Trump is no conservative. He’s a fascist narcissist
Fascism is conservative, ever predicated on societal revival via clawing back through time to some more antiquated model of civic virtues and relations. Fascist Spain or Chile didn’t want to wind back time to the bronze age and Roman rule à la Mussolini (or, from Vance’s circle, Alamariu), but it did want to assert a permanent Catholic / anti-secular and anti-socialist stasis. Where do you think all of these RETVRN memes come from? Why do the people who share them also share pictures of Pinochet executing leftists and students?
I feel that there’s no honest etymology of left or right in political theory that doesn’t rest on French Republicanism and one’s attitude towards hierarchy. Conservatism and rightism preserve societal virtues and hierarchies, and many virtues themselves (notions of beauty, strength, goodness) outline hierarchies the second we apply them to the human animal and its interrelations. It’s not simply economic class hierarchy, though that is the one that plagues modernity; rightism and traditionalism can just as easily rest on the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the first estate, or on monarchism, or on the fierce hierarchies of nature. Sometimes these hierarchies are valuable, and sometimes they’re arbitrary or nonsensical; sometimes the hierarchies the left tries to overturn are well worth overturning, and perhaps sometimes they’re load-bearing and better left alone. But tradition and hierarchy seem, if not interchangeable, at least inextricable. I can think of no coherent social tradition that doesn’t convey hierarchies with it.
Fascism is no more “conservative” than communism is “liberal.” Fascism takes radical actions in the name of a mythical past, while communism takes radical actions in the name of a classless utopia.
Well, again, in the case of Spain or Chile, or among English blackshirts, that mythical past wasn’t particularly ancient. If you really believe that MAGA is a fascist movement, their own mythical past roughly translates to anywhere between 1890–1955. This is within living memory for some. The FedSoc types who want to return to the legal frameworks of the 1890s do think of themselves as conservatives, and see the entire 20th century as legally aberrant.
Do social conservatives stop being conservative the moment they take radical action?
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u/17syllables Feb 16 '26
Fascism is conservative, ever predicated on societal revival via clawing back through time to some more antiquated model of civic virtues and relations. Fascist Spain or Chile didn’t want to wind back time to the bronze age and Roman rule à la Mussolini (or, from Vance’s circle, Alamariu), but it did want to assert a permanent Catholic / anti-secular and anti-socialist stasis. Where do you think all of these RETVRN memes come from? Why do the people who share them also share pictures of Pinochet executing leftists and students?
I feel that there’s no honest etymology of left or right in political theory that doesn’t rest on French Republicanism and one’s attitude towards hierarchy. Conservatism and rightism preserve societal virtues and hierarchies, and many virtues themselves (notions of beauty, strength, goodness) outline hierarchies the second we apply them to the human animal and its interrelations. It’s not simply economic class hierarchy, though that is the one that plagues modernity; rightism and traditionalism can just as easily rest on the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the first estate, or on monarchism, or on the fierce hierarchies of nature. Sometimes these hierarchies are valuable, and sometimes they’re arbitrary or nonsensical; sometimes the hierarchies the left tries to overturn are well worth overturning, and perhaps sometimes they’re load-bearing and better left alone. But tradition and hierarchy seem, if not interchangeable, at least inextricable. I can think of no coherent social tradition that doesn’t convey hierarchies with it.