Why do conservatives wrap themselves in the flag so desperately? Maybe because their ideas are un-American

Curiously, the agrarians, ur-Americans of Southern Protestant extraction, were influenced by the leading figure of the French Counter-Enlightenment, the arch-reactionary ultramontane Catholic Joseph de Maistre. Even in the present day, a Southern apologist for slavery has written a screed for something called the Abbeville Foundation extolling Maistre’s hatred of republics. Evidently, despising the very governmental foundation of the United States has become fashionable for a certain type of reactionary conservative.

Émile Faguet, a French author and critic, called Maistre “a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of pope, king and hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner."

Maistre hits many of the key themes of American conservatism: religious dogmatism, belief over evidence, anti-scientism, the imperative of obedience to hierarchy and a habitual brooding over violence.

The author then continues on to wealth accumulation.

Wiki Link https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_de_Maistre

  • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    32·
    2 months ago

    I’ve been saying the cons are not real patriots and that they hate the real America and the ideals of this country for decades now. Of course all cons will deny this, but so do many “moderates” that seek to tone-police such truths…but it’s fairly obvious that the cons truly do hate this country.

  • Omega@lemmy.world
    221·
    2 months ago

    There’s a reason they stop reading the Constitution at “We the people…” and celebrate the Confederacy.

      • Omega@lemmy.world
        4·
        2 months ago

        If they ever get to the words “promote the general Welfare”, they’ll ban it in schools for promoting socialism.

  • Godort@lemm.ee
    3012·
    2 months ago

    They don’t hate America, they hate what it’s becoming. Which is to say, they want to go back to pre-civil rights, when you were effectively guaranteed success by being a straight, white, and male.

    • 1024_Kibibytes@lemm.ee
      191·
      2 months ago

      And yet you’ve never really been effectively guaranteed success in America unless you were straight, white, male and already rich. And most of them aren’t rich.

      • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
        61·
        2 months ago

        Used to be only land-holding white males had a right to vote. Let’s go back to that and reverse all the woke.

        /s I hate that I have to append this for people to understand sarcasm.

        • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
          4·
          2 months ago

          Hell, isn’t that what Elon is proposing? I think it was him saying it should just be tech bros running shit unless I’ve got the wrong idiot tech bro.

    • Silverseren@fedia.io
      82·
      2 months ago

      When, of course, civil rights has little to nothing to do with it. The current issues with the country in terms of economy, such as rampant inflation, is the result of the very policies conservatives have been extolling for generations. To go back in the manner they want would mean to reduce and revert the impact conservative policies have harmfully built up over the generations.

    • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 months ago

      It’s not an either/or. It’s Zionist Nazis or Zionist lite. Those are currently the two things that have a chance in the upcoming American election. Currently I’ll take slightly less Zionism and keep being involved in trying to get any democratic voting system that’s not FPTP so that we have more than two options.