re: #383 Eclectic Cyborg

But it’s not obeisance, it’s opportunism.

People like Mitch McConnell have been talking about how to game the US system to create de facto Republican monopolization of power for decades. The gaming of Supreme Court appointments was an explicit, you-can-track-the-paper-trail conspiracy. Trump is providing a pretext to experiment with another kind of monopolization of power, but this isn’t new or different in substance from what they’ve done distantly.

The thing to understand here is that conservatives want power more than they want to preserve institutions, and will rapidly change their theories of how institutions should be structured if they can posit an alternate structure that captures more power for longer.

This goes all the way back to “states’ rights”—a bad faith position only taken to justify the institution of slavery—but it’s important to notice that the thing retained is “we deserve power” and the thing that transforms is “how institutional power should in theory be assigned.” All their legal theories affirm a consequent.

It wasn’t too long ago that conservatives presented themselves as for small government…a statement that involved devolution of power to states or even counties…but that wasn’t an ideal they genuinely believed in, just a calculation that if power was assigned that way it would produce their preferred outcomes. Even the push for privatization amounts to capturing power for conservative ends, because more than anything else American conservatives want to assign power to capital-holders: it is better that you governed by your bank, your landlord, and your insurance company than by any political institution that might guarantee rights or liberties.

But in the era of Trump conservatism has reversed because it sees a path to fully capturing the power of governance far faster, without dismantling useful coercive structures: rigging the courts, stopping the legislature from functioning, and asserting a unique theory of executive license.

If this fails, they’re not going to stop because it’s not about Trump, it’s about any method of capturing power. The next theory…including ones that just straight up are about coups and secession…will also affirm the consequent that their kinds of people should have unchecked power.