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We’re getting the right all wrong: The surprising origins of modern conservative movement
Salon ^ | October 24, 2015 | Elias Isquith's interview with Kathryn Olmsted

Posted on 10/25/2015 12:58:50 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife

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To: dila813
Did she actually say this country doesn’t have a left?

She did, and in a sense I agree. The whole "left" and "right" discussion is a distraction that has almost no connection to reality. The real contrast is freedom v. tyranny.

- Today's democrats want to compel people to use low flow shower heads.

- They want to compel people to use the light bulb that our ruling class chooses.

- They want to compel people to pay for abortions for their employees.

- They want to compel people to cater/photograph/host gay "weddings".

- They want to compel people to pretend that anyone who feels male on a particular day is male and that anyone who claims to be more female at the moment is welcome in the little girls' restroom and the cheerleaders' locker room.

- They want to compel people to reject tobacco but to accept marijuana.

- They want to compel people to buy insurance that they neither need nor want.

- They want to compel people to give up the wealth they generate so that it can be redistributed as ordered by our ruling class.

- They want to compel people to disarm so that the people have no opportunity to resist as the commands get even worse (if that is even possible).

What conservatives want is far different. Conservatives do not want power over others. All we want is to be left alone: free to speak as we choose, to write as we choose, to worship and exercise our religion as we choose 24 hours a day and not just for an hour each Sunday morning, to keep and bear arms in exercising our God-given natural right to protect ourselves and our families, and to keep our own property without fear of theft by criminals or by government thugs.

When do we try to control others?

- We try to control criminals, supporting the idea of locking them up to protect the innocent.

- We try to reduce abortions, protecting innocent, unborn lives from the abortion industry, predatory medical researchers, and panicked women who are pressured to decide before they realize the "problem" they want removed is actually a child.

- We try to stop all thieves, whether it is illegals stealing in the secure knowledge that they will be deported instead of jailed, liberals stealing under the delusion that passing a law to allow theft makes it okay, or protected groups of thugs stealing because they have been told their "rage" justifies theft.

- We try to stop other violent crime, encouraging women to be armed to permanently stop rapists and everyone to be armed to prevent other crimes.

Democrats have always been the party of slavery, and they have not changed. The only difference is that today they want to enslave everyone and not just blacks. They want absolute power and control over every moment of our lives. Conservatives want absolute freedom, with government doing only what is necessary to protect that individual freedom. Sadly, the GOP as an organized party is trying to split the difference.

21 posted on 10/25/2015 4:09:28 AM PDT by Pollster1 ("Shall not be infringed" is unambiguous.)
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To: nathanbedford

I frankly don’t know what impresses me more, that you were able to wade through that spittle, or your reply.

Bravo Zulu.


22 posted on 10/25/2015 4:54:02 AM PDT by ziravan (Buck the Establishment.)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
The narrative has many well-known manifestations; there’s the (perhaps apocryphal) story of LBJ claiming the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would “lose” the South for the Democratic Party for “a generation.”

What LBJ actually said was, "That will get us the nigger vote for fifty years."

There's a tape of it (LBJ used Saint Jack's taping system as did Tricky Dick) out there on the interwebs somewhere.

And guess what, Lynden? That fifty years is over!

23 posted on 10/25/2015 4:56:35 AM PDT by metesky (My investment program is holding steady @ $0.05 cents a can.)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
"Modern"?

Exodus 18:21

Moreover thou shalt provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens:

24 posted on 10/25/2015 5:28:10 AM PDT by Theophilus (Be as prolific as you are pro-life.)
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To: nathanbedford

Good essay. Gov. Walker and the WI Legislature successfully changed the argument, the predicate and the venue in regards to public unions. They explained why it had to be done and showed how it could be done and a majority of the residents backed them.

I’m disappointed his campaign never got traction because I believe he could have brought fresh ideas and strategies to this never ending battle.


25 posted on 10/25/2015 5:45:30 AM PDT by randita
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To: Mechanicos
Toward this end, Marcuse-who favored polymorphous perversion-expanded the ranks of Gramsci’s new proletariat by including homosexuals, lesbians, and transsexuals. Into this was spliced Lukacs radical sex education and cultural terrorism tactics. Gramsci’s ‘long march’ was added to the mix, and then all of this was wedded to Freudian psychoanalysis and psychological conditioning techniques. The end product was Cultural Marxism, now known in the West as multiculturalism.

You neglected to mention that as Hitler arose to purge communist descendants of the Spartakusbund, Roosevelt's administration recruited most of the Frankfurt School to infect American universities.

26 posted on 10/25/2015 5:52:18 AM PDT by Carry_Okie (Despotism to liberalism: from Tiberius to Torquemada, and back again.)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

+1


27 posted on 10/25/2015 6:26:45 AM PDT by Bigg Red (Let's put the ship of state on Cruz Control with Ted Cruz.)
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To: Carry_Okie; Mechanicos

I thank you both for your thoughtful and informative commentary.


28 posted on 10/25/2015 6:30:20 AM PDT by Bigg Red (Let's put the ship of state on Cruz Control with Ted Cruz.)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
A lot of people have argued before that the U.S. doesn’t really have a left; it has a center-left that is pretty similar to the center-right in a lot of Western European democracies (Democratic Party), and it has a right and far-right (the GOP); but no left.

Bahahahaha right. No one in the US is 'left', everyone is either center or extreme right.

What if the archetypal founder of the modern right is not a former Dixiecrat or a resentful “Reagan Democrat,” but rather a mega-tycoon like, say, one of the Koch brothers? What if the foundation of conservatism as we know it wasn’t laid by recalcitrant segregationists in the Deep South in the 1960s, but by anti-labor big businessmen in 1930s California instead?

Please. The modern GOPe might have roots the way she describes them, or at least relate back to the far west, but actual conservatives trace our roots to the founding fathers. Pretty simple.

Oh, and of course, racism.
29 posted on 10/25/2015 6:58:41 AM PDT by Svartalfiar
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To: Bigg Red
Since you are interested, the Frankfurt School also included Abraham Maslow and Eric Fromm, fathers both of a cultural and psychological feminist paradigm to break down the family as a source of authority, religion to go with it. Replace the father with the state, turning boys into useless wimps fit for disposal.

There are only two sources of authority in a society: family and the physical force of the state, democratic or otherwise. Break the family, and the state can mold children to whatever pleases whoever is in power: autocrat, oligarchy, or democratic majority shaped by control of public opinion does not matter. Although one could consider religion a parallel hierarchy, in terms of wielding power, religion has usually functioned as a despotic contrivance, a way for few to direct the many. After all, the content of religion is a byproduct of rearing. Without family, the state becomes god.

Socialists know that they can't make it in a free market without tweaking the game, and that takes power, which makes family their enemy. Yet they don't seem to care that in concentrating power they have enabled despotic forces that subjugate everybody. They just want their cut, their piece of it, to wield over others and lord themselves within their accepted limits. That is power. Democrats worship power, which is why so many are infatuated with despots. Every person his own god, with blinders on to ignore their slavery, needing only a whipping boy upon whom to wield revenge.

Thems is us.

30 posted on 10/25/2015 7:14:19 AM PDT by Carry_Okie (Despotism to liberalism: from Tiberius to Torquemada, and back again.)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
Communists, of course, had very progressive ideas about gender roles and race equality.

Sure, they considered ALL of their slaves equally dispensable.

31 posted on 10/25/2015 7:21:46 AM PDT by pepsi_junkie (The only fiscally sound thing dems ever did: create a state run media they don't have to pay for)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

On surprising if you’re a drooling libtard who pictures Colonel Sanders when thinking of conservatives.


32 posted on 10/25/2015 7:46:20 AM PDT by Impy (They pull a knife, you pull a gun. That's the CHICAGO WAY, and that's how you beat the rats!)
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To: nathanbedford

All this hand wringing about how “cultural Marxism” gained its present day hegemony with zero analysis about how that hegemony managed to be victorious. Don’t tell me they played dirty and we played clean. Gramsci is key. While conservatives figerd culture was like grand opera and the society pages, the Frankfort intellectuals dissected notions of modern culture up one side and down the other. It paid off, didn’t it.

What conservative forces do you see approaching that leftist process of cultural analysis? Yah, none. At some deeper, if twisted, level, Marxists anticipated the world of electronic communication as a carrier of culture and worked successfully to maneuver into a position of control of the new information battlefield. They didn’t have to work all that hard in the racist vacuum created by “artists” like D. W. Griffith.

What conservatives need to realize is that “Culture” is not Social Dawrinist “survival of the fittest” when it is obvious that “fitness” in the Age of Information ain’t about making a bigger club, but being smarter. Conservatives need to know in their bones that the wealth of a nation is emphatically not a matter of making money, but resides inside the mind of the sentient individual.

So, yah, we lost the culture battle. And we are paying for that defeat without learning a ding dong thing about our error. Lemme say it again. We F’d up and they won. We F’d up and still haven’t changed a lick. That’s what them Greek drama guys would call a “tragic flaw”. Tragic because there’s no impetus to change anything about how we conduct our business. Why conservatives have absorbed all the crap ideation of our traditional enemies- THE ARISTOCRACY is a sad wonder.


33 posted on 10/25/2015 9:33:45 AM PDT by Yollopoliuhqui
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To: Yollopoliuhqui
The moment you cited The Frankfurt School you had me entirely in your camp because this has been a hobby horse of mine on this forum for years now.

Quite apart from the observations I made concerning the legalistic and constitutional approach to the dominance of leftism, there was always the manipulation of the American psyche by the cultural Marxists. I have long held that culture trumps politics and ultimately culture even trumps the law and, finally, the Constitution itself.

If the left has subverted our epistemology, which it has, small wonder we lose on every front.


34 posted on 10/25/2015 10:59:52 AM PDT by nathanbedford ("Attack, repeat, attack!" Bull Halsey)
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To: nathanbedford

The Frankfort School Marxist Freudians are a part of it. There’s more. As “soft” Marxists or menshevik/Trotskyites, The Frankfurters were not the bomb throwing revolutionaries but they created an intellectual rationale and tolerance for “direct action” that we now see in radical environmentalism and black bloc violence. Marxists today would be unrecognizable by their 1848 or even their 1930’s predecessors. But which is more dangerous in McLuhan’s electronic “Global Village”- the Brigada Rossa/baader-meinhoffite or the smiling enviro multicultural technophobe abortionist?

This is a battlefield of the perceptions, and perceptual manipulation is the weapon of choice. But even this battlefield has its phases and no single approach will be appropriate at all times. Ergo, demographic polling, feedback and data massaging are key weapons systems. The radicals have honed this to a fine art and it got them this far. BUT, phase change- If you manipulate data habitually, the method becomes transparent, people get hip and see the lying. Time is not on the radicals’ side when obsolescence becomes lawful with all the physical inevitability as Newton’s law of gravity.

The entire point of scientific method is to render the future more predictable than witchcraft or augury. If we cannot predict social outcomes better than they can, game over. Hell, the GOP can’t even predict the Trump outcome and it’s a hoot watching them gyre and gimbal in order to save their precious, if obsolete, point of view about what it takes to get elected, let alone what it takes to be a great leader. They learned zip from Romney’s defeat and double zip from the amazing forward jolt Sarah Palin gave McCaine’s campaign, a jolt that caused a white knuckle panic among the lefties, just like Trump is doing today.

What the true conservatives have going for them, their trump card (pun intended) is their enlightened sense of ethics and honesty based upon Christian parables. How conservative Christians allowed the commies to usurp and coopt Christian idealism is one of the great mysteries of the Universe. Yah, I’ll say it, Christianity is fundamentally empathic and in the info wars of the present epoch, empathy is the H-Bomb. Until we perceive human kindness as a necessity rather than a liability in a delusion that we are still in a medieval dog eat dog world, we’re gonna get our butts whipped every time.

Trump is careful to iterate this in in between his tongue lashings; we know he’s a good guy, a guy who would help his neighbor just like any decent ethical Christian. The combination of his hard hitting savvy tempered by the decency of a guy who knows in his yarbles that real Americans stand for fair play, independent sentience and technological optimism, is what is so attractive, and rightfully so. If he picks Palin as his running mate, my head will explode, lol!

Anyhow, to understand what the other major input into the forked tongue of left fascism and right fascism was historically, you have to investigate the 18th century Enlightnment and its bastard step child- romanticism, mainly German Romanticism, as a reaction against a tyrannical Vatican and a reaching out for exotic alternatives which soon morphed into an under reported mania for occult spirituality and hermetic societies in the 19th century, particularly among the ruling classes of the western world. A book that knocked my head off its socket and that should be studied by any student of history is Prof. Dorothy Figueira’s scholarly “Aryans, Jews, Brahmins”. It’s on Amazon.

In this book you discover the ideational relationship between the exploitation prone ruling class nobility, including its contemporary variants on Wall St. and in Banking, and the “New Age” technophobia that characterizes the “progressive” airhead left today. Their goals are identical: to establish a one world government, to de-technologize human society, to reduce the world population, all of which are basically a reincarnation of that theme park of disease, ignorance, superstition and warlordism known as feudalism.


35 posted on 10/25/2015 12:42:50 PM PDT by Yollopoliuhqui
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
She has a book to sell and California agribusiness is her topic. Therefore, she connects California agribusiness with the everything.

Granted, when Reagan (and Nixon and Goldwater) came on the scene there was a lot of talk about how the specifics of California (or Western-state) political culture had shaped them, but they wouldn't have had such a resonance in the rest of the country if their appeal was so closely tied to Golden State or Far West specifics.

The Orange County conservatives one heard so much about in those days, weren't closely tied to the big growers elsewhere in the state, so far as I know, and Reagan-voters elsewhere in the country had even less to do with California's labor struggles.

Just what "caused" the modern conservative movement is hard to say, but it was the problems of the 1970s -- crime, recession, inflation, the Vietnam defeat and Soviet expansion -- that made conservatism popular enough to get Reagan elected. Liberals see race at the bottom of everything, but concerns about busing or affirmative action didn't always have much to do with the crude racism of earlier years.

The Frankfurt School is a red herring. Political movements look for allies and areas to expand into. Even without obscure German theorists, eventually the left would have looked to feminists and gays, as they did to racial and ethnic minorities, to replace white working class men, who were becoming reconciled to capitalist conditions.

Most leftists now don't have much use for the old dead white Germans who hated jazz and deplored popular culture. The views of those who do claim to admire Adorno or Horkheimer don't have much in common with what those thinkers were saying in their own times.

36 posted on 10/25/2015 1:08:23 PM PDT by x
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To: x
Kathryn S. Olmsted is chair of the history department at the University of California, Davis. A historian of anticommunism.
37 posted on 10/25/2015 1:24:25 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Gene Eric
[conservatives] have been fighting against labor unions and social democracy ever since.
As Thomas Sowell pointed out, “social” justice is injustice. And “social” democracy is tyranny.

38 posted on 10/25/2015 4:07:13 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion ('Liberalism' is a conspiracy against the public by wire-service journalism.)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
We’re getting the right all wrong: The surprising origins of modern conservative movement

Who's surprised?

Just read my tag line; been true for years, now!

39 posted on 10/25/2015 6:30:55 PM PDT by publius911 (Pissed?? You have NO idea!)
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