Talking To Conservatives Reveals the Fatal Flaw in Our Justice System
By: Walter Rhein
Tags: Conservatives, BlackLivesMatter, Justice, Politics, Legal

Talking To Conservatives Reveals the Fatal Flaw in Our Justice System

You lay out facts, they nod along in agreement, then they arrive at the exactly wrong conclusion Walter Rhein Follow Sep 7 · 7 min read

Photo by Alex Radelich on Unsplash

In another life I used to waste my time trying to convince conservatives of the dangers of their political positions. I’d make comments about how Republican calls to cut Social Security amounted to theft.

“That’s our money.”

Conservatives would nod along in agreement.

I’d make comments about how much power we surrender to the government if we allow abortion bans.

“It means the government owns our bodies and not us. They can use this as a precedent for greater encroachments on our personal freedoms.”

Conservatives would nod along in agreement.

I’d cite mutual friends or relatives who were members of the LGBTQ community.

“Republicans are far too tolerant of hate speech regarding these groups, if you vote for them, you’re voting against the ability of the people we know to enjoy the rights we both take for granted.”

Conservatives would admit this was wrong.

Without any valid counter argument and despite the fact that they had all of these issues laid out for them in painstaking detail, every conservative I used to know still voted Trump in the last election.

Arguments simply don’t matter to them. They make a decision and they stick by it. You may not think this is a major problem. You can say something like, “we can agree to disagree,” and try to ignore them and move on with your life.

But what if you ever get into some kind of legal trouble? What if you end up on trial with a group of twelve conservatives and all their prejudices and preconceptions set to sit in judgment of you? What chance does innocence have in the face of a predetermined and resolute mindset? The answer is none: you’re going to jail.

Well, keep your nose clean and you won’t end up in court

One knee jerk reaction when you point out a problem is to instantly blame the victims rather than the underlying faulty system. Sure, if you manage to stay out of any kind of legal trouble, you’ll never end up in court.

Everybody always wants to sweep potentially catastrophic issues under the rug. People say there is no climate change. They say that you don’t need to wear masks to protect yourself from a lethal virus. The list goes on and on. Assuming that bad things will always be somebody else’s problem is a good way to guarantee that you’ll be burdened by misfortune throughout your life.

The fact is that we have courts and the courts are busy.

More than 100 million cases are filed each year in state trial courts, while roughly 400,000 cases are filed in federal trial courts — Quality Judges Initiative, FAQs: Judges in the United States, Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System, University of Denver

The population of the United States is around 330 million. If each court case involves two people, roughly two thirds of the citizens end up in court every year and that doesn’t even include the judges or lawyers.

People end up in court because of traffic violations, divorce, or many other completely mundane issues. The majority of court cases shouldn’t be enough to impact the course of your life. But what if you have a judge that refuses to listen to facts? What if the district attorney doesn’t like the ethnic sound of your last name and decides to go for a maximum penalty on an offense any other prosecutor would dismiss. What if half or more of the jury members there to judge you are blatantly racist?

Conservatives have been conditioned to disregard facts

The current conservative mindset is the end result of decades of conditioning. We’ve been complaining about it for years but nobody’s implemented any action to stop the brainwashing. Every year conservative philosophy seems to double down again and again, and incrementally they’ve made slow advances towards madness.

Many people have made observations on the differences between the way conservatives and liberals think. However, it’s important that more people speak up about the inherent dangers of conservative thinking.

Part of the problem is widespread suspicion of facts — any facts. Both mistrust of scientists and other “experts” and mistrust of the mass media that reports what scientists and experts believe have increased among conservatives (but not among liberals) since the early ’80s. The mistrust has in part, at least, been deliberately inculcated. The fossil fuel industry publicizes studies to confuse the climate change debate; Big Pharma hides unfavorable information on drug safety and efficacy; and many schools in conservative areas teach students that evolution is “just a theory.” The public is understandably confused about both the findings and methods of science. “Fake news” deliberately created for political or economic gain and Donald Trump’s claims that media sites that disagree with him are “fake news” add to the mistrust. But, the gullibility of many on the right seems to have deeper roots even than this. That may be because at the most basic level, conservatives and liberals seem to hold different beliefs about what constitutes “truth.” Finding facts and pursuing evidence and trusting science is part of liberal ideology itself. For many conservatives, faith and intuition and trust in revealed truth appear as equally valid sources of truth — John Ehrenreich, Why Are Conservatives More Susceptible to Believing Lies?

We’ve all lamented the fact that so many conservatives can believe in idiotic concepts such as Q-Anon, or vote for a blatant hustler like Donald Trump, but the problem is much worse than that. These people work in schools, they work as police officers, they work as judges. It’s not like their messed up way of thinking is only an issue once every four years. They are committed to their labor of destruction every single day.

Our legal system is based on presenting facts

The current mindset of conservatives essentially renders our legal system completely invalid. The idea is that the issue is debated and rational people make conclusions based on the evidence presented.

What chance does that have of succeeding when literally half the country has been trained to disregard facts? Not only will innocent people end up in jail as a result, guilty people will not be held accountable.

Senators voted on Wednesday afternoon to acquit President Trump on two articles of impeachment — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — after a historically unusual but typically contentious trial. Forty-eight senators supported a verdict of guilty on Article I; 52 voted not guilty. Forty-seven senators supported a verdict of guilty on Article II; 53 voted not guilty. The Senate would have needed 67 votes to convict Trump on either article — Philip Ewing, ‘Not Guilty’: Trump Acquitted On 2 Articles Of Impeachment As Historic Trial Closes

Meanwhile, in other parts of the country you get this:

Crystal Mason tried voting in the 2016 presidential election, but she didn’t know she wasn’t eligible, and her ballot was tossed. But that uncounted ballot still led to a conviction and a five-year jail sentence, with that ruling still being appealed almost five years later — Lauren Lantry and Cheyenne Haslett, Texas woman faces jail time after being convicted of voting illegally while on supervised release in 2016

A predatory legal system

White people inherently know that if they end up in court they shouldn’t give any indication of their political leaning. This is an extension of the “don’t bring religion or politics into polite conversation,” axiom that is another example of kicking the can down the road.

It’s easy to think, “maybe I’ll get lucky and they’ll find me innocent because they think I’m conservative.” That wild card might even be appealing to white people, until they stop and recognize if they’re assumed to be liberal then they’re going to jail regardless of innocence.

It happens to black people all the time.

The over-representation of black Americans in the nation’s justice system is well documented. Black men comprise about 13 percent of the male population, but about 35 percent of those incarcerated. One in three black men born today can expect to be incarcerated in his lifetime, compared to one in six Latino men and one in 17 white men — Elizabeth Hinton, LeShae Henderson, and Cindy Reed. An Unjust Burden: The Disparate Treatment of Black Americans in the Criminal Justice System. New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2018.

The downside is that our legal system doesn’t work for anybody. It allows guilty people to free and punishes the innocent. The stubborn insistence of conservatives that they don’t have to recognize facts ruins any chance of a better society.

Facts are facts

Everybody knows that our justice system is flawed, but few people recognize it’s irretrievably broken. Courts and police have become leveraged into cudgels to oppress the vulnerable.

With half of the citizens in our country insisting that their own delusional perception of the world is more valid than verifiable facts, we’re all burdened with an unacceptably high risk of a wrongful conviction. The only people who benefit from this system are the criminals that repeatedly get away with crimes and are free to run for president again.

The conservative mindset that dismisses reality in favor of their own self-righteous fantasy has negative repercussions that permeate every level of our society. We know that our justice system doesn’t work. We have the statistics to prove it. What nobody wants to hear is that it can get worse and it’s going to get worse until we discover a way to vaccinate conservatives and cure them of their potentially lethal allergy to the truth.

This vaccine needs to be a government mandate.

The delusional conservative mindset is going to topple every institution in our society. At some point as our hospitals fill up with victims of the pandemic, and our basements fill up with water from glacial melt, and our jails fill up with the innocent, somebody has to stand up and say, “Enough is enough! You don’t have a right to tell lies! You have to stop, now!”