Re: 2020 Democratic Challengers III: Weekend at Bernie's
You've got being wrong down to an art today!
Well, I hope not
only today.
conservatism is an ideology
You're right so far...
an ideology of white power mixed with nostalgia.
You are mixing up the political ideology of conservatism with the cultural movement of conservatism. They are different things, although they are often confused and they are frequently thought to reside in the same people (in reality they rarely do).
Political conservatism, the ideology, is about limited and expressly stated government in which the economic minority of the rich is protected from the numerical democracy of the non-rich with many mechanisms to ensure plutocratic rule. It also frequently explicitly involves agreements between the religion of the elites and the government though in the US we happily dodged that bullet.
Cultural conservatism, the movement, is about social reaction: xenophobia, racism, Bible Thumping sexism and homophobia. It relies implicitly on the assumption of Jeffersonian purity of rural, God-fearing (white, Christian) America against the depraved, urban, Cosmopolitan city slickers. It's the cornerstone of the right in America.
Cultural conservatives are encouraged to think of themselves as economic conservatives by their 0.01% masters because this allows the latter to ram through plutocratic policies which ironically damage those very "salt of the earth" types who profess to believe in it. This is the Great Republican Swindle, and the cultural conservatives still haven't sussed it out.
The National Review never represented anything but think tank conservatism that was used to cover up what really drove Republican voters. Conservatives are as racist now as they were when Nixon deployed the Southern Strategy all those years ago. Trump just made them loud and proud about it instead of hiding behind tax cuts and whatever Ayn Rand bullsh it Paul Ryan is spouting at any given moment.
You are conflating two things. On the latter -- that the American "conservative" masses are as racist now as they ever were -- is absolutely true. In fact they're as racist now as they were when they were Dixiecrats!
But about National Review and the
politically conservative think tanks you are dead wrong. William F. Buckley was the polar opposite of the Ma and Pa Kettle racist Dumpies. He was a true believer in the snide Colleridgean-Burkean economic and political conservatism of the British Ruling Class and its cut rate American cousins at Princeton and Yale in the first quarter of the 20th C. That's why he was so appalled and angered in "God and Man at Yale" that that institution had moved on from Herbert Spencer and Charles Sumner. He was still down with that -- an Elitist O.G.
It really was a shock to guys like David Frum and Francis Fukuyama that the Republican masses didn't give a rat's as-s about their Classical Economic Utopia and were just a bunch of racist rubes. It broke their hearts. That's what Dubya and then even worse Dumpy proved to the intellectual right.
The point of all this is Americans
aren't ideological. They're not sophisticated enough to be anything more than hill people sharpening their knives and enviously eyeing the valley people, and making up slights to justify their raid.
I have no use for Bloomberg and Schultz. However I won't let you revise history in order to get into Bernie's pants. 1) the dude's married, and 2) you're doing "the cause" more harm than good if you continue to trash every Dem (Obama included) who came before the 2016 election. Good luck fighting a war with half an army. All we're missing is your latent misogyny.
Why would you expect robust support from the people who were fighting the wars back then if your attitude is that nothing happened before 2016?
