1419
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
1419 points (95.6% liked)
People Twitter
5034 readers
1079 users here now
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a tweet or similar
- No bullying.
- Be excellent to each other.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
From what I see, Trump is indicative of a growing trend, generally by conservatives to bring religion and their beliefs into government.
Trump is more absolutist and authoritarian than many other political candidates that I have seen.
To my best understanding of the current climate of the people who support him, they want more authoritarian control over what other people do. Partly in an effort to make themselves more comfortable in their own social interactions with others. So their assumptions of things like, women have curves, and men wear pants and have beards, and men like women and women like men, etc, are always correct, despite the fact that reality disagrees with them.
They're always on the lookout for any way for them to improve their socio-economic standing as well, with the basic concept of more for me, less for everyone else.
I believe that to them, Trump is a means to an end. Less for everyone else, more for them. More of their rules, and values, imposed on others, whether others want it or not.
Take for example, gay marriage. IMO, it's just marriage, eg. Two people who love eachother pledging their intention to continue to love and support eachother. My view is starkly contrasted by their view of "marriage is between a man and a woman before God!" (Or similar). Something something, the sanctity of marriage.... Blah blah. Nobody seems to care about divorce rates though the writings they're imposing on others pretty clearly state that marriage before God is a joining of souls in permanent matrimony and cannot and will not be broken. Ever. But I digress. Since they're opposed to gay marriage, they don't want it to be allowed, though it's clearly discrimination. Arguing about "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" and whatnot. The authoritarian, bull headed, my way out the highway mindset of someone like Trump, can actually achieve such goals. He's absolutist. Whether he believes in the prohibition of gay marriage or not.
On a personal note, I hope all the LGBTQ+ people get all the same rights to be as happy or as miserable as the cis/straight people. You're all fabulous and I love you all as brothers/sisters/siblings (for the gender ambiguous). I personally will continue to support you and fight along side all of you for equality.
Circling back to the point, this viewpoint can be copied and pasted on a number of issues that the right may not feel that they are properly represented on. Another good example is abortion; but that has mostly played out with the whole roe v. Wade thing, so I won't go into more detail there, despite the fact that I have a lot of things to say about it.
I think that demonstrates the point. They don't value him for what/who he is, they value him more for what he can do for them... To accomplish their goals and impose their ideals on everyone else. His ethical deficiencies and disregard for anyone's opinion, well-being, and opinion, are desirable features for them.
They're pushing for oppression of anyone who is different from them, trying to move up their capitalist ladder of success. Trump is just the latest tool that they're trying to use to accomplish that goal.
I think it's simpler than that. Conservatism, at its core, has always been a purely reactionary opposition to liberal and progressive politics. In the modern era, it has felt the need to wrap itself in something resembling a positive ideology which presents thinly falsifiable policy positions, regardless of how narrow and mutable those ideological boundaries might be. Because until recently, abject, reactionary nihilism has been seen as a losing position.
Trump has freed conservatives from that burden. No longer do they need to create and defend any flimsy intellectual basis for their reactionary stances - Trump has presented a completely liturgical basis for conservative nihilism, and in doing so, he has freed millions of anti-intellectual CHUDS from the burden of thinking, and they love him for it.
Well, there's two major divides within conservatism as it plays out today, right?
Classical liberalism, we can call one, and then populist conservatism...
Classical liberal Republicans/Libertarians are highly principled and highly progressive with very positive, engaging values - think about these old guys like Paul Findley who were fundamentally isolationist, anti-war, pro-Palestine conservatives, that truly believed in Hayek's Constitution of Liberty and that the key to bettering humans is through decentralization of power, minimal government, and human freedom.
And then there is conservatism that goes back to, like, tradition or populism.
Of course, these things often combine, but I think you need to treat conservatism with a lot of nuance because otherwise you are just dismantling a strawman.
Revolutionary nihilism is how radical liberalism was portrayed by Dostoevsky in the Devils - a great book - and it does make sense, because we see at its root that some of these radical movements actually were about reinventing all of society around totally new principles and annihilating what has hitherto been normalized in Western civilization...
Yes, there is like the Nietzschean reactionaries who want to build the New Man, but yeah, it's still a losing position. I do not even think that guys like BAP are even on that level - like some of the hardcore neopagan LARP squad certainly envisions a completely new basis to muh Western civilization. But it's not like Varg Vikernes is a viable option - in spite of how wildly popular Black Metal became after hipsters getting into blackgaze and shit after ironic Pitchfork album reviews, not even one of the most seminal figures in the genre can be anything much more than a joke for having these beliefs.
I think one of the problems we have is the paranoia about this stuff - you act as if the right is really some monster that is rising to swallow the country in a wave of Fascism, but it's not the right who are anywhere near successfully removing their opponents from ballots.