One Liberalism Through the Ages

This was originally published at Open Left, I am republishing it here as a starting point to further updates on these topics and themes. - D.

Last weekend Paul wrote: Moreover, by the 1870s, British liberals had become quite aware that their previous understanding of economic freedom was a hollow joke, producing vast legions of downtrodden urban poor, and so they began seeking another way to think about freedom, closer to that which slaves have always understood-freedom as a gaining of power for those at the bottom, not to be dominated from above, but to be lifted up by collective support for one another: in short, the New Liberalism of Britain, which 60 years later arrived in America in the form of the New Deal.  I've been meaning to write about this for some time, and now I promised Paul I would, so here's a first installment on the topic.  Understanding the transition liberals made from unfettered free market economics in the mid 1800s to the interventionist government model post New Deal is key to making sense of the ideological morass which humanity transitioned through in the past 400 years.  I know opinions differ on this subject, and many on the left see a meaningful distinction between progressivism and liberalism, or between classic liberalism and modern social liberalism.  I do not.  They're all liberals, even though there can be notable policy distinctions between various groups of liberals, there is still only one liberalism, and it is the same liberalism as began (or at least took form) with John Locke in the late 1600s. This is a daunting topic.  When I first became politically aware in my late teens, and pondered what "liberal" and "conservative" meant beyond the trite caricature presented by the contemporary political parties or newspaper discourse, I discovered that no one of any academic merit had particularly good (or widely accepted) answers to this.  For example, I have written of how Conservatives cannot define "conservativism."  If better read and smarter people cannot reach concurrence, forgive my temerity in making a run at it too.  Ideology is at the core of what drives politics and any improvement of our understanding of the topic is worthwhile.  The confusion about the topic allows a lot of people who aren't liberals (like libertarians who call themselves "classic liberals") to be confused for them, and others who should be allies to create unnecessary distinctions and look at one another with distrust over what are differences not in core ethics, but technical mechanics.  It is strange that we all generally able to spot liberal and conservative ideas intuitively yet seemingly no one can can agree on what these things are.  We are left with too many definitions that rest on the specific policy preferences of the ideological groups at different points in history.  Just as modern conservatives who love free trade are not really different from past conservatives who loved tariffs and mercantilism, today's liberals who want limitations on trade are not a different species from their Corn Law repealing bretherin of 1846.

In this iteration of the project, I'm going to rely mostly on Boston College political scientist Alan Wolfe, a liberal who studies questions of ideology.  It is more of a reliance on appeal to authority than I want to rest this on, but congealing the sea of philosophers and developments into a coherent story is more than I can pull off this week. Ok, What is Liberalism then? To begin to show that "classic" liberals are just liberals operating in a different socio-political environment, we need a definition that could plausible cover both groups.  Wolfe provides a really good one:  "As many people as possible should have as much say as is feasible over the direction their lives will take." In a radio interview Wolfe once gave, he highlighted the concept of autonomy as vital to liberalism.  It is distinct (ironically considering the etymology of the word) from "liberty" (or "freedom").  I have never liked the word liberty.  Perhaps it is because those who extol it most often seem to be referring to the liberty of a predator to consume prey.  What of the liberty of the prey not to be eaten?  Liberty and freedom are negative concepts.  They imply merely the absence of formal restraint (usually by the state).  However autonomy is a richer and more complete concept.  It is akin to the distinction Martin Luther King Jr. once drew between peace that was merely the absence of violence, and peace which contained the presence of justice.  Thus it is not merely enough to remove the chains that bind humanity, if they are left destitute in the street to wander aimlessly and hungry.  Autonomy requires the capacity to pursue goals.  It is still individualistic, but allows for the real support all of us need from without to make any of those goals a reality. A shorter definition from Wolfe's might be "As many people as possible should have as much autonomy as feasible."  Indeed, Wolfe has probably said as much, and likely uses the longer version as the word autonomy requires explanation.  Much more can be said about this, and I think there are even other valid (probably longer) definitions of liberalism possible, but this one satisfies my need.  For one thing it should be evident that conservatives cannot really claim to exist under this definition.  The long history of conservativism, as Phil Agre wrote in a famous piece, is one of hierarchy and inequality.  But what about libertarians?  How are they distinct from this? What Liberalism is not Well for one thing note that Wolfe's definition lacks any mention of an economic system.  Wolfe comments on the topic: The idea that liberalism comes in two forms assumes that the most fundamental question facing mankind is how much government intervenes into the economy. To me, perhaps because so little of the means of production lies under my control, this is a remarkably uninteresting subject. I think of the whole question of governmental intervention as a matter of technique. Sometimes the market does pretty well and it pays to rely on it. Sometimes it runs into very rough patches and then you need government to regulate it and correct its course. No matters of deep philosophy or religious meaning are at stake when we discuss such matters. A society simply does what it has to do.  Agree with that or not (I do), it is not surprising his definition does not require reference to economics.  In my own mental model of society, economics is the engine of the car.  Engines are obviously very important to the overall functioning of the car.  However, they are not the purpose of the car.  They are also able to vary significantly in theory.  So long as it can provide power to turn an axle, who cares how the engine does it?  In practice, car engines almost all work on the same principles, and the laws of physics limit the practicality of many alternative models.  So it seems with economics.  Capitalism may be the greatest economic system possible, or it may be the best we have tried so far, and others still untried will prove much better.  Liberalism can be agnostic on this topic.  If it employs capitalism, it will delve into the best way to tune and tweak that engine for maximum output, but it will remember that the engine is not the car, and what is good for the engine is not necessarily best for the car. Wolfe's definition also does not make reference to the State.  It does not specify a big state, or a small one.  Virtually every definition of libertarianism or conservativism seems to rest upon some goal of smaller government and a minimized state.  In short, for Wolfe, the state should be as big or small as it needs to be to provide the most autonomy for the most people.  The economic system should be the one that does the same. Let me provide a non-Wolfe source to bolster this claim, Francis Fukuyama, discussing the views of Adam Smith: Smith is, however, no straightforward partisan of liberalism. He says that the prototypical bourgeois virtue of prudence earns only our "cold esteem"; his analysis, in the Wealth of Nations, of the deadening effects of the division of labor on the worker in the pin factory served as the basis for Marx's concept of alienation. For Smith, liberal commercial society is clearly second best, to be preferred only because the best regime is incapable of realization. A society in which virtue is placed front and center - a theocracy, for example - produces unexpected and counterproductive consequences, including hypocrisy and moral lassitude in the orthodox, and fanaticism and opposition in the heterodox. Smith preferred a "free market of religions," in which the need to attract followers promotes active belief, and the diversity of sects keeps fanaticism in check - something not unlike the actual condition of sectarian Protestantism in the United States. If religious belief, nonetheless, tends to erode over time, there are other sources of moral behavior.  (Emphasis mine) For some the claim that Smith is a liberal is contentious, and certainly libertarians often see him as one of them, but here we see even Smith is actually not primarily concerned with economics, but morality.  He arrives at his economic conclusions by eliminating other options that do not bring the type of moral society he envisions. Adding More History Still, we are not yet ready to explain why contemporary libertarians fail to meet Wolfe's definition.  We return to Wolfe for a brief synopsis of the development from classic to social liberalism: In the 18th century, legacies of feudalism and the rules of mercantilism created a situation in which free markets could both allow people greater control over their lives and at the same time spread that capacity to others. Smith, although claimed today by libertarians, was a liberal, indeed one of the great liberal thinkers, not because he made such a lasting contribution to economic theory but because he developed a moral philosophy respecting both freedom and equality. Under conditions of contemporary capitalism, by contrast, individual autonomy is threatened by poverty, economic instability, and concentrated corporate power. Using government to control economic fluctuations, as Keynes argued, gave society the capacity both to improve the ability of any one person to become more autonomous as well as to extend the same notion more broadly. Keynes, a member of the British Liberal Party, was never a socialist. He, like Smith, was a liberal because he too respected both freedom and equality.  You have to consider Smith's vision of capitalism in contrast to what it displaced, the mercantilism and even legacy of feudalism which dominated life.  Capitalism was simply better than those in providing autonomy.  A feudal peasant is simply born into a caste from which he can almost certainly never escape.  The mercantilist worker may draw some sentimental happiness from the success of her nation in the zero-sum competition with other nations, but her lot does not really change whether or not her nation secures that choice colony in the New World. Flash forward to a world in which feudalism has shrivelled to nearly naught, and mercantilism has begun to give way to capitalism.  Where are liberals?  They've won a major battle, but now must re-evaluate what they have really accomplished and where to go from there. This is the slow march Paul describes at the start.  After all capitalism was new.  It hadn't been done before.  Smith and other liberals who followed him had high hopes, but the results did not pan out as well as desired.  Better than feudalism?  Sure.  Good enough?  No. Now we're ready to arrive at our answer for the libertarians:  Yes, in many ways their policy preferences today map very well to the policies pushed by liberals like John Bright and Richard Cobden in the UK, Jefferson and Madison in the US or William Lyon MacKenzie in Canada.  The classic liberals.  However the difference is that those men did not have the extra 150 years of experience with the reality of capitalism.  Libertarians have stuck to a set of beliefs that liberals abandoned because they weren't serving the true goals of liberalism.  Rather than assume libertarian thinkers are unaware of this history, we must conclude that they either do not share the same goals as liberals, or lack the rational capacity to reach the correct conclusions about the empirical policy record. While in regrettable individuals it is sometimes the latter reason, most often the difference is the rejection of autonomy by libertarians, and generally all forms of positive liberties.  The mere absence of enforced state monopolies and divinely empowered noble figures dominating life had not proved sufficient to create a society of general autonomy, and so liberals have looked to various ways through the State to provide it.  Libertarians have resisted these.  Liberty outweighs autonomy for them. While that's defensible on many philosophical grounds, it is not what liberalism is about, even if it amounted once to what liberals of a certain era were about in specific policy terms. Libertarians today can worship markets and reject positive liberty if they want, but they're 150 years late to the classic liberal party.  It's a free country, they can call themselves what they want, but they're just revealing that they never understood what liberalism was really about to begin with when they employ the term.  Liberalism didn't betray its roots by embracing the welfare state, that was the natural response to the results of an early iteration of liberal policy real world experiment. There is one liberalism that has pursued the same broad goals through different means. In my next attempt at climbing this mountain, I will try to elaborate more on the specific progression of thought and events along that road for liberals in several nations.

Does DLC Style Centrism Push Conservatives Further Right?

My friend Paul Rosenberg has a really interesting theory:

While neoliberals saw their moves to the centre as inherently conflict-reducing, conservatives saw those moves as deeply threatening. After all, if Clinton or Obama were willing to work with them, there had to be something rotten going on. However, there was no obvious reality-based way to articulate this, since Clinton and Obama actually were quite close to conservative thinking in major ways.

Instead, Clinton and Obama's rightward moves gave rise to two types of conservative reaction. First was an intense explosion of conspiracism, which allowed for the interpolation of vast imaginary political space into a highly compressed political spectrum where no such actual space exists. The militia movement under Clinton and the Tea Party under Obama both traffic heavily in this sort of imaginary, often deeply paranoid politics. (Birth certificates, anyone?)

(I would add the persistent gun control conspiracy fantasies to that last item)  This is a compelling explanation for the phenomenon.  I would like to see more evidence for it, but I'm glad to see at least an idea that attempts to explain the bizarre spectacle of the vast bulk of US conservativism running around claiming their own ideas from just a few years ago are tantamount to Soviet gulags and Nazi health experiments.   Rosenberg doesn't mention it, but I think this is pretty compatible with what I remember of Robert Altemeyer's research on Authoritarians - I don't think authoritarians react well to logically similar ideas coming from sources not blessed by their existing authorities.  Reacting by moving yet further away from whatever hated group outsider is now endorsing ideas the in-group recently supported is pretty plausible.

It's also productive in that it hints that if Democrats move left, it's possible Republicans will return to something closer to world norms for political conservative movements among industrialized nations.  At least, they might not move yet further right than they already are.  No reason to assume that this would work both ways, but at least if it's true, Democrats should certainly stop pushing the right, right.

Will Sun News Investigate the Staged Citizenship Ceremony? Will the CRTC?

Last October, Canada's Sun News Network, filmed and broadcast a story on what was portrayed as a regular swearing in ceremony for new Canadian citizens taking their oath of Citizenship.  Turns out, the participants were all already citizens and the ceremony was a "reaffirmation" ceremony.  Worse, most of the participants were actually civil servants working for the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration Canada.  This came out because the Canadian Press obtained emails through access to information showing the event was essentially staged for the benefit of the cameras.  At the time, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney blamed the civil servants for staging the event, and apologized to the network that had covered it, Sun News Network.  Kudos to the Canadian Press for staying with the story and requesting more documents because, well:

Kenney had criticized civil servants when it was revealed six bureaucrats reaffirmed their oath of citizenship alongside three or four bona fide new Canadians during a televised ceremony last October.

But he was striking a decidedly different tone Tuesday after The Canadian Press published the bureaucrats’ version of events — that the network was actively involved in the decision to use civil servants as stand-ins.

During the Sun News broadcast, the hosts referred to the group as new Canadians that had “finally” received their citizenship.

Now of course the minister lied both when he blamed lowly civil servants for the staged event and in claiming Sun News was unaware that the event was staged.  Also unsurprising that once again, civil servants were blamed for a political screw up.  This government has a track record of blaming staffers, underlings and bureaucrats whenever anything goes wrong.

But what about Sun News?  Back in February we were supposed to believe the Sun News didn't know the swearing event was staged.  Now we have documents credibly alleging that Sun News employees knew the event was fake and even participated in the last minute decision to throw the bureaucrats into the event when too few of the government's hand-picked participants showed up. 

It seems to me we have a prima facie case of Sun News knowingly airing "false or misleading news" in contravention of the Canadian Broadcast Act.  Will the CRTC investigate?

Even aside from that, from a simple journalistic credibility perspective, Sun blithely accepted Kenney's February apology to them for his department "misleading" them.  Will they investigate internally to find out who at Sun News knew all along?  They're not even carrying the story today.

It's pretty hard to avoid the conclusion that Sun News is just "Fox News North," operating under a still functional sort of "fairness doctrine" set of regulations up here which prevent it from going the full Murdoch, but still working in as much pro-Conservative bias as they can.  I know the substance of this event is pretty small bore in the grand scheme of things.  A citizenship swearing event staged for an ideologically friendly news network to run a soft story is hardly the most imporant issue, but at heart the issue is about truth in news and the government's ability to lie to the public without consequence.  If this sort of thing is allowed, much greater and more consequential propaganda could easily follow.  It mostly appears this one was put together by bungling amateurs in Kenney's political operation likely thinking that no one would look into such a minor event.  But letting this slide will teach other politicians what they can get away with.

It's also a good moment for uncovering what Sun News is really about.  A chance for the upstart network to show its quality.  Conservatives have been complaining for years about CBC's pre-supposed bias and poor journalism.  Yet, given the chance to show up the "state broadcaster", Sun News is hardly shining. 

And even if you want to still believe the Sun News didn't know the event was staged, that's hardly the greatest endorsement of their journalistic acumen:  A bunch of cubicle dwelling career bureaucrats managed to pull one over on the network that prides itself on "hard news."  A few quick interviews with the event participants would have quickly uncovered the lack of bona fide new citizens.  Even a better soft news outfit would have done these interviews just for the sake of having some human interest footage.  So, Sun News:  Complicit in a journalistic fraud, or merely gullible and incompetent, which are you?

Canada: 40% liberal, 30% conservative

One thing I've found difficult to find for Canada is polling on the underlying ideological beliefs of Canadians, as opposed to party preference.  Our pollsters just don't seem to ask the question very often, perhaps because it's probably viewed as a confusing mess to voters where our traditional two big-tent parties are named after the very ideologies they're supposed to represent.  I don't have empirical data to back it, but based on the confusion over the subject I see online every day, I don't think many people have a clear understanding of the distinction between ideology and party preference.  In Canada-ese we say "small l liberal" and "small c conservative" when we're talking about the ideology, but even that really only makes the distinction clear to people who are clear about the disctinction.

Hell, even highly politically active people have very deep differences of understanding over the meaning of the term "ideology" - just go back to the silly claims of many of the strongest Obama supporters shortly after his election about Obama lacking an ideology and instead being about "what works" as if pragmatism isn't itself a question of ideology. 

Still, any oasis in the polling desert so I'm glad to see pollster Ekos ran a poll on the subject of Canadian ideology not so long ago.  Top line results are that 40% of Canadians self-identify as liberal, 30% as conservative, 26% as neither and 5% as don't know or refused.  Ekos calls this "starkly divided" but I'd call it a clear lead for liberalism.  I'm really glad they resisted providing "moderate" as an option too, though I think I would have preferred to ask on a 7 point scale to reflect on strength of belief. 

Further, if you look at page 6 of the PDF, this is a high for liberalism as far back as the graph goes, to 1997, and the gains clearly come from the "neither" group which has declined to third place for its first time. 

The chart on page 11 with some demographic break downs is also fascinating:

• Saskatchwan/Manitoba (combined probably for sample size reasons) are more conservative at 54% than Alberta at 41%
• Men are barely more liberal than conservative (within MOE) but women are almost 2:1 (42% to 23%) more liberal
• The only age group that is more conservative than liberal are over 65's and it's fairly modest (and within that subsample's margin of error)
• the effect of university appears profound with 53% of university educated identifying as liberal
• Liberal party supporters are more liberal than NDP party supporters 72% vs 61% (more on this below)
• Green supporters are barely more liberal than conservative and the only party to have their leading group be the "neithers" at 38%
• 11% of Conservative party supporters identify as liberal, which really has to be an appealing target for NDP and Liberal strategists:  These should be highly persuadable voters.

liberal Liberals versus liberal New Democrats

On the higher number of liberals supporting the Liberals than the NDP, there's lots of ways to interpret that.  One possibility is that NDP supporters dislike the term "liberal" for its association with the party of that name, even if they are left-of-centre ideologically and hold views most would identify as being mainline liberal/progressive as usually understood in Canada and the US.  Or they may be people who feel they are left of liberalism itself, bona fide socialists or even communists.  Another aspect is the NDP's roots in the praries as the predecessor party, the CCF and its relatively greater strength in places like Northern Ontario where voters may support the NDP but somehow not consider themselves liberal or even left-wing.  It's unfortunate that the poll's regional breakdown combined Manitoba and Saskatchewan because I can buy a right shift in Saskatchewan, but Manitiba's provincial NDP government has been going strong for a very long time.  I realize the provincial NDP in Manitoba are closer to the Liberals federally, but hard to believe they would appeal much to conservatives even then. 

On the Liberal party supporters specifically, the very low number of "neithers" and conservatives tells me that fears of a Liberal collapse entailing half the party's remaining supporters going to Harper are unlikely to come to fruition.  Basically the blue Liberals have mostly left already and what's left are people who are genuinely left-of-centre and just have issues supporting the NDP or abandoning the party of Laurier, Trudeau and Pearson. 

Greens

The Green numbers really back my suspicion that the Green party is a protest vote for a lot of disaffected voters of other parties.  Having "neithers" as their top group seems likely to be akin to the situation in the US where self-identified moderates and "independents" tend to be the least politically aware/informed and most prone to decide "they're all crooks!" and so a party like the Greens becomes an attractive place to park your vote.  I'm somewhat surprised at the high number of conservatives supporting the Greens.  I know the NDP line on the Greens I often hear is that they're a "crypto" conservative party.  There's some truth to that in their policies and platform, but I don't think that matters a whit to most voters, for whom the Green party is literally about the association to environmentalism.  It may be that this is where conservatives who accept the reality of climate change go, since they just can't stand the NDP or Liberals and yet want to register their support for some kind of market friendly action to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

It also tells me it's probably not worth the NDP or Liberals' time trying to woo Green voters.  Numerically there's just not that many liberals there and they're probably pretty dedicated environmentalists who have real issues with the Liberals and NDP.  I'm doubtful the neithers supporting the Greens are easy to reach either.  If the left-of-centre vote does solidify on the NDP, and some of the existing liberal support for the Conservatives can be pulled back, the NDP can forge a winning coalition.  Chretien managed to find majority coalitions (over 40% support in '93 and 2000) even with the NDP and BQ taking substantial numbers of votes in the 90s and early 2000s.  Even after the right wing parties merged, a badly scandal wounded Martin did eke out a minority in 2004 all the same. 

Canada may just be liberal enough to put a left-of-centre party into government even with four of them vying for that pool of votes.  In fact, if the NDP dominance of the BQ in Quebec continues, we're back down to three effective parties, which isn't much different from the Chretien/Martin days.

The Emptiness of Conservativism

Often, when criticizing conservativism, we focus on its many glaring real world policy failures.  After all, we are living in a prolonged real world experiment in deregulation, rigged trade, lower and flatter taxation, privatization and well, just leaving everything to the market to solve itself.   The result has been a disaster, not just in America, but in the rest of the industrialized/rich world, and how bad it has been lines up quite well to how completely each country has implemented the modern conservative agenda (basically neoliberalism).

Today I came across PZ Myers linking to a good article talking about Finland's great success in education, a success found in doing basically nothing the neoliberals say will fix education in America.  Pieces like this are not hard to find.  In the heath care debate, liberals point at places like Canada, France, Japan and Australia as having health systems that deliver better results for less money than America's.  On taxation or general matters of equality, we point to, say, Sweden or maybe Japan.  Here in Canada, where we are allowing the tar sands oil reserves to suck us into the resource trap by killing off other sections of the economy, I could easily point to Norway as an example of an oil rich country that manages not to let the oil warp and pervert their entire system and where everyone benefits from the natural bounty left in the ground by sheer providence.

What can conservatives point to?  Where are their great success stories?  Where are the nations living well using conservative policies?  Aside from the Pinochet period in Chile and pre-2008 Ireland, generally the only nation conservatives could point to as containing both success and heavily conservative policy was America itself.  Now, they are reduced to pointing at a place like Texas, which by virtue of creating a higher absolute number of jobs in the past couple years than other US states becomes the metric of "success."

Which really highlights the abject failure that is conservativism.  Texas is your success?  Because it had a slightly less terrible job creation record?  Really, is that the heights of conservative vision?  I think it is.  A world of minimum wage earners bowing and scraping to their betters for fear of being excluded from the job market in an "at-will" and "right to work" labour market, and hoping against hope to defy the odds and be one of the few called to some higher strata of the economy.  A world of hard knocks and a constant awareness that no one will help you up if you fall.  What do we all get in exchange for this?  Even if we take their economic claims at face value, we supposedly get higher aggregate economic growth and maybe a wider variety of consumer goods.  On the one hand you might be laid off any day for any reason without warning or compensation.  On the other hand, you'll have lots of shiny gadgets to play with while you're unemployed.  If you can afford them.

This is something I think could be a fruitful line of attack on conservativism, if any prominent liberals were inclined to actually attack it.  Conservatives can and do debate whether liberal ideas work in reality, but at our best, our vision is just head and shoulders better than theirs.  We propose a world free from deprivation and desperation, free from fear, and most of all a world of dignity for all.  It isn't utopia by any stretch, someone still needs to clean the toilets and take out the trash.  But the people who do that in the liberal vision are treated with respect, like everyone else is.  And if you want to claim that our economic system of high marginal taxes and judicious regulation limits economic growth and reduces consumer choice, that really doesn't seem like so much to give up in exchange. 

Most humans seem to agree.  Every social insurance scheme that I know of, from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the US, to their various counterparts in the rest of the rich world are very popular with their populations.  Even America's heavily corporate and right wing media, cut loose from the fairness doctrine for decades now has been unable to convince the public that these programs are bad for them.  At best, they're sometimes able to convince a majority that the programs are unaffordable.   These claims are nonsense, but the tactic highlights the enduring popularity of safety over the vaunted "choice."  People don't really want to make choices where "abject poverty" or "death" are distinct possibilities for choosing wrong.  This is what conservatives offer:  "Come, gamble on your retirement at the Wall Street casino.  You may just strike it rich!  Or you can die in a gutter if you bet wrong."  In fact, we generally treat people willing to gamble at stakes this high as mentally ill.  Despite a population with north of 40% of people calling themselves "conservative" and another 40% who are "moderate" US conservative leaders cannot manage to get majorities on board with the propositions involved in gambling on your healthcare or retirement.

The conservative vision stinks and people know it intuitively.  Even if their ideas worked as they claim, the result would be generally terrible for almost everyone who wasn't filthy rich.  It's time to make this point regularly.  

Conservatism is a pyramid scheme

David Kaib suggests this is worth a post and no time like the present.  I first had this thought pondering the Devos billionaires, one of the most generous and dedicated donors funding the whole conservative movement.  While most billionaires live up to the aphorism that "behind every great fortune lies a great crime" the Devos clan take it to the next level by having made their money quite literally through a pyramid scheme, that being Amway.  Having them fund movement conservatism makes the phrase "poster child" seem dim and inadequate to describe the fit.

Liberals have often lamented how conservatism is able to attract so many followers from the ranks of those who economically have almost no chance of gaining by the policies they support.  The empirical record of supply side economics and flat(ter) tax rates is lengthy and conclusive in demonstrating that only the narrowest slice of the already-rich actually net benefits by them - sometimes we say top 2% or 1% but actually in many cases the benefits go even narrower - to the top 0.1% or 0.01%.  Even a game which only 2 out of 100 players can win would be known as "gambling" but when you get to 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10000, conservatism can really be described more in terms of the lottery.  And at least with real lotteries, every player has equal odds of winning, with conservatism the winners are pre-ordained and yet the other 9999 still seem to want to play.  Why?

It's a neat trick conservatives have pulled.  They have tens of millions of middle and lower-middle class white people out marching and screaming on behalf of a couple hundred billionaires who reap the rewards of trickle down economics (which probably should be called "trickle up" economics, since that is what really happens).  It is this trick that I find most comparable to a pyramid scheme.

Most explanations focus on conservative appeals to social issues; guns, God and gays.  There is certainly something to all this, but not enough to explain polling which still shows much too large percentages of the populace in favour of the wide array of conservative economic ideas from deregulation to lowering of corporate tax rates to tort reform.  Any benefit that anyone in the bottom 98% gets from any of these is at best tangetical and is most likely beneath notice.  Even if I own shares in companies having their taxes cut (most people do not), and see an increase in my divident payouts, what will it amount to, a few dollars?  Point here being that it is not the case that conservatives win votes solely on social issues while most of their voters actually prefer liberal positions on economic issues but elevate social issues in their voting criteria.

Now, Paul Rosenberg wrote many posts showing that even the majority of conservatives are in favour of many liberal ideas - that they want increased spending on numerous social programs.  This is a complex phenomenon and I don't want to oversimplify it, but aside from the usual ideological incoherence of most people, there is duality and contradiction.  These people may support increased spending on health care, but they may also support cuts in the corporate tax rate that make such spending unsustainable.  Why they support spending on health care is not mysterious, the other side is more interesting.

I also find the separation of social and economic issues to be a little too neat, ignoring that there are commonalities between them.  It's not so much that conservative rank and file positions on social issues are consciously linked to economic issues, but that they serve similar roles:  Perpetuating power over the powerless.  Having more money is certainly a form of power, but so is maintenance of social norms and even laws that privilege some people over others.  I shouldn't need to make the link between power and desire for personal gun ownership because it should be pretty obvious.  The myriad of religious issues are typically about keeping Christianity in a defacto privleged status, where we all have to say "Merry Christmas" to each other every year, but no one worries about the correct seasonal greetings for members of any other faith.  Naturally, Christianity itself generally promotes a misogynist and hierarchical view of the world, so promoting it is promoting secular conservative values too.  On gay rights what I find most revealing is the conservative preoccupation with not "changing the definition" of the word "marriage" - as if they were all English language pedants. Partly it is just ordinary sophistry to evade the charge of bigotry for an indefensible position, but I think really they are upset that the legal privilege alloted to their special relationships would now be shared by others.   Nothing else really explains the difference in polling support for civil unions and full legal same sex marriage (and certainly most gay proponents of full marriage equality understand the social status insult inherent in only recognizing their relationships as "civil unions").  It is about saying "I am better than you."

Elevated social status

This is the underappreciated driver of many conservative issue positions.  For conservatives, status and hierarchy are part of the norm they expect to see.  The thing about hierarchy is that the person one rung from the bottom will often be the most strident defender of their prerogatives and feel they have the most to lose through a push to equality.  Thus, Corporals are often the biggest assholes toward Privates (at least initially on being promoted, usually a Sergeant sorts out these victims of their first power trip fairly quickly).  This I think is why conservatives fight so hard against anything that brings just basic equality to historically disadvantaged groups.  After all, if blacks, women and gays are no longer being stepped on, then everyone else who was previously slightly above them (poor white straight males) are now reduced in status according to a zero sum calculus.  The villian in the movie The Incredibles expressed it as "if everybody is special, than nobody is."

This belief is oneself as special and deserving of privilege can easily contribute to the next motivator for non-rich support of rich people economic policy, that is the belief that one will be rich.  Here we come full circle to the pyramid scheme angle.  These things only work on a particular kind of sucker, the kind who vastly overestimates his own abilities.  This is backed up by social science research which also reveals that those with the greatest abilities are most apt to underappreciate their abilities. 

It also makes it difficult to accept you've been fleeced (also backed empirically) which means that instead of accumulating enemies among the lives of those bilked by pyramid schemes, most victims remain in denial even if they are forced out of the scheme for losing too much money, accepting they got fleeced would be to admit their abilities are not so keen as they hoped an ego trip they're not able to make. 

Taking this back to the realm of economics, we end up with a few factors driving non-rich people to support policies that only help rich people:

1. The belief in one's own imminent success
2. Overestimation of one's own current economic status (not wanting to forget that upper-middle class conservatives also net-lose from upper class tax cuts, even if they see some nominal benefit at tax time)
3. Desire to keep others down (and yourself "up" if only in comparison)

All these flaws common to the human psyche allow con artists to prosper again and again, and conservatism is just a bigger and longer con than the others.