Although it’s fairly obvious that the varieties of right-wing punditry and congresspeeps likely couldn’t tell a questioner what socialism was, is, I would also suggest that it might be hard for the same to tell what conservatism itself was, is.
Of all the photos I’ve seen of members of the not-at-all silent minority, each one expressing on t-shirt and sign sentiments ranging from forthright trepidation to depraved paranoia, this photo is the one that, for me, says it all. Harkening back to previous discussion about how sentiments, (and world views and framings and the sort,) may be an aspect of allowing sensibility to be programmed–thus etched, thus unmovable–the dichotomy in the idea of hard workers/everybody else, puts the object relations in relief.
This goes back a very long way, to the 19th century in America. The following cartoons are from the collection at The Southern Labor Archives, Georgia State University.
IDLENESS
PROTECTING WHITE LABOR (click for larger version)
Both cartoons are from the 1880’s.
Then there’s the resurgent idea about the salutary effects of resistance.
Plucked from Jefferson’s letter to William Smith in 1787:
“Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusetts? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. And what country can preserve its liberties, if it’s rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
I suspect advocates of this salutary resistance wouldn’t be able to tell you much about the so-called second American Revolution–Jefferson’s presidency–or the sweep of events leading to Jackson, then to Lincoln and the Civil War, and, soon enough to the first iteration of contemporary themes in the last four decades of the 19th century.
In our national discussion, the terminology from the right has obtained a marvelous level of conflation. What can a student of political philosophy and political economy and history say in response to Republicans musing over calling their opponents ‘socialist democrats,’ this coming on the heels of their stringing together, liberals-socialists-marxists-fascists?
However, given the demographic Waterloo the Republicans now face, rallying a few more badly educated yahoos to the rump party’s cause won’t do the trick. The Daily Show and Jon Stewart nail the actual state of the bruised Republican psyche: they’re struggling with having to cope after having lost the presidency after controlling the executive branch for 28 out of 40 years. Like it was in the era of McKinley, the country was not guided by populists, let alone Jeffersonians.
Not for nothing do some protest in knowing ways: “But, we’re not a democracy–we’re a Republic!”
The several core contradictions are delicious. I’ll gloss the context and explain why I suspect the Republican idealogues have lost their purchase on the vaunted principles of conservatism. Three features jump out above all. One, is their appeal to righteousness based in a Manichean struggle for the soul of an idealized America. Two, and related to this, is their retreaded appeal to a silent majority. And, third, is how all of this is inflected by a kind of post-modern Calvinism, and, a version of Christian ethics, removed almost completely from the communitarian Christologcal ethic, from the ethic, (so-to-speak,) of the beatitudes.
So: there is the formation of identity based in appropriation of a backward cast idealization of a monolithic golden primal age, itself–this glorious and singular past–produced by the severe Christianity of the sainted Founders. Then, it is incumbent upon the knowing patriots to–always–resist the forces of “liberal-fascist” traitors.
It goes something like this, I feel.
It is true, on the other hand, that the golden age of founding patriotism was not funded by a severe Christianity, was not in any way monolithic, (witness the gulf between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson; between Alexander Hamilton and james Madison, etc.,) and would not come to a bloody clash of divergent patriotism and between patriots, until the Civil War.
(That the extremist tea party brethren reject Christian brotherhood in favor of personal responsibility-fueled social darwinism is remarkable too.)
What ideas brought this about?
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