men who decided he was suspicious, primarily because he was black - is a case in point).
To add another point to it, Brazil’s current conservative President, Jair Bolsonaro, the great Trump admirer, is prone to foster the same lethal response from his ‘base’ against the country’s indigenous people, much like Trump and the Republicans are biased against Afro-Americans, Muslims and Mexicans.
The conservative’s open hatred and vindictive vilification of the first black President, Barack Obama, to this day, also underscores our broad assertions.
The American ‘Evangelicals’ are one of the most vocal Christian supporters of Donald Trump, and the conservative right-wing Republicans currently in power. And, these politically active conservatives hate liberal values of tolerance, acceptance, women’s rights, freedom of sexual orientation, immigration, vaccination, science, environment protection over big business, fair-play, social safety net, food-stamps and health-care for the most downtrodden etc...etc… In other words, all the socially humane policies that would be most ‘Christ-like’, if He was here making them. After all, His overarching fundamental message has always been the nurturing and uplifting of the poorest and the most downtrodden, and not of the richest and the most privileged, as has been the American conservative political doctrine of the past decades, and most currently. And, the American conservatives love everything about Trump, their self-professed ‘Messiah’.
Therefore, it can be safely said that they love among all his other ‘sins’, gross misogyny, for his open confession of a powerful man’s repulsive and sexually abusive behaviour towards women (the Hollywood tapes), which they casually brushed aside as they continued to embrace him; as they do his daily lying (which is legendary); his love of fostering division and hatred among Americans (daily); his open racial and religious bigotry (Muslims should be banned, and all Mexicans are criminals & rapists); his shocking lack of empathy (even with horrific number of deaths from the pandemic); his gross incompetence (making America the leading COVID-19 infected Nation); his dangerous stupidity and ignorance (disinfectant injections); his monumental false pride; and his rampant hypocrisy (hardly Christ-like qualities).
Yet, in spite of his decidedly and pronounced anti-Christ-like personality, the American evangelicals love their dangerously shallow, idiotic, consistently immoral person as their ‘saviour’, and hate ‘liberal’ values which can credibly and biblic-ly be argued are far more Christ-like than not.
In behaving as they do (certainly not as they preach), the conservatives of America have made the country the most socially inhumane amongst most of the developed countries of the world, with some of the greatest inequality between the rich and the poor (definitely not a Christian value).
In voting as they do, the morally untethered conservatives in America support consistently fiscally irresponsible, economically disastrous Republicans, and they support Big-Pharma and insurance company profitability over Universal Health Care, even though every other developed country proves that Universal Health Care is cheaper, and obviously far better for the American people.
They also consistently elect Republican lawmakers and officials that favour big business and their political-contribution making lobbyists, over the good of the people. They elect environment destroying policy makers over those that would protect the quality of their air, land and water (go figure). And they actively and consistently vote against gun-control and therefore by default endorse gun violence against the innocent, which makes America lead all the developed countries in the world, by far, for internal terrorism and mass shootings.
But it is when the secular Liberal ‘leftist’ majority of America, and the rest of the sane world had come to the conclusion that ‘all hope was lost’, because in spite of Trump’s and the Republican’s dismantling of all semblance of the rule-of-law in American government, he and other conservative leaders like Mitch McConnell seemed to be untouchable, there seemed to arrive ‘Divine intervention’ in the form of the COVID-19 Pandemic, which has struck America the hardest. So, is the COVID-19 virus’ greatest victim going to be ‘American Conservatism’, and its greatest false prophet Donald J. Trump?