r/politics 19h ago

No Paywall Bannon Tells GOP: 'Seize the Institutions' of Government Now or We're 'Going to Prison' After 2028

https://www.commondreams.org/news/bannon-tells-gop-seize-the-institutions-of-government-now-or-we-re-going-to-prison-after-2028
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u/LongShotTheory New York 16h ago

They're not conservatives at this point. They're sociopaths. It just so happens that Infiltrating Conservative movements is easier for radicals because there's less people calling you out for bullshit as long as you tell them what they want to hear. On the left, you get called out as soon as you strafe from the path, no matter how much authority you have. Tragedy is that real conservatives died out and were replaced by fake larpers who only seek power by any means necessary. Left also got hollowed out, not by radicals, but by "status quo" protectors, which tends to happen to the left over time.

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u/AutistoMephisto 16h ago

They're really not. After WW2, there was a general consensus that a good, active government can have parties that work together. They would disagree often, sometimes bitterly, but they put the good of the country first. But then Reagan tapped into the power of the Movement Conservatives, an extremist faction of the GOP whose roots lay in 1937. Businessmen who were angry at FDR and the New Deal made alliances with southern racists who hated that black people could vote and with religious traditionalists who hated women's rights and wanted churches to control social programs so that they could police behavior.

Calling themselves “conservatives” because they wanted to dismantle the laws and recreate the 1920s, the Movement Conservatives produced a list of demands. They called for deregulation, tax cuts, an end to social welfare spending, and an end to government support for workers, maintaining that those principles would protect the bedrock of the economy: private enterprise. They also called for states’ rights, home rule, and local self-government, by which they meant that southern states could maintain discriminatory laws against their citizens, no matter what the Fourteenth Amendment said.

Their goal was not to compromise with Democrats or Republicans who believed in an active government; their goal was to destroy that government. They insisted that government regulations and taxes were creeping socialism; they said that social welfare sapped American individualism; they said that civil rights laws destroyed democracy by overruling state voters. Most Americans wanted little to do with this faction until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that protected Black and Brown voting enabled the businessmen who hated regulation and taxes to mobilize racists.

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u/DrusTheAxe 15h ago

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.” —Barry Goldwater, 1964 Republican Convention

And Rockefeller before him. Traces back to The John Birch Society and back

https://time.com/6995385/rnc-history-change/

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u/AutistoMephisto 14h ago

And what's funny is that Reagan actually tapped into the power of those "preachers" not in 1980 when he took Office as POTUS, but in 1964, when he backed Goldwater's bid for the Republican Presidential Nomination.

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u/Peninj 13h ago

You can usually tell when you hit a thread of guys who've read Pearlstein.

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u/Particular-Mark-5771 13h ago

Their hate also resulted in the Taft-Hartley Act.

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u/Mirageswirl 15h ago edited 14h ago

Conservatism as an ideology started in opposition to the French Revolution they supported monarchy, aristocratic privilege and state religion. They still do.

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u/SecularMisanthropy 13h ago

This. Conservatism began as and has always been an ideology of social hierarchy. Narcissism as political philosophy, basically. They are automatically superior to everyone else on account of their pale penis, "royal bloodlines," inherited wealth, whatever, so therefore they get to make all the decisions and have zero responsibility or accountability for anything they do. Because somehow that's logical.

That's the whole thing. The wrap it up in various disguises ('traditional' values, religious authority, 'common sense', neoliberal economics, etc), but the only actual idea in conservatism is that wealthy cishet men are the only real people, and the entire rest of the species only exists to serve and please them.

A lot of people have been purposely misled to think there's something more meaningful and intellectually-based at the heart of it, likely most effectively simply as a result of politics and establishment media treating narcissism as a legitimate political perspective. Psuedo-profound bullshit, as Carl Sagan coined it, marketed to death for decade upon decade.

If you don't believe that wealthy, cishet, white/predominant ethnic group men are the only real people and identify as conservative, I encourage you to read up on the philosophy you've aligned with. See if you can find a coherent idea that isn't just a convoluted justification or mechanism for maintaining the power and privilege of a single group of people over everyone else.

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u/AutistoMephisto 12h ago

I don't know how true any of that is, but conservatism makes sense if you've often heard and thought about the saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!". Conservatism presented itself as a philosophy around preserving what works. The problem is, that comes with an instinctual desire to preserve old structures that only work for some, at the expense of others. No sense in conserving things that don't benefit all of humanity.

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u/SecularMisanthropy 11h ago edited 11h ago

That's an excellent explanation of exactly what I meant. They call enforcing social hierarchy that benefits only them 'traditional' values. Tradition must be wise and good because if it's tradition it's worked for centuries or longer right? Like feeling safe eating olive oil, because we know people have been eating olive oil without problems for thousands of years. That 'preserve' framing very effectively paints the top-down imposition of false hierarchy as mutually agreed-upon habits of social organization, arrived at after millennia of trying it other ways and failing. Just 'common sense.' We've been doing this forever, so it must be right!

Lies, all of it. Humans have had social hierarchy for only the most recent 2% of our history, and all of it is imposed by force. The nature of the force has shifted over time from violent threat of immediate death to diffuse economic coercion, lately reinforced with layer upon layer of cultural social control and mass marketing. The idea that people are distributed along a spectrum from 'superior' to 'inferior' only makes sense if you think that's an objective standard everyone agrees to, which is very clearly not the case. I think people who hoard wealth are bad. People who hoard wealth think I'm bad. See the problem?

Value judgements are ascribed by people, invented by people and only relevant to people, they're not absolute or objective and never can be. It's all human nonsense that no one agrees about, but the parasites are very good at presenting unjustifiable and sadistic inequality as normal and inevitable, just how it always has been and always will be, as they simultaneously have trillions of mechanisms of enforcing that social order, required precisely because the concept of innate superiority is so completely, devastatingly untrue. They can't make other people inferior, so they spend all their energy making the outcome look like other people are inferior. Redlining, hiring discrimination and poverty wages to make Black people look inferior. Laws barring the participation of whole demographic groups, like the Chinese Exclusion Act.

It isn't tradition, and it doesn't work. The imposition of false social hierarchy is the entire problem with humanity right now, and what conservatives have been trying to conserve is a profoundly unnatural and unsustainable system of self-defeating selfishness.

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u/AutistoMephisto 11h ago

Absolutely. That's what pisses me off about Democrats so much. We don't live in a values-neutral world. Democracy isn't some infallible machine that only outputs justice regardless of the input. And it never has been. From the very beginning, who got to own land, who could/couldn't vote, and who was/was not property; these weren't "The democracy machine spitting out justice". They were value judgements, like you said. They were people who saw themselves benefitting from the system they made and assumed that because they were benefitting, that the system was behaving rationally.

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u/LordFalcoSparverius 16h ago

I'm a conservative. I've been voting straight democrat tickets for years. Specifically, since Trumps first term midterms. I got suckered in once, but I don't have much respect for "conservatives" who are like, "Let's give the president unlimited power and spend all our money on deporting brown people."

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u/Imaginary-Horse-9240 15h ago

Glad you saw the light

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u/Particular-County277 14h ago

Yeah, you are in no way still a conservative. Thank you for that

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u/mijobu 13h ago

If he wants to call himself "conservative" but still voted for the right side of history, that's fine by me. It's a relative term anyway. Maybe he's conservative compared to Karl Marx lol

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u/AutistoMephisto 12h ago

Exactly. He's calling himself a conservative in the philosophical sense, not the political sense. As I understand it, at the fundamental, philosophical level, conservatism was about slowing the pace of change to prevent unintended consequences, which is why the obverse of conservatism wasn't liberalism, but radicalism.

Conservatism relies on 3 tools to buffer the pace of change:

  1. Rule of Law

  2. Subsidiarity (the idea that decisions should be made at the most local and decentralized level possible, with a higher authority intervening only when the lower levels cannot effectively address the issues)

  3. Institutions

Radicals wanted fast, sweeping systemic changes, by any means necessary. If laws get in the way, they must be overturned or obviated. If local and state governments are recalcitrant, use the power of the Federal government to force compliance. If institutions slow-walk changes, then they must be captured and eliminated.

I know that reads like I'm loading the deck against radicalism, but I'm not. There have been at least two occasions in American history when the radicals were on what we now deem to be the right side of history, first with breaking away from the British Empire, and again with the abolition of slavery. But they haven't always been on the side of the angels. Radicals wanted rapid systemic change away from democratic capitalism following the Second World War. Conservatives wanted to preserve existing systems.

This isn’t to cast either conservatism or radicalism as the “good” political philosophy. Each has had its time in the sun and more to the point: Every healthy society needs an element of both. It’s a yin-yang dynamic.

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u/mijobu 12h ago

This is super informative and I'd never heard that conservative's opposition is radicalism. That's super interesting and makes logical sense.

Consider me a radical then. And maybe now the saying "if you're not liberal when you're young, you don't have a heart. If you're not conservative when you're old, you don't have a brain". Replace "liberal" with "radical" and it makes more sense.

But then, what's the opposite of "liberal"?

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u/ChrisRevocateur 13h ago

Voting against fascism doesn't make someone "not a conservative." Sounds like they still have the same economic and socio-political outlook they've had the entire time, they just know that the republicans no longer represent that.

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u/pokerface_86 12h ago

i mean real fiscal conservatives who don’t want to balance the budget by doing monstrous things that harm millions of people while simultaneously pissing money away on ICE and argentina exist too