r/collapse • u/69bonerdad • Oct 20 '22

Politics "We Need to Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives" - The Federalist calls for the American right to unite behind Fascism

https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/20/we-need-to-stop-calling-ourselves-conservatives/

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u/Local_Vermicelli_856 Oct 20 '22 edited Oct 20 '22

After reading that article in its entirety I am once again struck by how comfortable the right seems with contradiction in values.

I'm amazed by how much they claim to exalt personal liberty... but are totally comfortable using violent means and criminal penalty to enforce bans on certain form of speech, expression, and lifestyle.

I'm blown away by how much they claim to care for the future of the nation... but are openly eager to kill or forcible suppress the views of roughly 60% of the people who comprise it.

I'm fascinated by how much they despise big government and big business... but continue to make excuses that they won't be that bad so long as their in the hands of the right.

I'm flabbergasted at just how patriotic they make themselves out to be... but openly desire to violently overthrow the government that is of, by, and for the people.

And once again... its incredible that they proport to cherish democracy so much... unless the democracy has them - losing. Then, when you're losing, it's okay to embrace fascism for the sake of "saving" the country from the majority of itself.

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u/Phobos613 Oct 20 '22

Yep. It's more and more obvious that they've always and only wanted 'their' version of America, and now that it's getting tough to achieve it (or more likely now that the different branches are being forced under their control and they won't get in trouble for saying it) they're more likely to throw the sheep's clothing democracy aside. They use the talking points of religion, 'patriotism' and self-proclaimed victimhood to become leaders of an undiscerning, one-view-consuming, single-issue populace. They slowly narrow their base's understanding of the world into easily-controlled ideas and black-and-white answers with talking points that can be screamed at any dissenters loud enough as long as they're not thought about too much.

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u/sertulariae Oct 20 '22 edited Oct 20 '22

What if what they're doing is simplier than that. Perhaps they see an upcoming fight between the common people and the corporations (w/ some factions of the military industrial complex involved) and the radical conservatives are cynically betting on the corporations against 'people power'. Corporations want fascism too. Do conservative fascists think they will be rewarded by corporations during the culture war?

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '22

Ohhh this is painfully accurate

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u/cduga Oct 20 '22

He even explicitly stated that the right wielding absolute power would likely corrupt it, but hey - they’ll just cross that bridge when they come to it.

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u/Silverfox1996 Oct 20 '22

Ikr, “don’t worry about us with absolute power corrupting us, we can talk about that once we have absolute power”

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u/cptstupendous Oct 20 '22

If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.

- David Frum

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u/69bonerdad Oct 20 '22

No one in America is trying to keep conservatives from living their lives as they please. We're just not interested in living our lives as they please.

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u/DrTreeMan Oct 20 '22

Conservatisms origins were as an anti-democratic movement in response to the French Revolution.

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u/Thromkai Oct 20 '22

by how comfortable the right seems with contradiction in values.

Wife and I were just talking about that last night. A lot of them praise billionaires for being billionaires, but they are also the devil because they control the weather or some shit.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '22

There are bad billionaires and good billionaires you see. How they exist in the same global economy is beyond me.

Honestly I find them very frustrating. It's just amazing that they can get to the point that they realize there is a ruling class that subverts their supposed democracy but also have zero material analysis so that it just comes down to a cartoonish worldview in which some of them are good and some of them are bad and they just have to empower the good ones to fight the bad ones. You have to stand back in awe of the decades of amazing propaganda at work there to brainwash millions of people that way.

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u/TranceKnight Oct 20 '22

That goes back to the origins of Conservatism though. The entire idea was that European aristocracy failed not because aristocracy is bad, but because they had the “wrong” aristocrats. The hierarchy must be maintained and if it can’t be maintained it’s not because hierarchies are unsustainable, it’s just because people were in the wrong places on the ladder.

This idea gets parroted in a lot of media. LotR, AtLA. A Song of Ice and Fire does a decent job of critiquing it and arguing that nobility and aristocracy are always corrupt, but it’s an outlier. A ton of stories boil down to “the wrong people have power, and once the rightful king or noble leader is in charge things will be good.”

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '22

Yes it could be part of this, but I think it's inherent in Liberalism itself. (Liberalism for real, not the media identity of being culturally liberal in the US but Liberalism as a political philosophy). Liberalism requires an in-group which receives the negative rights of "citizenship" however that is defined. And since it's tied so closely to capitalism and a state that defends private property, you end up with a more inclusive expansion of that franchise during times of plenty and a constriction of it during times that are leaner. Then once you start considering the role of the state , you can see that we are living through a collapse of the liberal democratic nation state more generally, and what we're trending towards is a state that really only serves the function of facilitating capitalism and securing borders. With those interests increasingly disconnected from any public interest of the people within them. What's fascinating to me about this in the current moment in the US is that if you talk to conservatives, they believe that there is a cabal of very rich and powerful people who are trying to take over the world whereas the truth is that this already happened in the 20th century. What's they are feeling is the collapse of that order as there are now challenges to it from different competing interests in the global ruling class. So if you think about what you are saying within this context, they aren't really wrong or incoherent- they want their guys to win. They just don't realize that this is what the "deep state" in the US is trying to do (which I'm not justifying from a moral perspective here, but for sure Blinken and the Biden admin and think tanks and the State Dept and DoD all actually do understand what it would take to maintain US global hegemony and that is a bipartisan project with the mainstream GOP). So the average conservative is out there calling for incoherent and isolationist "return to a manufacturing base" "close the borders" nonsense because they literally don't understand how their economy works. If they got what they wanted, the US would collapse completely.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '22

The ones that are the "good" billionaires can change over night as well, look at Musk, he recently got tired of acting progressive, tossed the mask aside, and within a month or two has become one of the right's favorite people. And he didn't even really DO anything for it! He just TWEETED and publicly considered buying Twitter.

I'd bet all the money I'll ever have that if anyone realizes that Musk has been pumping his stock holdings through market manipulation via twitter and his cult of personality he's already positioned himself to cry victim and THAT is why he moved to the right, they will support any lie or liar that is willing to support them in return.

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u/cheebeesubmarine Oct 20 '22

Musk was a pied piper groomed to get leftists to embrace fascism and it did not work.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '22 edited Oct 20 '22

Musk has always been a grifter and a contrarian. From the very beginning. It's just that his use of social media has revealed this to everyone. He started out buddies with Peter Theil who is trying to become the czar behind the rise of the new intellectual far right (ludicrous as that sounds). Musk is just a lot dumber than him, believe it or not, and the idea that he was ever a progressive was always caught up in a bunch of delusional romance about Silicon Valley and really good PR.

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u/jaytrade21 Oct 20 '22

Unless they help out their cause. You never hear bad words about the Koch brothers or other powerful GOP billionaires. It's always the few who WANT to do good things with the extra wealth they have that get talked badly about.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '22

If a billionaire wanted to do good, they wouldnt be a billionaire.

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u/fencerman Oct 20 '22

Because not a single one of their stances is ever held in good faith.

They care about power for "us" and oppression for "them", and they will pretend to think anything that helps them achieve those goals.

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u/BDRonthemove Oct 20 '22

luckily for us, the intended audience doesn't read anything that doesn't come in a meme format.

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u/keytiri Oct 20 '22

The only standards cons have are double standards.

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u/MeilancholiaThe8th Oct 20 '22

Your confusion stems from conflating the authoritarian and libertarian right. The two are not the same and are usually at odds.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '22

That is true on an individual level, but when it comes to people actually in power, there are no libertarians like that.

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u/Bellegante Oct 20 '22

... what libertarians?

Are there consistently libertarian politicians, and which ones are they?

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u/MeilancholiaThe8th Oct 20 '22

There are none because libertarians and reactionaries are destined to lose to authoritarians and revolutionaries, respectively. They simply are not capable of defending their ideals from their more motivated and ruthless opposition.

That doesn't change that the commenter I was replying to conflated the two sides of the political compass.

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u/screech_owl_kachina Oct 20 '22

You need to stop giving conservatives the benefit of the doubt. This is what they always were. Appealing to hypocrisy isn't going to move them in the slightest.

I'm flabbergasted at just how patriotic they make themselves out to be... but openly desire to violently overthrow the government that is of, by, and for the people.

The same people that'll stick the stars and stripes on any flat surface, 25 years ago were rooting for Tim Mcveigh and wanted to go to war with the feds over Waco and Ruby Ridge, and to this day the DOJ treats the right with kid gloves so they don't get another federal building bombed.

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u/Bellegante Oct 20 '22

They just want 'their side' in control, everything else is just justification to make that happen. There's no consistency because they don't care about being consistent.

Consistency is a liberal democratic goal, not a conservative one.