“Conservative” is a Dirty Word

In 2006, the rap group Three 6 Mafia won an Academy Award for their song “It’s Hard out Here for a Pimp” from the film Hustle & Flow. Regardless of how one feels about the song, I can’t shake the idea that if one substituted the word “conservative” for “pimp,” the title would become even truer.

On an anecdotal level, this seems abundantly apparent. I have had friends assume that I am a bad person upon first hearing about my religious beliefs and my self-identification as a “conservative;” I have had to avoid that designation in academic settings for fear that it would create undue bias; and I have even been told by a friend that he avoids the term almost solely because of its baggage. The fact is, conservative and Republican are taken to be synonymous. If I am conservative, to the public-at-large (or at least the public in Chase-world), I must be some crossbreed between a greedy capitalist and a self-gratifying bigot; when I hear the word justice, I must picture Hammurabi’s Code gazing down like Dr. T.J. Eckleburg while condoms, piled high as the Tower of Babel, burn and small white children sing the Pledge of Allegiance. In short, I am assumed to be a bad person.

In an academic setting, the designation is both useless and dangerous. Outside of an economics department, you’d be hard-pressed to find many conservatives at big-name institutions. Even in the economics departments you would find more libertarians and libertines than conservatives as such. But why must “conservative” be a dirty word? Well, on one level it is the human need for the “other” that makes conservatives easy prey. On another level, it is the singular failure of conservatives to clarify or proselytize. We seem happy to hole up in our academic monasteries and wait for the eschaton.

But that is not the way to solve the problem. Note that I have not even touched on my political beliefs in this piece. But what if I were to say I am anti-death penalty and pro-acting on Climate Change, yet I am still a conservative in temperament, religion, and underlying philosophy? Most would, I think, be speechless. And that is a shame. Dialogue is not encouraged often enough on our campuses, in our streets, or in our halls of governance. There is too much assumption on all sides. If society wishes to remain “liberal,” in the original and valuable sense of the term, then it cannot keep this up; it cannot let “conservative” be a dirty word.