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What do conservatives conserve?
(lemmy.ca)
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this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2025
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The status quo.
First it was the monarchy, now it's the bourgeoisie.
Conservative politics changed dramatically with time. Modern conservatives would call Otto von Bismarck a communist for taking religions out of the schools, creating public healthcare and basically paving the way for the modern welfare state. For a long time conservatives were nationalists, which meant strong government control and spending, while liberals opposed it. As the power of monarchies dwindled and the bourgeoisie became the status quo, with time conservatism adapted to protect the bourgeoisie private "market" interests.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
This above, this is from Eisenhower... do you think modern conservatives would care about the state feeding the hungry, clothing the cold, building schools, power plants, hospitals and houses for the population?
Tomorrow conservatives will probably just defend decision being kept in the hands of the few corporations that control all the AI.
Not quite. They try to regress back to an imagined previous state of virtue.
Well, that's the simulacra. There is the fantasy for the supporter and what the leaders are actually after.
For example, in Third World countries the conservatives, as in everywhere else, use nationalistic and patriotic rhetoric and treat national symbols as their exclusive party symbols, claiming to represent this "neutral ideology" called "nation", so the supporters all believe themselves to be patriots and nationalists. However, all Third World conservative parties’ main policy is literally giving away all natural resources and strategic industry to First World powers, there is nothing they fear more than economic sovereignty, for they are serving bourgeoisie interests (they profit from privatization, not the nation)... but again, the supporters do believe they are nationalists.
I'm sure American conservatives want to regress to that imagined previous state of virtue, but what they’ve got is mega technology and arms corporations, who sure don't give a fuck about any of that, increasing their grip over the government. So regardless of the intention, conservatives function to keep power in the hands of the already powerful.