To the limited extent that today's conservatives uphold the free market, they do so from a mystical base fundamentally antithetical to capitalism and ultimately subversive to freedom. Their approach is epitomized by the Christian views of the Religious Right, for whom wealth is essentially immoral: the rich man will virtually never enter the kingdom of heaven. Capitalism is therefore at best a "necessary evil." Moreover, by their public association with "free enterprise" (often including a noxious admixture of fascist elements), conservatives have done far more harm to capitalism than have any of the more overt statists who sometimes masquerade as "liberals."

Although there is variation within both the conservative and pseudo-liberal camps, the basic pattern of conflict between the two perspectives can be understood as the ultimate expression of the intrinsicist/subjectivist dichotomy discussed in Section 1 (pp. 1.3:13-4, 1.3:48-9). The logical consequences of this dichotomy, as reflected in their epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, and political views, are outlined in the chart at the bottom of this page (please scroll down as needed).

	CONSERVATISM	PSEUDO-LIBERALISM
Philosophical ancestors	Plato, Augustine, Catholic and Protestant Church Fathers	Kant, Hegel, Marx, Dewey
Epistemology and Ethics	intrinsicist	subjectivist
Source of concepts and values	intuition emanating from "pure" consciousness (i. e., God)	collective consciousness and collective will arising from material conditions
View of reason	ultimately impotent, to be replaced by faith	ultimately irrelevant; logic is determined by one's economic or ethnic background and must be "deconstructed" accordingly
View of human beings	creatures of God	passive products of their environments
View of mind/body	mind identified with "soul," which derives from a "higher" reality and which must not be tainted by imperfections of the flesh	"mind" only an expression of one's cultural and physical environment; physical behavior is motivated by irrational drives, arising from class, race, or hormones
Nature of good	obedience to God's word	social adaptation, subservience to the collective good
Nature of evil	trespass against God caused by inescapable "original sin"	socially deviant behavior caused by inescapable adverse material circumstances
Ultimate obscenity	overt sexual pleasure	conspicuous monetary profit* and material consumption
Primary political end	enslavement of human souls (i. e., minds)	enslavement of human bodies
Political agenda	legislation of morality (especially sexual behavior), censorship, state-sponsored prayer, other forms of social control	economic controls, compulsory life-style modifications in the "public interest"

* profit may be acceptable if acquired by governmental subsidy (i. e., by coercion)