OMG. Bikesharing in Israel? Totalitarian!

There comes a point in the life of every capital cocktail party pundit when they must—or at least ought to—perform deep and genuine introspection about their most sincerely held belief. The DC party circuit, of course, calls for comity and compromise as the solution to all of government's problems, as if somehow the animosity and rancor that House Republicans show for President Obama and his fellow Democrats can be solved simply by some pleasant dinner repartee. It's a worldview born of insulation within a bubble of artifice hermetically sealed from the somehow less pleasant reality that surrounds it. In the desert of the real, conservatives are not interested in comity. In many cases, they're not even interested in pushing an agenda. They're just interested in doing whatever they can to anger people on the other side of the aisle.

This punitive worldview is not an anomaly, nor is it a minority of conservative thought:



The study then presented participants with a real-world choice: With a fixed amount of money in their wallet, respondents had to “buy” either an old-school lightbulb or an efficient compact florescent bulb (CFL), the same kind Bachmann railed against. Both bulbs were labeled with basic hard data on their energy use, but without a translation of that into climate pros and cons. When the bulbs cost the same, and even when the CFL cost more, conservatives and liberals were equally likely to buy the efficient bulb. But slap a message on the CFL’s packaging that says “Protect the Environment,” and “we saw a significant drop-off in more politically moderates and conservatives choosing that option,” said study author Dena Gromet, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Got that? With all other factors being equal, conservatives were less likely to buy the exact same lightbulb if you told them it would help the environment. They didn't have any more aversion to buying energy-saving lightbulbs than anyone else, unless the package pointed out that this particular lightbulb was slightly less earth-screwing than the other one. Tell them that, and they were more likely to go for the other one.

Yes. Conservatives are actually willing to go against the economically motivated choices they might otherwise have made if it is pointed out that they are assisting a supposedly progressive cause in the process. Helping the environment is an objectively good thing, you might say. After all, given a choice between a better environment and a worse environment at the same financial cost, who wouldn't choose a better environment? But see, if you think that way, you're not today's mainstream American conservative.

Unfortunately, this lightbulb study is proving to be anything but an isolated incident. Conservatives are now routinely exchanging actual policy positions for the much simpler politics of opposition: hating something simply because their political opponents like it. Case in point? New York's new bikeshare program. Actually, "hate" probably isn't a strong enough word for how conservatives seem to feel about a relatively simple program that allows the denizens of Gotham to use admittedly unaesthetic, corporate-branded bicycles at their convenience. Case in point? Dorothy Rabinowitz, who called the program the product of the "totalitarians" running New York, and referred to the bike lobby as "all-powerful."

Now, Rabinowitz is no minor crank: she sits on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, one of the most widely read disseminators of conservative economic and political thought. For Rabinowitz, it is not enough to simply not use this new bikeshare option that residents can take advantage of at minimal cost. Rather, the very essence and values of this program must be excoriated for the good of conservative dogma. Urban biking is, after all, reminiscent of Paris, London and Amsterdam, and we all know how affectionate conservatives are toward our European allies. The program has environmental motives in mind—no more need be said on that front. And, of course, the program is supported by Mayor Bloomberg, who is certainly no friend to the conservative right. And even though these specific points were not specifically addressed by Rabinowitz, New York Magazine took the liberty of adding "healthy" and "sharing" to their list of reasons for conservative hatred of the program.

Nobody is being compelled to use the bikeshare program, any more than anyone would be compelled to take any other means of publicly available transportation. And yet, prominent conservatives seem to view the program as a totalitarian evil simply because of its emotional resonance, and its promotion of values that, while nominally universal, are far more characteristic of progressive circles. Rabinowitz' attention-grabbing editorial rant has simply reemphasized that conservative ideologues are losing ownership of any vision they can call their own, and are determining their positions by what pokes as many sticks into as many liberal eyes as possible.

I'm sure, however, that if only Rabinowitz could actually attend a cocktail party or a society dinner with one of these bikes, the two of them could finally work out their differences in a collegial atmosphere of collaboration and move New York forward. On two wheels, or otherwise.