,
9 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
@SethCotlar It is stunning in one sense, but it also makes me realize that I was not really listening to some very clear underpinnings of popular conservative thought across a wide spectrum of issues. 1/
@SethCotlar What I'm realizing is that pretty much from the early 1970s onward, everyday American conservativism has had a consistent idea about power--military power, juridical power, political power. 2/
@SethCotlar The top-level, visible substance of that idea is that all such power can and should be used capaciously and without real constraint against groups of people that they believe to be an existential threat. 3/
@SethCotlar These groups are defined racially. And culturally. And nationalistically. There is no concern for procedural protections against military, juridical or political power because they believe themselves protected (for now) by their own racial, cultural and national status. 4/
@SethCotlar But they also believe those protections are in imminent danger of dissolving. Rather than embracing procedural protections and universal rights for all, they want their own protected status reinforced and reestablished. 5/
@SethCotlar Because they believe that should that protection disappear, procedural liberalism will leave them exposed to retaliation from everyone else. In part because they know procedural liberalism never protected minorities or foreigners from illiberal power. 6/
@SethCotlar But deeper still? I think they have a view of power that is bleak and brutalist. They think that Leviathan only barely keeps the lid on. They do not really believe in justice for anyone, only in a kind of providential arbitrariness. That we live in hell and that we all sin. 7/
@SethCotlar And while I think that vision of power is deeply wrong--both empirically and morally--I also think we have refused to reckon with it or engage it, treating it instead as infantile, shallow and incoherent. It's coherent. It's awful, destructive--but it's coherent. 8/
@SethCotlar If it came in a more rarified philosophical form--as it has in the past--we'd see it for what it is. We'd still hate it, but we'd reckon with it.
