"...Plato's political programme, far from being morally superior to totalitarianism, is fundamentally identical with it."—Karl Popper ("The Open Society & Its Enemies")
There are clear parallels between Plato's politics and Edmund Burke's conservatism.
There are clear parallels between Plato's politics and Edmund Burke's conservatism.
Burke, like Plato & Marx, was a historicist. Unlike Marx, Burke/Plato have a right wing historicist political ideology. Per Plato, all social change or "progress" is actually degradation, degeneration, & corruption. We must arrest or halt change to keep society from degenerating.
Burke's philosophy of history was essentially identical to Plato's. All social "progress" is really degradation and should be slowed as much as possible. The similarity is not accidental. Burke was a Christian conservative & Christianity is a form of Platonism.
Christian theology (especially Western Christian theology) comes more from Plato & Plotinus than from the Bible. As a good Christian, Burke was a disciple of Plato rather than Christ—because that's what "Christian" really means, a devout Platonist!
As a Christian/Platonist, Burke was opposed to social progress. But, unlike Plato, he didn't want to stop social change but merely slow it down. To Burke, progress is inevitable. Trying to stop it merely leads to insurrection & hastens social change, so it's better to slow it.
Conservatism was not without its positive insights (e.g. the value of stability & security; the recognition of the problematic nature of revolution & insurrection), but it also logically leads to totalitarianism when carried too far.
Burke's conservatism didn't carry it that far—he was a classical liberal rather than a fascist like Plato. Ultraconservatives like R.J. Rushdoony & Gary North—"theonomists" or "reconstructionists"—seek to impose biblical law in America. They're honest conservatives to the core.
Their extremist ideology is just conservatism taken to its logical conclusion. Their ideas are perfectly consistent with the principles of Burke, even though Burke would have despised such an ideology.
The totalitarian nature of the rightwing in America today is, though completely out of touch with conservative principles, somewhat logically connected to conservatism. They reject the anti-revolution & anti-insurrection aspects of conservatism, but cling to other aspects of it.
Their desire is to halt social change, impede social progress, and even turn back the clock—get the queers back in the closet, the immigrants to go away, the women back in submission, and the blacks back on the plantations. That's what the Republican Party really is for today.
The Republican Party isn't about conservatism but rather about regressivism—it wants to undo the good social progress that has already been made. It wants to restore the patriarchy, the racial hierarchy, the tyranny of the ruling class.
But the modern right is eclectic, far too diverse & discombobulated to be summarized in such a concise way. There's the rightwing libertarians & anarcho-capitalists, who don't want to change things back but want to make a new society based on propertarian principles.
These rightwing anarchists want to abolish the State by privatizing it—private police, private courts, private militias. Then there's a different sort of rightwing anarchist in the Alt-Right: the discordians and chaotes, chaos magick practitioners.
These folks worship Discordia (mostly jokingly) and seek to spread the chaos of negative "anarchy." They want Trump because of his incompetence because they want the State and the economy to collapse. But they're anarcho-fascist.
These rightwing anarcho-fascists want to collapse the system just to replace it with a totalitarian ethno-nationalist system. This, of course, is compatible with the perpertarian anarcho-fascism of the anarcho-capitalists. Panarchy/pan-anarchism is seen as a way of uniting these.
The American right is not united. They've come together under Trumpism, the banner of the dumbass misogynist dictator, but they have no shared principles. Their goals conflict.
The regressives & ultra-conservatives want to turn the clock back and restore the stable class rule of olden days, but the anarcho-fascists have an entirely different agenda that directly conflicts with that agenda.
That's essentially what the American right is now though, a muddled mess of garbage ideologies united around misogyny, racism, & idiocy for the time being.
The shit-bags advocating these garbage ideologies are at the wheel, steering the right, but the voting base is mostly just duped ignorant folks that don't know what's going on. They're on board b/c they share the Alt-Right's prejudices towards queers, immigrants, & black people.
