01-13-2020, 09:37 PM
(01-11-2020, 07:25 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:(01-07-2020, 11:55 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Because we live in a Crisis and find it frustrating and viscerally offensive. There is no obvious flow.
If one is a liberal, one almost feels as if America has succumbed to something that offends every sensibility that mandates a resistance that we are not yet sure will prevail.
And conservatives can feel offended as well since conservatism has been debased and has nothing better to offer than Trump.
Conservatism will need to sort out much -- like casting out the Radical Right, the hucksters and demagogues, rediscovering the utility of rational discourse, and finding something worthy of protection (class privilege is never an adequate basis of conservatism unless the system is able to suppress dissent). Conservatism fares best when opportunity is a norm instead of a privilege, and such may depend upon liberal reforms of a recent time. (Aside from some better treatment of the handicapped and the establishment of LGBT rights, such "reforms" as America has had have had the enrichment of elites as the first objective. Conservatism used to be the defense of old virtues against radical assaults on a workable culture... and now Movement Conservatism (the only conservatism now relevant) is the defense of superstition (pre-modern thought) and elite egoism (postmodern thought) that have allied against rationality (that is, the Enlightenment). Conservatism may have never had a warm relationship with the Enlightenment, but when it acquisced with the Enlightenment it was far more defensible.
Donald Trump is absurdity and cruelty, neither intellectually nor morally defensible. He represents the consequences of the celebration of ego, the culture of celebrity, and the rejection of objectivity.
With generational theory as a guide, I can predict that conservatism will get a revival as a defense of benign traditions and as a default alternative to radical Leftist efforts that implode or become excessively costly or disruptive.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.