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Conservatives feel a sense both of exclusivity and of exclusion. Conservatism started with aristocratic émigrés from the French Revolution who were from the beginning imbued both with a sense of class superiority and at the same time of being deprived of their rightful place by the tyranny of the common-man majority. And so conservatives harbor distinctly non-democratic ideas that are given ferocity by their feelings of injustice and persecution.
Slaveholders in the Old South were the new aristocracy, so jealously guarded that the South warred to secede from America rather than give it up. The American dream then was to be lord of the manor served by slaves. The make-do substitute today is financial superiority. This need for inequality saturates the heart and soul of the conservative. Of the average man beguiled by the conservative view Corey Robin writes (The Nation, 6/23/08): “His passion is for supremacy, not equality, and so long as he is assured of an audience of lessers, he will be content with his lowly status.” And so all but the most modest of Southern landowners bought a slave, and today all but the poor own stock portfolios. The chance to turn a mere accident of birth or circumstance into an opportunity to lord over other people otherwise indistinguishable from them,-this chance to distinguish oneself from the common masses is vital to conservatives.
Power over others is seen by them as freedom, as the ones lorded over are the dominated ones and hence are not free; only the guy at the top is free. So when a conservative orates about freedom, he is talking about slavery for others. When a conservative intones about defending freedom he is talking about defending his dominion over others. How can America be the land of the free if I do not have the chance to be above others, he would ask. How can America be a free country if it is in thrall to mutual responsibilities and treaties among nations of equal authority? America must either dominate the world or it is no longer free to do what it wants.
Counter to this belief in a pseudo-democratized exclusivity, where everyone can be lord of his manor (as long as he is not the slave, that is), is the belief in the power of the masses to accomplish wonders that advance everyone. Without equality there would not be the masses, but a static hierarchy of domination instead. In the extremest analysis, ants and bees show that a hive is the most efficient social structure. If a hive mentality is not for you, not to worry. The differentiation of product and service functions inherent in commerce is only one example of how the complex human brain does not operate in the same way as the ant brain; we cannot be truly hive beings. We know how wildly different we are in how we think, what our interests are. We can cooperate as equals while being as individually distinctive as any ego could dream of. New Deal precepts, Keynesian economic principles, equalizing forces such as labor unions,-these are empowering to the masses. Conservatism, on the other hand, empowers only self-styled elitists who jealously and savagely guard their power to dominate other people and maintain a fossilized status quo.
So when citizen apologists say that an America not under the sway of conservatism would be a doomed America, they are in a sense quite right. Those who believe in a racist America, or in harsh class lines, will be disappointed in a more democratic America. Those who need to dominate some living being will have to get a sturdy houseplant to abuse in a more democratic America. The America of conservatives, like the slave-holding plantations of the Old South, will one day be gone with the wind. But the America of inspiring achievements accomplished by vast forces of working people happily building a country they can feel invested in,-this America will rise from the rubble of the old America brought down by the collapse of the old, divisive economy. Conservatives’ anti-tax, anti-redistributive ideas would have ultimately yielded a feudalistic society with an aristocracy that didn’t care that feudalism is a stagnant, non-productive economy. The self-pitying cries of the wannabe aristocrats of today, that say that legions of fat, lazy slackers are living in luxury on the hard work of multi-millionaires is an exhibition of how profoundly deluded and deranged the human mind can become when diseased by the evermore self-absorbed, paranoid, and short-sighted greed of conservatism.
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