It is truly amazing that grownups can pay tribute to an ideology whose history is so despicable and whose record is one of always being wrong. Of whom do I speak? The right, both political and economic.
I am here in the deepest, darkest intellectual cesspool, the American South. Here one is constantly bombarded with clowns politicians and wannabe politicians trying to convince you that they are the most conservative creature in the universe. Only extreme ignorance can account for them treating that label as a badge of honor. Besides being colossal pests, their most obvious problem is that they have no inkling what conservative means. True conservatism is only a marginal improvement over what these people hold so dear. If only they knew.
What has conservatism wrought? What has it given us? Not to go back too far, they tried to keep us under the thumb of King George the Third. They defended slavery, at a cost we cannot truly comprehend. They defended child labor. They killed people seeking representation by unions. Prior to WWII they favored Hitler. That was one of the few wars they weren’t enthusiastic about. It did precede the advent of the military/industrial complex.
It has been a long, hard, unfruitful slog trying to find a conservative economic prescription that improved matters for anyone not a member of the top few percent. On rare occasions a few of them have been sufficiently forthright to admit to error. Forthright, but not contrite. The pain inflicted by such Dummkopfs (a tip of the hat to Angela Merkel and her coterie) is difficult to calculate. Just ask a Greek.
These greedy bastards brought us every economic calamity from the panics and crises of the 19th Century to the Great Depression to the recent worldwide economic collapse and the present stagnation. They certainly were not the handiwork those without access to the levers of financial power, i.e., vous et moi.
Looking at the picture, I wonder why these police are protecting the symbol of the miscreants while others are evicting the victims.
As FDR proclaimed in his first inaugural address, speaking of the plutocrats, “They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.” Conservatism is, simply put, selfishness and greed at its base. Would people want to maintain (conserve) policies and situations harmful to their own interests? The question answers itself. I don’t think FDR was referencing mirror gazing as vision. Conservatism is too small to encompass regard for the well-being others or the welfare of the nation.
Conservatives do not contemplate progress, only holding tight to what they have or regressing to what they perceive, or rather misperceive, as a state preferable to themselves. Had conservatives always had their druthers, we should still be living in trees, fearing the loss of our nuts . . . or berries.
Of what use are conservatives? Very little but they have their place. It just shouldn’t be in responsible positions. True conservatives, not the clowns in tri-cornered hats, can serve to slow, not constantly stymie, progressive efforts. Progressive certainly does not always translate as perfect. Progressives could sometimes benefit from a slowing down, taking a second look. The solutions to most public problems are rarely simple. That’s a good reason for keeping them out of the hands of those reliant upon the simplistic philosophical bases of ego and greed.
Those putative conservatives that are seeking to preserve their wealth and/or position at least have an excuse for devoting their efforts to the shortsighted, simpleminded construct. The attraction of this ‘ism’ may be because they themselves are simpleminded. It could be because they are intellectually lazy. It could be due to a lack of intellectual curiosity. For many it is loyalty to their misguided parents or other influential person(s) in their life. Whatever the reason, we can sympathize. They have a real goal. They are just not headed in the right direction.
What I find dismaying are those victims of conservative aims and policies that see themselves as rabid adherents of such nonsense. They side with those who would take away their health care, their Social Security, their unemployment insurance, their food stamps. Those things become important after those ‘compassionate conservatives’ have exported their jobs to North Korea or South Carolina. Maybe the appeal is the conservative history of concern for what they term, “The Great Unwashed.”
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