Section Four:
Mass Deaths by Incompetence or Ideological Blindness
* This section is not for simple disagreement over whether a war should have been fought or a policy put in place. This section instead looks at whether a president could reasonably have done a better job, or not being able to, admit to it and turn the matter over those below him who could. Another reason a president may be judged as incompetent is when he (or anyone else) is unable to step back and see the lives lost because of failed ideas. One must say this is ideological blindness.
* In any critique of Communism, for example, one can point to humanitarian disasters like forced collectivization. Private farms in Russia before Communism produced enough food to feed the nation, though many poor were still going hungry. In the name of Communist ideology, the state took over these farms and the crop yields dropped dramatically. Rather than admit the obvious solution would be to keep private farms and find ways to distribute food to the poor, collectivization continued. Tens of millions died. That is ideological blindness and moral callousness that cannot be defended.
* In the US, the ideologically blind tend to be either conservatives or anti Communist Cold Warriors on either the right or left. Their body count and moral callousness caused by their willful myopia almost approaches that of the worst Communist. Truman’s toll is perhaps 7 million, GW Bush’s perhaps over a million. Buchanan the slavery defender who demonized abolitionists has half a million dying because of him, while both Lyndon Johnson and Nixon caused comparable deaths.
* But perhaps the longest example of ongoing presidential ideological blindness is the question of government regulation in daily economic life. More Americans die every year, preventably, because of conservative ideology about “free market” capitalism than from most wars fought overseas in almost any time frame. It is difficult to find a higher number of conservatives anywhere on the globe more ideologically blind than in the US. A British, Canadian, or Israeli conservative who demonized poor people dying from lack of healthcare would not last long in office. But in the US one can bleat “freedom” and red bait, even getting many of the same people who most need help to agree they should literally die in the streets, and then say it is their own fault in the bargain.
* This is not an indictment of conservatism, but of a fanatic unwillingness by many to look at the evidence. There is a parallel ideological blindness on the left among Communists, who the more fanatic conservatives resemble more than they would like to admit. It was not always so. Republican pillars like Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt called for public healthcare. Reagan and even the NRA once favored some kinds of gun control. Conservative opposition to regulation is not always true even now. On many issues, most conservatives do favor regulation; censorship of films, TV, music, and video games; banning abortion, and for some, birth control; restricting some personal freedoms and rights, such as barring gay marriage or currently illegal drugs; barring freedom of speech and freedom to petition for groups such as labor unions; or freedom of religion for atheists, Muslims, and pagans.
* What instead needs to be explained is why opposition is so strong to government intervention on some issues, but not others, and why that opposition is so strong that some will literally let people die. Conservatives, including every conservative US president, were and are not dumb people. But they clearly can be either isolated, or pander to the votes of those who are, to allow moral blindness and callousness that causes many deaths to continue. For when your neighbors die all around you because of failed ideas, and in visibly large numbers, how much more blind can you be?