It should be pointed out, too, that it's not just conservatives who have been slow coming around to this. Under President Clinton, for example, in the 1990s, we had a great increase in incarceration and in war-on-drugs activity.
Nader: Conservatives are working with progressives and liberals in state legislatures to reduce the horrendous, long jail sentences for juveniles possessing marijuana or heroin. And we have Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, and others forming Right on Crime, which is designed to reduce the number of nonviolent convicted inmates in prisons by hundreds of thousands in order to save taxpayer money.
But it's interesting that the more they talk with liberals and progressives who have been at this a little longer, the more you even begin to hear from people like Newt Gingrich that there's a human rights element to this, too, not just an efficiency element. Once people start talking with one another, they educate and inspire one another, and move to even higher levels of convergence.
van Gelder: So another topic Ralph listed in his book is the protection of the environment. Daniel, is that something that conservatives are concerned about?
McCarthy: It certainly is. I know there's an example that Ralph relates in Unstoppable about a debate he had with conservative economist Milton Friedman where Friedman admitted, yes, you do need to have government regulation of pollution; this is not something that takes care of itself. Conservatives do acknowledge that, but at the same time they also worry about the propensity of any federal bureaucracy to be inefficient and misplace its priorities, and the possibility of regulation being captured by politically influential industries and used to fight small industries.
Nader: But Sarah, a more intriguing thing is climate change. This is where you have conservatives constantly saying it's a hoax, or it hasn't been proven, or it's not man-made. And the question I ask them is, at what point will you be persuaded? I mean, you have the vast majority of scientists who say it is heavily based on activities of human beings, and there's still a huge portion of the population that refuses to believe that. So is that ideology? I don't know. What do you think, Dan?
McCarthy: It's anti-elitism. On one hand you have business interests that have a very hard view on this. But then you also have people who think that just because a bunch of academics and scientists say something, that doesn't mean that we should believe it. We don't live in a technocracy where credentialed experts are the ones who dictate public policy.
So, it's a cultural divide, and also about education blocs and about different geographies within the country.
There's a lot of noise generated to prevent Americans, especially on the right, from taking seriously some of the things that scientists say. But it also needs to be mentioned that too many people on the left have a dismissive attitude toward evangelicals and anyone who doesn't agree with them. There is a responsibility on the part of everyone to communicate with their fellow citizens. I think that's where this debate has often fallen down.
van Gelder: Let me ask about a demographic divide. There are few people of color and few women leading on the conservative side. Do you believe this is for policy reasons, or cultural reasons, or for historic reasons?
McCarthy: Well it's a bit of both. Obviously the South is aligned with the GOP, which in turn is aligned with conservative rhetoric, which makes the GOP and by extension, mainstream conservative rhetoric, seemingly the party of the South and the party of the historic white majority of the country.
The second thing is a certain kind of time lag difference. Conservatives are still thinking of the country in terms of the way it looked back in the 1980s. Certainly all the talk about Ronald Reagan on the right reinforces the idea that that is the America that is, was, and always will be, when in fact we have a much more diverse America today, and we're going to have an even more diverse America in the future.
Nader: When Democrats started to dial for the same corporate dollars around 1979 as did the Republicans, economic issues that relate to corporatism were taken off the table. Campaign rhetoric shifted to social issues. This was illustrated some years ago when a reporter asked Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, how he kept winning elections, he said, "Oh it's very easy: God, gays, and guns."
There is a responsibility on the part of everyone to communicate with their fellow citizens.
So poor West Virginians, for example, who were not given an opportunity to vote on economic issues in the last election, gravitated to the more traditional appeals symbolized by Inhofe's triad and other non-economic appeals.
McCarthy: Yeah, the two parties and the bipartisan elite have had their own kind of convergence on a strategy for dominating the country, both in government and in big business.
Americans of all ideological stripes have been feeling a great deal of alienation, resentment, and anger. But it's very difficult to talk about the actual structure of government and of the economy and to explain how it is that people have been effectively disenfranchised and manipulated. It's much easier on both the left and the right to focus on cultural issues, where you can have scapegoats and think that those are the central issues, and to ignore these more structural problems.
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