The "Party of Life"

Branding is as potent a force in our politics as in any other part of our culture, and no political branding has worked better to grossly simplify and mislead the American people than the Right’s claim to being, as Rick Perry recently put it in an interview, the “party of life.” When it comes down to it, conservatives seem only interested in protecting the beginning and end of life. Rather than trying to improve the situation for those in their prime of life, conservatives use their resources to increase the number of unwanted children and to deny the terminally ill the right to die in a manner of their choosing. Why is this? And why is the protection of one stage of life placed in opposition to others. 

This distinction comes down to how one defines life and where (and when) that definition comes from. The conservative approach seems to be about as basic as you can get: nobody has the right to end the possibility of life. Nobody apart from the state, of course. This can clearly be seen as a pre-Democratic view of life. It derived from the belief that your life does not belong to you. It belongs to your Lord (God) and Master (Chief, King, Emperor, Arch Duke, etc). You are expected to live your life in services to the institution you were born into. In return you are promised safety (by the Master) and salvation (by the Lord). For those of you with a passing grasp of history, philosophy, or sociology, yes, this is the basic idea of contract theory and this is where the conservative position on life stems from. It comes from a time where the average denizen did not have control over his (and certainly not her) own life. 

Ever since the idea of government began to be serving the people rather than simply ruling them, the definition of life has become much more nuanced. Many of us now believe it includes the right to certain unalienable rights. The right the education, the right to a life free of fear and violence, the right to love whomever you please, the right to food, clean water, health care. Rather than having the focus of government be to improve the lives of the select few who rule it, it should be to improve the lives of all citizens, to give every child an equal chance to succeed and to ensure that every single human being be treated with respect and kindness. 

What the reactionary conservatives fail to realize when they call on people to ‘just take care of yourselves’ is that we already have. Government programs like public schools, medicare, and social security are the ways that we, as a nation, have decided to protect ourselves. It is not enough to protect our literal lives, we must protect and maintain the quality of those lives. What the reactionary conservatives are really saying when they tell you to take care of yourself is to do it alone. They are trying to encourage you to give up one of the most effective and most important rights of a citizen––the right to collectively bargain. They are asking you to flee the public institutions that have been created to protect us and, once again, offer ourselves into their unregulated hands. 

So why is this? Well, it’s because, when it comes down to it, the reactionary conservative movement just isn’t on board with this new definition of life. They do not believe that the government should have anything to do with quality of life, just protecting it (with anti-abortion legislation, the military, opposing the right to die) and ending it (the military, the death penalty). Do not mistake this for wanting to leave you alone. They have simply realized that it is easier to weaken a Democracy than to rule it directly. The conservative movement answers not to the rural farmers they splash all over their posters but to the massive corporations they have helped make, legally, citizens. 

I can certainly accept debating the amount the government should be doing to protect and better the lives of its citizens. What I cannot accept is the outright rejection of the idea that the role of government in protecting life has evolved. Understanding and supporting this evolution does not make you a socialist or a liberal, it means that you understand and agree with the basic tenets of Democracy. We have to face the fact that the conservative movement may not.