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Maggie's avatar

I'm going to start with my Caveat: I was born approximately a week before the USSR began to really unravel. I never lived through any of conservativism's grand success. I grew up with Rocky IV and Red Dawn as cable TV staples. But I've never lived in a world where the US wasn't the global superpower.

Based on my limited life experience, I'm going with "it was all a lie". My childhood was defined my my parent's various failings and incompetence, and as a teen I desperately needed to believe I could pull myself up by my own bootstraps. I liked conservative principles. Work hard and succeed. A foreign policy that made the whole world safer (after all, I didn't want to live in my dumpy town forever!) Balanced budgets! I read Charles Krauthammer's column every Friday. He seemed smart. George Bush seemed to be authentically well-intentioned to me (PEPFAR, No Child Left Behind) and I bought into the Team America let's invade Iraq schtick. John McCain seemed like a good embodiment of teenage Maggie's value system.

In retrospect, I think my parents were motivated by entirely different things. Things weren't going well for them; they wanted people to blame. Rush Limbaugh offered that to my dad, in spades. Blame Dems, blame women, blame immigrants, Let's Go Buchanan, that was my dad. My mom was looking for validation that she had done the right things, and that her problems weren't her fault. I think the "moral majority" stuff really spoke to her. They were both looking for a bail out. McCain ticked their boxes, but he didn't excite them, at all. In 2016, Trump is basically the antithesis of everything I have ever believed in and the embodiment of everything I despise the most in America. He's a hard no for me and meanwhile they're lapping it up. All of it! (I then realize that I actually share no values with the people who raised me, have an existential crises, vote for Gary Johnson, and perm my hair.)

I'm sympathetic to the intellectual merit of the Cargo Cult theory and the demographic change theory (I studied abroad in France while Jean-Marie LePen was handing over the reigns of Le Font National to his daughter.) But for anyone my age, it's a hard sell that the Republican party has any real moral, philosophical, or policy underpinning.

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Delenda Est's avatar

"Was MAGA always the inevitable endpoint of conservatism?"

The answer is Yes.

But that requires us to properly understand just what "Conservatism" is. We need to distinguish it from Liberalism - which is the political philosophy of individual rights and limited government which dates back to the Age of Revolutions in the latter 18th century. The Liberal Revolution smashed the Ancien Regime, otherwise known as the Patriarchate, that throne-and-altar conception of society as organized in terms of vested hierarchy and privilege. The cardinal value of this Regime was ANTI-equality. They understood "freedom" in terms of knowing your place and fulfilling your God-given role in society. Liberalism was aimed like a dagger at this worldview and this anthropology.

Conservative values are the values of Patriarchy. The Patriarchate/the Ancien Regime was brought down by Liberalism, but Patriarchal *values* persist. And not for no reason - Patriarchal values were essential to keep civilization going, when zero-sum competition reigned, levels of economic productivity and technological innovation were in the basement, and life was nasty, brutish, and short.

Those values are less practical for us today, but they still have a tight grip on the minds of many. And one of the most enduring aspects of the Patriarchal worldview is the DENIAL of true universal political equality. The Conservative doesn't *really* believe that we're created equal.

Conservatives are not to be confused with Right-liberals, who really are very different from them. Right-liberals value political equality, but they value individual liberty and small government (which is not to be equated with limited government) more. One of the biggest differences is that Conservatives are permanently tempted by the attractions of authoritarian conservative populism (more succinctly referred to as Fascism), while Right-liberals are diametrically opposed to the Fascists.

The curious byways of American politics however have led the Right-liberals to go into political coalition with the Christian conservative populists; their interests are aligned to the extent that they are skeptical of the Left-liberal emphasis on egalitarianism and a robust measure of equality of outcomes.

We are seeing now however how that coalition is exploding, spectacularly - and in a manner which threatens to bring down the Founders' Experiment.

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