The History of Conservatism In 95 Words

From "The Daily Dish" (whose banner page really, really needs to be this)

FoxNation Or The Onion?

It can get hard to tell them apart at times. But one thing leapt out at me in this story - from the comments section. One FoxNation member wrote:

"HAHAHAHAHAHA OBUMMA – Un-raveled. EPIC FAILURE. IMPEACH it.”

All of which is par for the course, except for that last pronoun. It? Obama is a thing or an animal? Sometimes, the underlying feeling just slips out, doesn't it? I really don't want to believe that the underlying passion among some against the president is racist at its core. And yet, there it is.

And that really is the entire history of Moderates, Centrists and Conservative expatriates like Sullivan, isn't it?

"I really don't want to believe that the underlying passion among some against SOME VERY GOOD IDEA is REALLY DESPICABLE at its core. And yet, there it is."

For decade after decade and on critical issue after critical issue, they could never bring themselves to believe that the Right was motivated to do awful things for depraved motives until it was far, far too late.

And with a mountain of burning, blood-soaked proof at their feet, they still can't.

They simply cannot believe -- long after the average flatworm would have given up and gone Liberal -- that all the awful things that the elitist Dirty Fucking Hippies were warning them about have all turned out to be true.

That, all along, they have been wrong-wrong-wrong.

This is because they are terrible cowards : because the full, unremitting weight of such a revelation would pulverize their weak spines and baby-soft egos and so they climb further and further down the Fox News rabbit hole, following the always just-out-of-reach promise that they will never have to pay for their cowardice and incompetence ever deeper into Hell.

Which is why, on November 2nd, of the few Americans who could be bothered to vote, over half of them voted to make the wealthy ever wealthier, doom the middle class and lock the poor into poverty forever.

The media politely cooperated by postponing most stories about the grotesquely conspicuous consumption of the hyperwealthy (from the 11/28/10 New York Times):

...

The Great Depression ended the last comparable Gilded Age, of the 1920s, and brought about major reforms in American government and business. Not so the Great Recession. Last week, as the Fed’s new growth projections downsized hope for significant decline in the unemployment rate, the Commerce Department reported that corporate profits hit a record high. Those profits aren’t trickling down into new jobs or into higher salaries for those not in the executive suites. And the prospect of serious regulation of those at the top of the top — the financial sector — is even more of a fantasy in the new Congress than it was in its predecessor.

Wall Street is already celebrating the approach of bonus season by partying like it’s 2007. In The Times’s account of this return to conspicuous consumption, we learned of a Morgan Stanley trader, since fired for unspecified reasons, who went to costly ends to try to hire a dwarf for a Miami bachelor party prank that would require the dwarf to be handcuffed to the bachelor. If this were a metaphor — if only! — Wall Street would be the bachelor, and America the dwarf, involuntarily chained to its master’s hedonistic revels and fiscal recklessness with no prospect for escape.

until after all the votes to give them more tax cuts had been counted, but they needn't have bothered. The Right has long since stopped being recognizably human, and their leaders have stopped pretending in anything but the most pro-forma way that they even care about covering up their fascist agenda anymore.

For the most part, the American ruling class no longer has even the slightest sense of national pride or patriotic attachment to the United States: the average plutocrat is now so far removed from the trials and tribulations of the rest of us that they see us no differently than they see the inhabitants of Rio's slums or Haitian cholera wards -- faraway, unsanitary, shithouse-dwelling failures. Public bus/Public school/Free clinic losers useful as interchangeable meat-cog labor, but otherwise wholly disposable.

Every now and then as they raze the American Dream further into oblivion, the ruling class hits a vein of unusually persistent liberty-nostalgia or a particularly intransigent outcropping of constitutionalism that requires them to kick the wingnut killdozer into a higher gear and the grinding sounds of their momentarily-overt, teeth-bared racism or outright contempt for democracy temporarily freaks out the Moderates and Conservative expatriates.

These freak-outs never last: they splutter along for a day or two and then are aggressively paved over with thick, David Brooks-flavored Centrist sludge. Alleged Liberal elitism is widely and angrily mocked, nonexistent "traditional" Conservative virtues are sermonized, and Moderates and Conservative expatriates all dutifully slide back into their "both sides do it" comas.

The whole, wild scam works because our rulers believe that enough of us are such hopelessly ignorant rubes that we can be effortlessly suckered out of our birthright every two years by the same, tired, ridiculous lies.

I really don't want to believe that this is how America works.

And yet, there it is.