this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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Thank you for introducing me to Wilhoit’s Law:
It is a really good quote that crystallized for me what conservatives were all about. It just didn’t make a fuck of a lot of sense to me beforehand. Why vote against your interests over and over again?
That, and I also now understand that there is something like 30 percent of the population that doesn’t believe in positive sum games. They think that with every transaction there must be a winner and a loser. Don’t quote me on that exact amount. But it is just a startling amount of people that have some very weird beliefs that lead to fascism.
Fascists are strange creatures indeed.
They claim to be all about logic and rationality, but even a little bit of either blows apart their entire worldview.
"They're taking all of your jobs" while "they're lazy and stealing all of the welfare money".
"It's simply the natural order" yet "we need brutal enforcement to keep it in place".
"It's free speech" yet "ban the books, ban the journalism, jail the journalists".
"America did not do anything wrong" yet "we cannot teach portions of American history".
"War is terrible" yet "we'll blow them to smithereens".
"College education is useless liberal indoctrination" yet "I was incredibly smart which you can tell because I went to Wharton" and "I graduated from Yale".
"Thoughts and prayers are all we can offer for shooting victims because bans won't work" but "let's ban abortion".
To your first paragraph, I would say it still doesn’t make a lot of sense. I do think your average conservative benefits from conservative rulemaking/enforcement in a “sundown town,” look-the-other-way-if-you’re-one-of-us sort of microcosm, but when you look at the effects of conservative policymaking on a macro-social and -economic level, it’s clear that middle-Americans are still getting a worse deal than they would under more progressive regimes.
The second and arguably more important component is that conservatives strongly believe in social hierarchies (even if they are themselves near the bottom). So it doesn't actually matter if their lives get worse, as long as the lives of people below them (i.e. minorities) are even more miserable. In addition, they believe the rich should stay rich and maintain or increase their power, because they naturally deserve it (this would have been the monarchy and the landed gentry/nobility etc in the past).