Oceania Has Always Been at War with the Fascists

Corey Robin, whom I've begun following lately, posted this on Facebook yesterday:

Every time I hear of one of these lowlifes, from Trump down, telling an immigrant or a Muslim or a protesting football player that they don't belong in this country, I think of these words from Arendt: "And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you." Because the people who say these vile things to immigrants, Muslims, and protesters are my fellow citizens, my fellow residents of the earth, I have no choice but to share the country, and the earth, with them. But if they can't embrace others in a positive and welcoming way, I wish they could at least reconcile themselves to the presence of others in the way I have reconciled myself to the presence of them.

Someone called Art McGee commented:

"Because the people who say these vile things to immigrants, Muslims, and protesters are my fellow citizens, my fellow residents of the earth, I have no choice but to share the country, and the earth, with them." Actually, you do have a choice, but the implications of that are not something you want to grapple with. We used to kill Nazis and fascists, now we want to understand and reason with them.

Robin replied:

If you're serious about that program of killing Nazis and fascists in this country, you should be making the case for it, ceaselessly, and organizing for it, in real life, and not just troll people like me with false accusations that what I want to do is "understand and reason" with Nazis and fascists. Otherwise, it just seems like a bit of grandstanding.

I'm not able to comment on Robin's posts on Facebook, so I'm going to do that here.  

McGee was repeating, perhaps cut-and-pasting, a common claim from "antifa" hangers-on, that "we used to kill Nazis and fascists."  I've seen it used often. That he was merely parroting a party line is clear from the fact that he chose to misunderstand Robin's reference to "fellow citizens."  I'm not aware of a time when "Nazis and fascists" in the US were killed by their fellow citizens.  If anything, it was the other way around: American fascists basically ran the country.  That's one reason why it was difficult to get the US into the war against Nazism: there was very widespread sympathy and even allegiance to fascism at home and abroad among Americans.  American businessmen were happy to do business with Nazis and fascists in Europe, whom they rightly saw as their allies against working people and democratic freedoms, but many ordinary citizens shared their attraction to swarthy men in uniform trampling on uppity wogs.  World War II was really a blip in that respect.  After it was over, the US went back to business as usual, rehabilitating and protecting Nazis and fascists around the world.  You can deplore this, as I do and Robin does, but to ignore it, to pretend that the situation was otherwise, is at best to broadcast your ignorance in public, and at worst to engage in a whitewashing of history.

This is why I get picky about the use of pronouns.  I'm not being pedantic.  Usually it's "they," but "we" is also popular.  Who's the "we" who killed Nazis and fascists in the US?  Who's the "we" who allegedly want to "understand and reason with them"?  This is just handwaving, intended to obfuscate not to clarify, and as Robin says, it's grandstanding.  McGee isn't thinking, and doesn't want you to think either.  I've come to expect this from the Right, though I criticize it there; I won't let the left get away with it either.  Nor should "we."  I have to share the earth with such people, but they also have to share it with me.

Doing a Joyful Jig

Jon Schwarz has a new article at The Intercept about a fascinating short documentary film about a pro-Nazi rally in New York City's Madison Square Garden in 1939.  Jon gives the historical background in the article, and links to the film so you can watch it from there.

I'm not nearly as horrified by the film as Jon says I should be.  For one thing, I am pretty sure I'd heard of this "Pro-American Rally" before, and I'd certainly heard of the pro-fascist Roman Catholic priest Father Coughlin, whose wildly popular radio program publicized the rally and helped fill the Garden.  I also know something of the popularity of Nazism in this country: of the stalwart working Americans who would rather have lost the war than work next to Negroes, and of the leading American politicians and business figures who found fascist dictators strangely alluring, both before and after World War II.  More recently I can hardly help being aware of white Americans who are not at all bothered by neo-Nazis' draping themselves in Old Glory and the Stars and Bars along with the swastika, defending Confederate memorials in the name of the White Christian Reich.  The people who do so probably wouldn't call themselves Nazis, but they're clearly willing to make common cause with them, just as their grandparents were.  Or maybe not -- I don't know how their grandparents felt.  But these people are standing now in the American Nazi tradition, which goes back to the 1930s.

I have a few quibbles with Jon's article, though.  At one point he writes:

This is a ferocious, simian exhilaration that can only be felt by someone who is emotionally a child. But there are always many chronological adults waiting for someone to give them permission to lay down the burden of an individual adult’s consciousness. To tell them: We’ve located the culprits causing all your frustration and pain. They look like us, like humans, but they’re not. They’re wearing a disguise. Dissolve with us into this howling mass of protoplasm, and you will be responsible for nothing.

Whether Jon or I like it or not, those people are human -- that's just the problem.  And he knows it, since in the very next sentences he write, he says: "This has happened, at various scales, innumerable times in our species’ history. It’s more profoundly a part of us than anything we think of as “politics.”  So it's not only human, it's "profoundly" human.  And pretending otherwise is not only demagoguery, it's racist: Othering human beings by denying their humanity is how racism works.  As Walter Kaufmann wrote, not only is the criminal like you, you, alas are like the criminal.  We've located the culprits causing our humiliation and pain: they were in Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939, in Charlottesville in August 2017, and so on.

Acknowledging my common humanity with Nazis doesn't mean that I don't oppose them, that I won't criticize them, that I don't see them as dangerous.  (Nor does defending their right of free speech mean that I support them, as many crypto-fascists on the left will claim.  It's the same claim made by fascists on the right, of course: if you defend the rights of homosexuals, you must be a homosexual; if you defend the rights of black citizens, you're a nigger-lover.  Yet both factions see themselves as fundamentally different from each other.)  It means that I know I can't defeat them by assuming they're not human.

The passage I quoted above refers to an incident at the rally:

Then one man, 26-year-old Isadore Greenbaum, rushes the stage. Kuhn’s uniformed minions immediately and beat him. At some point, as the New York police grab Greenbaum and hustle him offstage, his pants are pulled down. Kuhn [the main speaker at the rally] smirks, and the audience erupts in glee...

Perhaps the central moment of “A Night at the Garden” is a shot of a young uniformed boy on stage. He is maybe 8 years old, and part of the Bund youth; he appears smaller and slighter than the others. As the crowd humiliates Greenbaum and drags him away, the boy looks around for affirmation that he is not alone. Then he does a joyful jig, rubs his hands together, and performs his dance again.

This is repugnant, of course, but I couldn't read about it without thinking of liberal Democrats indulging in similar eruptions of glee when some right-winger gets his comeuppance, or even when some smirking hack like Stephen Colbert makes a fag joke about Donald Trump.  Or when a white racist, arrested for assault, or even just fearing arrest, bursts into tears -- if his pants had been pulled down, there'd be joyful jigs by liberals and progressives all over social media.  As there are today, over the first indictments handed down by Robert Mueller, by people who are overestimating how significant they are.  But it doesn't matter: what matters is Bam! Boom! Oh, burn!  As if politics were a spectator sport, our team against their team, which I have to admit it is.  And when they think a right-winger has been humiliated, eviscerated, shredded, why not dance a victory jig, even nothing has been achieved.

Which is why, although I'm disgusted by the mistreatment and humiliation of Isadore Greenbaum, I question his good sense in jumping up onto the stage.  As I've asked before about protestors who fantasized that they, one man or woman, would take Trump down by speaking out at one of his campaign rallies, what did they think they were going to achieve if no one had molested them?  It's another resort to politics as pure spectacle.  Would Clinton fans have felt that she had been decisively defeated if some Trump fan had jumped up onto the platform of one of her campaign rallies?  Far from it: they'd have been outraged by the white patriarchal assault on a strong woman, and on all women.  If someone depantsed him as he was dragged away, there'd be joyful jigs all over social media.

Lest someone try to say so, this is not about "moral equivalence."  The principle of free speech is not about the moral content of your speech, though people all over the political spectrum have immense difficulty grasping this elementary idea.  You can, and should, criticize the content of other people's speech -- though you should also be self-critical about your own.  Freedom of expression makes no guarantees that what is said will be good.  If anything, it guarantees that much of what is said will be bad.  It just means that the State is not allowed to to regulate it.  (We badly need some legal limits on the power of private entities to regulate speech.)

One commenter complained in that direction: "With your rhetoric on shutting down nazi events surprised you don't condemn Isadore Greenbaum, Jewish man who rushed the stage".  Well, that's the question.  If it's okay for him to do it, or for a woman to shout "Black Lives Matter" at a Trump campaign rally, then it's okay for a Trump supporter to yell "Hitlery" at a Clinton rally.  The issue is consistency: what one side is allowed to do, the other side must also be allowed to do.  If liberals condemn the Right for fostering a climate of hate, they are not allowed to foster a climate of hate themselves.  Boasting about your own hypocrisy is even worse: it's exactly what Trump supporters do, so you're congratulating yourself for sinking to their level.  I don't "condemn" Greenbaum; I just don't think he was very smart.  I don't believe he was thinking, and we can't afford not to think -- not in 1939, not now.

Endless War

According to the Associated Press, about a hundred self-identified anarchists entered an anti-racist rally in Berkeley, California, where they proceeded to beat up several people.

The group of more than 100 hooded protesters, with shields emblazoned with the words "no hate" and waving a flag identifying themselves as anarchists, busted through police lines, avoiding security checks by officers to take away possible weapons. Then the anarchists blended with a crowd of 2,000 largely peaceful protesters who turned up to demonstrate in a "Rally Against Hate" opposed to a much smaller gathering of right-wing protesters.

"No hate" -- don't you just love that?  The hypocritical piety is practically Christian.  Even better, these goons went after isolated individuals they could gang up on with minimal risk to themselves.  Better still: the first guy they attacked is Japanese-American, which makes their assault a racist attack -- a hate crime.  (Or a "no hate" crime, which makes a big difference, I suppose.)  Luckily, almost miraculously, the police didn't seize the opportunity to attack the rest of the crowd, which is the normal police response to such incidents.

It has been educational to watch liberal and left reactions to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.  As I've noticed before, many of them are blurring the already vexed line between speech and violence, and eager to give the Trump administration the authority to decide what speech is acceptable and what isn't.  (I'm being slightly disingenuous there, since of course they fantasize that they themselves will make that decision; which shows that they're delusional, given existing historical and political realities in the US.)  They also exploit an ambiguity in the word "fighting," which can refer metaphorically to any kind of organized effort (including sports) against something, or to actual literal violence.

So, for example, I've often heard it said that Heather Heyer was fighting hate (or fascism or racism or Nazism, or fighting for what she believed in, whatever) in Charlottesville when she was killed by a white supremacist who drove his car into the crowd of people she was in.  Fighting (literal) doesn't seem to have been Heyer's style.  In any case, she was killed as she crossed a street at an intersection during (I think -- the chronology is muddled) the counter-protest.  I don't say this to minimize her death or its significance, only for clarity's sake.  That she wasn't clubbing down neo-Nazis makes her murderer even more cowardly and despicable.  While simply pepper-spraying and chasing a non-resisting individual isn't in the same class of evil (except perhaps metaphorically) as driving a car into an unarmed and nonviolent crowd, it's also cowardly and despicable.  Like this.

So when Ted Rall posted on Facebook last weekend that, "Considering the history of fascism, the debate over whether the antifa movement should resort to violence seems, well, quaint", I wasn't terribly surprised, though I was a bit disappointed.  I generally like his cartoons, and thought his book on Afghanistan, After We Kill You We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests (Hill & Wang, 2014), was excellent and important.  But he got things wrong this time, starting with the cartoon itself, which depicts a French couple at a cafe as Nazi troops march by in the street.  The Frenchman says, "Violence? But that would make us as bad as them!"

This is disingenous.  First of all, it's not as if the centrist liberals in Trump's America who call themselves The Resistance have renounced the use of violence in advance: the name they've chosen for themselves deliberately invokes those who fought against the Nazis in occupied France, though so far they haven't done anything much more strenuous than wear pink pussy hats and make memes mocking Trump.  Second, the situation in occupied France was not about whether or not to counter "free speech" with violence -- Germany didn't occupy France through free speech.  (Plus, the actual French Resistance was dominated by Communists, and if there's anyone liberal Democrats hate more than Trump, it's a leftist.  Unless it's a Jewish leftist.)

Second, debates in the US over the use of violence by minorities and dissidents have always been inadequate at best, and I haven't seen anything to suggest that things have changed.  The increasing boldness of white racists since Trump's ascendancy has been met with a lot of chest-thumping rhetoric about fighting Nazis in the streets.  I'm not objecting to the use of violence myself; I am, however, concerned with other questions, such as: Who's going to fight the Nazis?  When and where?  Who will lead?  Who will choose the leaders?  Who will determine strategy and tactics?  The neo-Nazis are organized and armed; how will "antifa" (a term I find about as annoying as The Resistance) violence be armed and organized?  These are not idle questions.

This weekend a video began to circulate online, which showed a white supremacist in Charlottesville trying to shoot a black counterprotester who'd made himself an impromptu flamethrower by igniting the spray from an aerosol can and aiming it at the racists.  By amazing luck, the kind of luck that convinces me there is no god, the would-be shooter had forgotten to disable the safety on his weapon, which slowed him down, and when he did fire, nobody was hurt.  The guy with the gun is being sought by the authorities, as they say.

What I find interesting about this scene is that ever since Trump made it clear he was appealing to a white-racist base -- hell, ever since Obama attracted racist hatred as a candidate and as President -- there has been a lot of agitation about how extremely dangerous white supremacists are, how they're the new Nazis and if we aren't ceaselessly vigilant there will be a replay of 1930s Germany here in the Homeland.  I don't dismiss these concerns, but I find it extremely interesting and significant that many of these same alarmists nevertheless seem to believe that white supremacists are not really dangerous at all, that because Antifa's heart is pure they need only to chant some slogans and the Fascists will collapse and surrender; the Fascists' bullets will either bounce off Antifa's Breastplate of Virtue, be repelled by Antifa's wristlets of power, or simply dissolve into the air.  There were many warnings about armed neo-Nazis, with heavy-duty weapons, gathering in Charlottesville, intent on mayhem.  It appears that even so, the Antifa mostly didn't consider them a real, serious threat, and those who did brought some homemade weaponry that would have been useless if the threat turned real.  Since we're not pacifists here, I can say that I wouldn't have been felt much sympathy if the guy with the aerosol can had gotten shot, because he was putting his unarmed anti-fascist comrades in danger, presumably without their consent or planning.

Or he was giving the police, who everyone assumed were on the racists' side, an excuse to stomp some hippies. (In a real Resistance situation, he'd likely have been court-martialed and shot by his own organization for such stupid criminal recklessness.)  Emptywheel pointed out last weekend that Trump's pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio was intended to send a message to his real base, the police, who supported him during his election campaign and support him still.

So while feeding his explicitly racist base with hateful rhetoric is important, it’s even more important to ensure that the cops remain with him, even as he fosters violence.

There is no better way to do that than to convey to police that they can target brown people, that they can ignore all federal checks on their power, with impunity (this is probably one key reason why Trump has given up his efforts to oust Sessions, because on policing they remain in perfect accord).
There is no better way to keep the support of cops who support Trump because he encourages their abuses then by pardoning Arpaio for the most spectacular case of such abuses.

The history Rall appealed to isn't reassuring.  There were street battles between Communists and Nazis in Germany during the 1930s; they didn't impede Hitler's rise to power.  Historians can probably explain why; I confess I haven't read enough about the period to have an opinion.  But whatever the reasons, street fighting didn't work for the Left; only for the Nazis.  In general, that has been true in the US as well.  In principle I fully endorse and support the right of African-Americans to defend themselves against police and government violence; but those who did, in the 1960s, seriously underestimated the power and ruthlessness of their adversaries.  And that leaves aside intra-movement violence, among the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers, for example.  And yet many antifa sympathizers, in between attacking the police (sometimes justly), believe that when push comes to shove the police will protect them from that Bad Ol' Nazis.  They should, of course; but the historical precedents indicate that they won't.

As you can see, I don't mean to suggest that violence never works.  After its defeat in 1865, for example, the Confederacy used violence very successfully to establish white supremacy all over the South, and eventually managed to sell most white Americans on their Lost Cause myth of elegant Southern heritage violated by the brutish Union.  As with the successful use of violence by the Nazis, I don't know the history well enough to explain why with any certainty, but I feel sure it's at least partly because most white Americans in the North (including educated elites) were racist, and weren't at all uncomfortable with white supremacy as ideology or practice.  There was a brief blip of anti-racist action in the 1950s and 1960s, and though some gains were made, white-supremacist resistance, violent and nonviolent, never ceased, and many of those gains are in danger of being lost again.

But this reminds me of an anecdote in a book I read a week ago, Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won't Save Black America by Stacey Patton (Beacon Press, 2017).  It's about the popularity of violence against children by African-American parents, and it's flawed but overall very valuable.  Many black parents, like many white parents, believe that beating children is the only way to keep them out of trouble and turn them into responsible adults.  There's an anecdote toward the end, told by an African-American woman, a single mother and a parent trainer:

Alvarez says she gets the "usual bullshit" from other parents who criticize her for not hitting her son.  "Spare the rod ... yada, yada, yada ... ain't nobody here for that.  My son, my rules.  As a parent trainer, when I hear parents swear by whupping kids, I ask, "How many here were whupped by parents?" Most will raise their hands.  Then I ask, "How many were whupped twice?" Most raise their hands.  Then I say, "So then maybe it's not that effective.  If it were, we'd only have to get beaten once to get the message" [214].

I feel the same way about violence aimed at stopping white racism: the most horrific war in history up to that point didn't stop it -- it barely slowed it down, and only briefly at that.  Maybe other avenues need to be considered.

I've also been thinking of something Noam Chomsky wrote about political violence about fifty years ago, and published in American Power and the New Mandarins (Pantheon, 1969, pp. 398-399):

It is quite easy to design tactics that will help to consolidate the latent forces of a potential American fascism.  To mention just one obvious example, verbal and physical abuse of the police, however great the provocation, can have only this effect.  Such tactics may seem "radical" and, in a narrow sense, justified by the magnitude of the infamy and evil that they seek to overcome.  They are not.

In fact, it is senseless to speak -- as many now do -- of tactics and actions are being "radical," "liberal," "conservative," or "reactionary."  In itself, an action cannot be placed on a political dimension at all.  It may be successful or unsuccessful in achieving an end that can be described in political terms.  But it is useful to remember that the same tactics that one man may propose with high conscience and deep commitment to radical social change may also be pressed by a well-placed police spy, bent on destroying such a movement and increasing popular support for the forces of repression. Consider the Reichstag fire, to return to a day that is less remote than one would wish. Or consider the act of a seventeen-year-old Jewish refugee from Poland just thirty years ago -- of Herschel Grynszpan, who assassinated a German official in Paris in November 1938.  It is difficult to condemn this desperate act, which set off violent pogroms throughout Germany and helped entrench more deeply the Nazi regime of terror; but the victims of Nazi terror would offer no thanks to Herschel Grynszpan.  We must not abandon the victims of American power, or play games with their fate.  We must not consent to have the same repression imposed on still further helpless victims or the same blind fury unleashed against them.

It seems to me that those who want to use violent tactics against the racist Right need to make very clear how they intend to use those tactics, why those tactics and not others.  So far I've seen a lot of grandstanding and posturing by people I wouldn't follow ... well, anywhere.  It's not as if there isn't a long history of political violence from which to learn, but I haven't seen any indication that the advocates of violence today have paid any attention to it.  Advocating violence, even or especially against fascists, without showing that you know what you're talking about doesn't establish your gravitas; it makes me suspect that you've played too many video games, or watched too many action movies, and mistaken them for reality.  I don't have the answers myself, and I'm not ruling out violence altogether; but I need better rationales for violent action than I've been hearing so far.  The burden of argument lies not on those oppose the use of violence, or starting a war, but on those who want to initiate it.  It's certainly interesting to hear nominal leftists using the rhetoric of the Bush administration when it insisted that we must invade the existential threat of Iraq now.  They are trifling with human lives, and if (or more likely when) it blows up their face, they won't accept responsibility, let alone accountability.

Give Me Your Tired, Your Wretched Analogies

My dear helpful RWA1 struck again, linking on Facebook to this article from the Washington Times, and commenting, "It is time to retire analogies to Nazis and fascists once and for all." It appears that a Democratic Congressman compared "Republican attacks on President Obama's health care law to Nazi propaganda," but backed down when criticized by (of all people!) Abraham H. Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League and the dead-armadillo group No Labels.

"You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually, people believe it," said Mr. Cohen on the House floor Tuesday. "The Germans said enough about the Jews and the people believed it, and you had the Holocaust."

I can think of two good reasons for eschewing analogies to Nazis and fascists. One is that it would limit, slightly, the output of American political discourse, since comparing your opponents to Nazis is a treasured bipartisan tactic. The US Government regularly uses comparisons between Hitler and foreign political figures it wants to demonize; an embargo on such comparisons would be a terrible hardship for our own propaganda mills, possibly forcing us to rely on the cheaper product of overseas propaganda mills. (If it meant never having to hear the word "Islamofascist" again, I might be won over. And would Communist and Socialist analogies also be retired?)

The obligatory reaction such comparisons evoke ("Oh, how could you say such an awful thing? You're so hateful!") is the second good reason: it enables everyone concerned to ignore the issue involved by trying to seize the moral high ground and extract an apology, by which time everyone will have forgotten what they were talking about to begin with. Rep. Cohen ("who", the WashTimes delicately informed its readers, "is Jewish") should have known that; he later "said it was 'disappointing' his comments have been used to distract from the health care reform debate." Disappointing, maybe; surprising, not at all. So why did he give his opponents such an easy out?

Lying, even the systematic repetition of outrageous lies for propaganda purposes, is not a specifically Nazi practice. Maybe his propaganda minister Goebbels codified the technique, as the WashTimes indicates, but according to Wikipedia Hitler coined the phrase "Big Lie" in Mein Kampf in 1925 -- and it was something he accused the Jews of doing, amusingly enough. When Goebbels wrote about the Big Lie in 1941, it was to accuse the English of doing it. It appears, in short, that like "Political Correctness", the Big Lie is what other people do rather than a method anyone avows as their own practice. (Rep. Cohen's history was faulty in other respects: anti-Semitic propaganda found such a ready audience among German gentiles because Germany, along with the rest of Christian Europe, had a long tradition of anti-Semitic propaganda and violence. It's not as if the Nazis invented anti-Semitism, or conjured it into German heads that had never harbored it before.)

I think that calls to stop using Nazi/fascist analogies are a distraction in themselves. It's not as if Nazism or fascism died in 1945 with the end of World War II, after all. Fascism survived in Franco's Spain, for example, until the Generalissimo's death in 1975. Various US-backed dictators in Latin America, such as Pinochet, Alfredo Stroessner and numerous Argentinian generals, admired Hitler. So did many American political and business figures, but this admiration went down the memory hole when Hitler became an official enemy. Since fascism, especially, is a specific and definable system of government, I can't see why it should be improper to point out that a given politician or country or movement or party is exhibiting fascist tendencies. When a country engages in torture, invades other countries aggressively, or inflicts collective punishment of civilian populations, these are not specifically Nazi practices, but they are the sort of conduct that supposedly revealed the endemic evil of Nazism. When Noam Chomsky says that if the Nuremberg Principles were enforced, every American president since World War II would have to be hanged, he's not saying that American presidents are Nazis, but they have committed the same crimes that were held up as proof of Nazi depravity. That's a more important matter, it seems to me, but it's exactly what is not acceptable to discuss in civil political discourse.

Of course, neither side will quit invoking Nazis until the other side does, so there's no real danger it will stop anytime soon. What is important, to return to Rep. Cohen, is not whether the lies of Republican opponents of Obama's health care reform bill are Nazi lies; what is important is that they are lies. Dragging in the urban legend (as it evidently is) of the Nazi Big-Lie is a distraction. From "death panels" to "job killing," the Republicans have lied. (So have the Democrats, of course, about other things, and they should be confronted on the substance, not compared to Nazis.) That may be partly because, although there are many valid criticisms that could have been made of Obama's bill, they were not those the Republicans were interested in making. The best way to deter the use of invalid Nazi / fascist analogies is to concentrate on substance. Anyone who wants to attack the Republicans (or the Democrats) should stay focused, on-message, without bringing in irrelevancies that will be used to evade the real issues.

P.S. If there ever should be a bilateral disarmament treaty on Nazi analogies, not to worry: there will still be fag discourse, as beloved among liberals as it is among conservatives.