We Need More Conservatives

How to slam on the brakes

Over the course of my career as an environmental journalist, I’ve come into contact with communities all over the world. I’ve interviewed the head of an indigenous guerilla army, walking through the jungle of Papua New Guinea. I’ve sent messages through people to where the internet cannot penetrate, asking for a representative from the last nomadic tribe on the island of Borneo to hike two days to the tallest regional mountain just to call me to corroborate information for an article. I’ve interviewed activists and campaigners and politicians, from the UK to the Pacific, and sat in on strategy meetings as an external advisor to movements across Europe and Asia. Despite the shared radical vision of a post-colonial, post-capitalist, post-imperial world, many of the strategies are grounded in typical conservative logic. These movements are built on a shared reverence of tradition and history. There is much of the world they want to stay the same, the parts which give them autonomy and sovereignty and community.

A tactic they all employ is calling bullshit.

“You need this mine for development!” - “Bullshit.”
“You’ll get rich working for us.” - “Bullshit.”
“We practice sustainable logging.” - “Bullshit.”
“We have the right to be here whether you like it or not.” - “Bullshit.”

Calling bullshit — loudly — on ideas which make a mirage of reality is incredibly healing. It clears the air. It defogs the windscreen so we can all see where we’re going. It grabs power back from the brokers who squirrel it away by changing the definitions of words so that nobody quite knows what’s going on when they talk, making it difficult to challenge them. Calling bullshit can ground people, both in the sense of bringing back down to earth the maniacs whose egos inspire destructive delusions and helping the victims of those delusions their feet on solid ground.

Last week, a couple of federal judges called bullshit on the Trump regime by applying federal laws to executive orders. They’ve neutered some of the attack on USAID and blocked Trump’s nationwide ban on gender-affirming care. Around the same time, New York Governor called bullshit on Louisiana’s attempt to extradite a New York doctor prescribing and shipping abortion pills to Louisiana women. That very doctor called bullshit on a lawsuit brought against her by Texas, fining her for prescribing pills to Texan women, by not showing up to the hearing. And a few weeks ago, a school in Chicago called bullshit on ICE officers who tried to access the building to interrogate a 12 year old by reminding them Chicago law says they cannot set foot on school property.

Here’s what I love about calling bullshit: It’s sensible — and that makes it accessible. It’s a form of protest that anyone can engage in. It’s about applying the rules and holding up standards and reminding people to be realistic. Realism is so often construed as a lack of imagination, but being realistic in today’s climate is all about knowing what the fuck is going on and understanding how to be effective. It’s a call for something meatier than optimism or pessimism — realism is about having the guts to face down the barrel of the truth and call it what it is.

“No, Mr President, the Constitution says you can’t do that — so you can’t.”
”No, Louisana, New York laws say you can’t do that — so you can’t.”
”No, multinational, climate science says you can’t do that — so you can’t.”

Calling bullshit strips conversations back to the basics, and reminds people there is a common ground to all dialogue: evidence, precedent, facts and results. It reminds people of the world that is, even if the powers-that-be would like you to think their rule is inevitable. Calling bullshit is a game of reality vs story, of what to think vs what they would like you to think. It reminds people that there are structures and certainties to which they can hold on in the storm.

But those structures and certainties are only as permanent as our belief in them. They fade because our reality was also once just a story, made real over decades and centuries of process and legalese and negotiation. These realities are transient, and the political battle of the past century has been between those who want to evolve them and those who wish to conserve them. But that divide is losing its borders, and now that we live in a world where words are only loosely defined, one could argue that calling bullshit is a conservative act. It is a clarion call to conserve meaning so we may all have a fighting chance. If we don’t know what the fuck is going on, how can we act?

The world as we know it is coming apart. We don’t have the time to lose to authoritarian regimes. In the age of terricide, every single week matters. The world we’re hurtling towards is an even more difficult world within which to enact change. So we need our conservatives. We need them, now, to stick in their heels and drag out processes and anally take the time to cross every t and dot every i. We need them to defer to legal precedence and demand reams of evidence and point to the fluctuations in our markets as proof of poor judgement. We need our conservatives do everything by the book as judiciously as possible. We need our conservatives, because they’re the brake.

The powers-that-be want to speed the world up until none of us can keep pace and are swept away in the inevitability of it all. We need to slow them down. We need an analogue resistance. We need conservative federal workers who deliver information in giant boxes and archivist who just can’t quite seem to find that last file. We need federal workers who lose their stamps and spill water on computers and bring their beg bud infestation to work. We need senior border patrol officers who misplace the updated rules and school receptionists who forget to update students’ records with their home address. We need everyone to wake up a bureaucrat.

Holding on to our history doesn’t work forever, but it buys us time to prepare direct resistance. Nothing we are facing now is particularly new: existential threats, existential technology, fascism, authoritarianism, oligarchy, global problematique. There is evidence all throughout history of human beings overcoming enormous odds and tearing down oppressive regimes and even enacting global policies to protect the planet. Yes, what is different about the complexity of today is that tackling terricide would, indeed, as Naomi Klein put it, change everything. There are lots of bastards out there who don’t want to lose their bloated wealth and power for anything. But they are a minority. There are plenty of Progressives who want radical change and plenty of conservatives who don’t want to see the planet destroyed and democracy demolished. In the face of a surreal future, we are realistic allies.

Not everyone can be a guerilla fighter deep in the jungle. Not everyone can be an activist who puts their life on the line. Not everyone can be a campaigner or an organiser or a progressive politician. Some people don’t dream of revolution. Some people are, understandably, frightened by change. Others simply like things the way they are in their corner of the world. There are those who wish to revolt and those who wish to maintain and for the first time in such a long time we have the chance to share common ground. We have the opportunity to call bullshit on the very thing which threatens both of us. We have a moment in history to collaborate in an attempt to slow down and dismantle the machinations of the powerful. Shoulder to shoulder, sisters in arms and brothers in paperwork, small c conservatives and big p Progressives in resistance, together.

There is no way through our global and local challenges until we do this. We need a far greater diversity of ideas and tactics, and much more capacity for emotional generosity. We need to understand why people think the way they do and not punish them for thinking differently. We need to build bridges to each other, crossing class, racial, gender and political divides. We need to braid our hair together into rope bridges across which we can escape into a better future. We need more hands to hold when darkness closes in. We need to find the common ground of our bodies and chorus a call of bullshit where it matters. We need each other, even if we disagree.

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