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Seems to me that a lot of the U.S. media’s struggles to cover the rise of far-right extremism - aside from cynical ignorance about its impact on so many vulnerable communities - is a basic misunderstanding re: conservative & reactionary political traditions. Some thoughts: 1/10
Take Edmund Burke, arguably the most important conservative theorist of the last four centuries. He was a supporter of the crown & aristocracy. He believed in natural hierarchies. He stressed the importance of faith in society. 2/10
Burke, however, was also a fierce critic of the East India Company’s brutality in South Asia, he was sympathetic to Irish and American causes of the era albeit w/o supporting their respective revolutionary initiatives or being a republican. The point? 3/10
Burke believed in progress — but slow, considered, deliberate progress, achieved thru sometimes glacial, generational change. No, he was not a “progressive” figure as such. But there was a method, a theory of society & its evolution. 4/10
Contrast w/ reactionary tradition that emerges after the French Revolution, winds its way thru continental Europe throughout the 19th century, eventually birthing various fascist/white supremacist offshoots in the 20th century on both sides of the Atlantic. 5/10
Here the objective is coercive “counter-revolution”, where revolution is any real or imagined social transformation: the fall of monarchist regimes, the spread of the franchise, women’s liberation, decline of organized religion etc. 6/10
Bc reactionaries perceive these changes as an existential threat to themselves & their social position, they feel entitled to use force to roll back such changes, to capture & use the state to enforce their will, their preferred social order (e.g. white supremacy etc). 7/10
In effect, they reject the very idea of change as such, and are willing to use organized violence - either via the state or thru terrorism - to prevent it, to liquidate its agents & champions. Precisely what the KKK, for instance, tried to do in both 19th & 20th centuries. 8/10
Hence, a lot of what passes today for mainstream conservativism in the U.S. has more in common w/ the reactionary tradition than it does w/ Burke’s Tory line, IMO. That wasn’t always the case but it is presently the case. 9/10
Thus actual “classical conservatism” is more comfortably situated in the contemporary Democratic Party, than in the “actually existing” GOP. I’ll leave my Americanist colleagues to sort out the implications of that, but it seems worthwhile to recognize above distinction. 10/10
