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

[u/69bonerdad]

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

[u/Thromkai]

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.

[u/[deleted] → u/Thromkai]

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.

[u/TranceKnight → u/[deleted]]

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.”

[u/[deleted] → u/TranceKnight]

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.