The Aristocrats
by digby
Gilliard has posted a rundown of the recent Fall of the House of Bush. You can certainly understand why the patriarch might cry in public. But what's most fascinating is this amazing picture.
It reminded me of this article by Phil Agre from a few years back that I've been meaning to discuss as we watch the edifice of modern conservatism start to crumble. It's an interesting piece, but what's really important is something that is so obvious that we sometimes forget about it with all the Neo-con and Theo-con intellectual babble of recent years:
From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.
The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals often theorize that conservatives use "social issues" as a way to mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy, are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply to be aristocrats. More generally, it is crucial to conservatism that the people must literally love the order that dominates them. Of course this notion sounds bizarre to modern ears, but it is perfectly overt in the writings of leading conservative theorists such as Burke. Democracy, for them, is not about the mechanisms of voting and office-holding. In fact conservatives hold a wide variety of opinions about such secondary formal matters. For conservatives, rather, democracy is a psychological condition. People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.
There's been a lot of rightwing populist talk in recent years and plenty of econobabble about "the ownership society" and the rest. Modern conservatism's most successful strategy was to merge public relations and politics into a seamless operation in which it could use modern marketing methods to convince people to vote against their own interests. (Perhaps we are seeing the first signs of how that can blow back on them. We'll see.)
But looking at that amazing picture of the Bush clan in the White house --- the former president, the current president, the Governor of one of the largest states --- all together in the White House says everything you need to know about what true conservatism is really all about.
We allowed them to impeach the duly elected president who beat the father, for trivial reasons. We allowed the father's appointees to settle a dubious election result in the son's favor. We have watched them as they created a presidency insulated from popular or congressional oversight in which they have gone so far as to set forth the idea that the president has no obligation to follow the law. They lowered taxes on the very rich to a level not seen in many decades and created an income disparity between the very, very rich and everyone else that is unprecedented in the modern era. They eliminated the single best means of ensuring that an aristocracy will not truly form --- the estate inheritance tax. The ten year campaign to repeal it was bankrolled by 18 of the richest families in America.
Who says Bush isn't a real conservative? Why he's the most purely conservative president in American history.
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