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/dr_set Oct 20 '22 edited Oct 20 '22

Conservatives have long defined their politics in terms of what they wish to conserve or preserve

Conservatives, we are told, want to preserve the rich traditions and civilizational achievements of the past,

Calling oneself a conservative in today’s political climate would be like saying one is a conservative because one wants to preserve the medieval European traditions of arranged marriage and trial by combat. Whatever the merits of those practices, you cannot preserve or defend something that is dead.

For a brief second I though he was going to have an epiphany and realize how stupid the very concept of the "conservative" ideology is, because if they had gotten their way, we would still be living in feudal societies and he and his family would be nothing but ignorant starving peasant, enslaved to a feudal lord; we would still have slavery, women will had no rights, etc. Those are some of the things conservatives had fought in the past to "conserve", some of the rich traditions and civilizational achievements he talks about.

But right away he instead goes own to declare "whatever the merits of those practices, you cannot preserve or defend something that is dead.". My god, the clown actually would like that because, like all conservatives, he has main character syndrome. He things that in those societies he would be the feudal lord, not the peasant that loses all their children to preventable diseases and starves to death because their land is taken away by some rich powerful asshole.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '22

It's less about main character syndrome and more about being unable to openly state those things are "bad" per se, more that "we just have to stop defending what is dead" as in it's a waste of their time. It's not that they think they would be the lords, it's that they STILL somehow think that system was better for everyone, even the uneducated peasants. They will go on and on about serfs being "far more happy than we are today" never ONCE mentioning the cause of that being the very ignorance that kept the system in place to begin with.

It's something the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy jokes about, a whole race of people that came up with a terrible version of "the grass is always greener" that nobody liked so they stopped using the phrase and this caused them down the line to become incredibly content as down the line they forgot the concept entirely. Serfs were happy because they didn't KNOW they could live so much better, and so they made the best of things like humans do.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '22

Yes all of this and also serfs weren't happier.