For most of the 55 years that I’ve been writing this column, I’ve struggled with trying to understand the fundamental nature of American conservativism in all its dark fears, profound hatred of progressive policies and the inchoate tangle of its wrath and crass materialism. This last decade, however, with one and a half Trump administrations having battered our psyches, the dark side of conservative America has become as obvious as a blister on your heel.
I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that the Trumpian MAGA right is verging on a uniquely disguised American form of intimidating fascist conservatism, one based on freedom and riches for some and social and economic penury for others — but without widespread torture and assassination …so far.
As a civil libertarian, feminist male, and small business person, the logic of opposites tells me, though, that there is another side to American conservatism that’s been squelched and erased for decades. It’s the conservatism of liberal America.
When it comes to custom, tradition and cultural persistence, people I respect venerate the core American values of diversity, equity, inclusion, conservation, governmental problem solving and active representative democracy.
Their deepest commitments are rooted in the bedrock traditions of the American experiment — the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, an unshakable belief in the virtue of hard work, and an Emersonian reverence for the natural world.
What the Trump and MAGA right calls conservatism abhors the American virtues of equal opportunity, equal pay for equal work and equal justice under the law. It worships the cruel vices of American social, economic and environmental injustice and its goal of advancing the immense fortunes of a social class that believes in a hierarchy based on wealth, exploitation, class hatred, racism, sexism, the exclusion of difference and the preservation of privilege. It stinks with xenophobia and Christian nationalism and aims to keep everyone down and in their place, most brutally those who come to our country seeking opportunity and the illusion of social justice that America still projects.
It’s the cruelty of Trumpian conservatism that makes present politics so grimly alien to the spirit of liberty and moral imperative of compassion. It’s still hard to believe, but this right-wing conservativism makes no bones about its righteous devotion to the crushing cruelty of an institutionalized tradition of patriarchy and white supremacy, and a flagrant indifference to the needs, agency and back breaking effort of the American lower and middle classes.
It seems impossible that voters and the media still take seriously a political regime that tried to overthrow an American election by force, a regime skilled in the sadistic arts of bare knuckle political retribution, one that still isn’t actually killing off its opposition but that doesn’t cringe at hounding its enemies with the tortures of economic and political harassment by partisans of a completely politicized Department of Justice.
Reform minded conservatives of the 18th century, like Edmund Burke, would shudder at such irreverent, violent and immoral tactics. We have two more years to find out if conservative proto fascism in America is capable of becoming
the kind of Hitlerian, Stalinist authoritarian monstrosity that so brutalized the mid-twentieth century world.
I’ll bet on the incompetence of the gang in the Trumpian clown car not to be able to rise above their petty greed, gross amateurism, and sycophantic fawning and throw themselves completely into subverting the laws and customs of fair play. Their chiseling hunger for power will most likely get in its own way and keep us safe from murderous authoritarianism a while longer.
I have to hope that the joke about me among my friends is off the mark — that my predictions are almost always worryingly wrong, and that, in fact, the exact opposite of my fortune telling too often comes true.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
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