26 February 2021

A Different Kind of Hoodie

The Confederate Political Action Committee conference has demonstrated that it's not about "conservatism" at all. It's about allegiance to the plantation economy prior to passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The only way that an "originalist" or "social conservative" reaches this result is by ignoring every "amendment" to the 1787 text… which sort of eliminates protections against the evils of government regulatory takings (Amd. V) and sort of undermines state sovereign immunity so necessary to a Confederate mindset (Amd. XI). It's about pretending that Pasteur, Koch, and Lister never developed the germ theory of disease <SARCASM> OK, so they were furriners. And it was after the Eleventh Amendment, so it wouldn't count anyway. </SARCASM>

No, this isn't about ideology at all: This is about tribalism. About giving voice to only the "right" people — those who look just like they do, dress just like they do, talk just like they do (including all malapropisms and rejecting anything not in good 'murikan Anglish), dress just like they do (easier thanks to recent President's Day sales at Montgomery Ward Sears KMart Penney's Wal-Mart, even if the sheets were imported).

And reject everyone and everything that is Other, in any discernable respect. Foreigners. Other races and ethnicities. Non-christians (different tribes of Abraham, different religious frameworks entirely, no religion at all). Nerds and intellectuals who aren't using "learning" solely as a means to more power. And we won't even mention those sexual issues that, statistically, are non-zero within their own population (however suppressed they may be).

They'll never manage to ponder whether there's not just implicit, but explicit, acknowledgement of fallibility and the need for change built right into the Constitution, and not just implicit, but explicit, denial of states'-rights supremacy built right into the pre-Thirteenth-Amendment Constitution. CPAC demonstrates "my party right, never wrong" to an extent rejected as consistent with any reasonable conception of "civilization" at Nürnburg (<SARCASM> oops, international law, so it doesn't count </SARCASM>). Plus, the Confederacy lost — get over it.

In short, "movement conservatism" has little to do with conservative thought — Burkean, Hayekian, whatever — beyond convenient marketing memes. And CPAC has even less, whether held virtually or in Cancun (paid for by whom, one must wonder).