But I’m not sure how to reconcile that with modern “rightists” who want to burn down the system and aren’t conservative in the lowercase-C sense.
The Republican party (and conservatism as a movement) are full-blown reactionaries. I like this passage from Corey Robin’sThe Reactionary Mind:
People who aren’t conservative often fail to realize this, but conservatism really does speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner. The loss may be as material as money or as ethereal as a sense of standing. It may be a loss of something that was never legitimately owned in the first place; it may, when compared with what the conservative retains, be small. Even so, it is a loss, and nothing is ever so cherished as that which we no longer possess. It used to be one of the great virtues of the left that it alone understood the often zero- sum nature of politics, where the gains of one class necessarily entail the losses of another. But as that sense of conflict diminishes on the left, it has fallen to the right to remind voters that there really are losers in politics and that it is they— and only they— who speak for them. “All conservatism begins with loss,” Andrew Sullivan rightly notes, which makes conservatism not the Party of Order, as Mill and others have claimed, but the party of the loser.
The chief aim of the loser is not— and indeed cannot be— preservation or protection. It is recovery and restoration.
And from another section:
There’s a fairly simple reason for the embrace of radicalism on the right, and it has to do with the reactionary imperative that lies at the core of conservative doctrine. The conservative not only opposes the left; he also believes that the left has been in the driver’s seat since, depending on who’s counting, the French Revolution or the Reformation. If he is to preserve what he values, the conservative must declare war against the culture as it is.
I just now saw this and… that is a much erudite explanation than I gave… I will have to check out this Corey Robin.
I think these ideas, and what I said, are mutually true.
What do you think?
Basically, yes, conservatives either literally are losers or fear loss, to horrifically paraphrase Robin… and also, their replacement identity, their group identity that has supplanted their personal identity, which includes being directed to war against certain ideas and concepts, well, they can’t not perform those ideas, otherwise, its another existentual criss.
First, they lost or failed at something core to their personal identity, then they subsume themself into the aggrieved group identity… and if they renege against or fail at the performance of the group identity… well now they have another existential crisis, suffer another kind of identity loss.
Conservatism, as a trauma response.
I just also want to note the immense cognitive dissonance between the actual, fear-based conservative mindset of ‘zero-sum’… and their purported belief in the ‘free market’, much of which totally fails to be any kind of logically coherent without the idea that… an unregulated market generally (or even always) leads to a ‘positive-sum’ situation.
They lie about how they actually think, and tell you the thing that very often actually is zero-sum in reality… is broadly mutually beneficial… and that you’re wrong/evil if you disagree.
You should definitely read the book if it’s a topic that interests you; it’s the best overview of conservatism that I’ve read. I’d say you’re pretty well aligned with what he wrote within, too.
The Republican party (and conservatism as a movement) are full-blown reactionaries. I like this passage from Corey Robin’sThe Reactionary Mind:
And from another section:
I just now saw this and… that is a much erudite explanation than I gave… I will have to check out this Corey Robin.
I think these ideas, and what I said, are mutually true.
What do you think?
Basically, yes, conservatives either literally are losers or fear loss, to horrifically paraphrase Robin… and also, their replacement identity, their group identity that has supplanted their personal identity, which includes being directed to war against certain ideas and concepts, well, they can’t not perform those ideas, otherwise, its another existentual criss.
First, they lost or failed at something core to their personal identity, then they subsume themself into the aggrieved group identity… and if they renege against or fail at the performance of the group identity… well now they have another existential crisis, suffer another kind of identity loss.
Conservatism, as a trauma response.
I just also want to note the immense cognitive dissonance between the actual, fear-based conservative mindset of ‘zero-sum’… and their purported belief in the ‘free market’, much of which totally fails to be any kind of logically coherent without the idea that… an unregulated market generally (or even always) leads to a ‘positive-sum’ situation.
They lie about how they actually think, and tell you the thing that very often actually is zero-sum in reality… is broadly mutually beneficial… and that you’re wrong/evil if you disagree.
Its… all projection.
Quite a logical short circuit.
You should definitely read the book if it’s a topic that interests you; it’s the best overview of conservatism that I’ve read. I’d say you’re pretty well aligned with what he wrote within, too.