re: #27 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

As someone who’s been making social connections in a blood red state, in a community of petit bourgeois conservatives, I really think the thing that’s changed it that you can’t abstract conservatism anymore.

Material conditions have changed in ways that demonstrate that conservative fiscal policy cannot be pried away from their social policy: that shit didn’t work, and conservatives still won’t acknowledge that but are now open about whipping the poor to extract value from them. Furthermore, a bunch of Cold War hawk shit has been contextualized by…people having access to more information about the specifics of how that actually “worked”…a constant string of confident predictions that created large body counts and didn’t deliver the goods but did produce a lot of shady characters that in turn created new crises and body counts.

Social conservatism is viscerally consistent in what it wants, but it’s positions benefited from the way that their targets could be turned into just-so-stories, folklore that explains the world: that abortion-seekers are loose women, that foreigners are Communists, etc are all easier heuristics to float when those people can’t speak for themselves through worldwide reporting or social media. Fox News plows the rut it does precisely because it was necessary to create a permanent interpretative frame that makes conservatism Utilitarian But Also Divinely Right—and that’s super effective—but over time it’s revealed the artifice of how conservative consensus is created, and that most of the actors in creating that frame are cynics and bullshitters.

Like…we have fascists now because fascists spring up as an explanation for why capital…and those that serve capital…can’t have been wrong, can’t have done policy that made most people’s life worse. To deny the obvious state-facilitated redistribution to the wealthy, you have to invent an occulted redistribution by a malefic and alien Them. But you can see the intermediate step of this process…the ur-fascist experiments with speaking into being a successful American fascism in the churches and AM radio stations of the last three decades: the whole time they had power and their shit didn’t work, conservatives were building that manifold of blame and othering.

(The War on Terror was a catalyst that made this process speed up, because it integrated into day to day conservative discourse imagery plucked from high conspiracism—The Protocols, the Red Scare—but the process had already started with Gringrich-ian framing of politics and the AM-pundit fostering of sadism as virtue)

More and more I interact with two kinds of conservative social expression: those that have dived into the contradictions and embraced Trumpism, and those that keep up a constant disavowal—they aren’t *that* kind of conservative, unreasonable people have mysterious obtained power. The former I’ve just had to eject from my life—you just can’t talk to them without the conversation bending towards their entitlement and the inferiority of others—but the latter are just fucking sad-and-exhausting because they’ve just disassociated…they believe the same things, vote the same interests, and refuse to engage with the possibility that the present is informed by the past.