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The One Real Party: Pseudoconservatives

Having grown up with Tory leanings, I took from the cradle a few very basic, truly conservative assumptions:

1. Human nature is fixed, constant and knowable.
2. There is much to be learned from the study of the past, and from the thinkers of the past.
3. Weakness drives more behavior than virtue.
4. You get what you pay for; there's no such thing as something for nothing.

America's self-described "conservatives" clearly believe none of this. Their view of humanity is meliorist at best (when that serves them) and usually Panglossian. They assume that the people of America today are wiser than their predecessors, therefore we have no need to study history, or even the news, to avoid mistakes there chronicled. The spiritual father of the movement is Henry Ford, an Apostle of the Free Market System, publisher of The International Jew, both darling and admirer of Adolf Hitler, and author of the sentiment: "History is bunk."

"Conservatives" believe that we modern Americans are too wise to allow inquisitions or holy wars -- therefore we should improve the general morality by establishing Christianity as the official religion of America, and the world if possible. Iraq and Abu Grahib are not allowed as counterevidence -- because 9/11 changed everything. They believe that the new man is too good to allow slavery, sexism, or discrimination, so the government shouldn't concern itself with discouraging such things. They believe that superstition is dead as the dodo, therefore we will have no with witch hunts. (Except possibly for the War on Drugs, the hunt for Day-Care Satanists, and the trial-free war on terror.) The wisdom of free markets coupled with the basic goodness of the American citizen will see that justice is done.

"Conservatives" believe that "God will think of something," therefore we don't have to worry about the ecology or oil collapse. And because we, or at least the Bush people, can create our own reality (through prayer perhaps) we can lower taxes and finance a $120 million-per-day war of indefinite duration -- without serious consequence. Surely God will divinely inspire a cold-fusion, perpetual motion machine that will enable the Free Market to bail us out later. And surely all those video games will hone the skills needed by soldiers in the war on terror.

On the other hand conservatives, like Tom DeLay, know that even the new, good, wise supersitition free American is a sinner, so unless Hell yawns below us we will lose all moral impulse. That's why our divinely inspired Founding Fathers insisted on the Bill of Wrongs, and inserted Ten Commandments into the Declaration. Or was it the Constitution? We could ask George Will. He wears a bowtie.....

Remember the party mantra: 9/11 changed everything, the laws of thermodynamics, the tendency of power to corrupt, the difference bewteen right and wrong, the time/space continuum -- everything.

posted by Kalkaino @ 11:03 AM