the fiery crash

Anonymous asked: if US conservatives are essentially a different type of liberal, then who would true conservatives be? and what are their characteristics?

left-reminders:

Basically conservatism is just another expression of capitalist liberalism, an ideological method the ruling class employs to get traditionalists to support capitalist social relations. Once you start going far enough right towards ultra-nationalism, you’re out of liberalism proper and are now dealing with fascism, the ruling class’s desperate attempt to hold onto capital accumulation when the system is on shaky legs and left-wing thought becomes more common. This is when typical traditionalist “conservative” liberals and propertarian “libertarian” liberals start to slide towards fascism – they recognize that they need to start using more overt and militant tactics to preserve “western civilization” and “freedom” (read: capitalist property rights whereby a select few privatize collectively-used utilities and resources for their own profit). What we saw last night in Virginia was an example of this – fascists trying to “unite the right” under a common banner that recognizes its role in preserving capitalist property rights and white supremacy. Not all conservatives and libertarians are at that point, to be sure, but sooner or later they’ll realize their commonality with fascists, probably when left-wing organization is on the rise again. The wise ones will slide left when they see capitalist contradiction for what it truly is, but most will slide right because their worldviews have been structured so fundamentally around notions of tradition, western civilization, capitalist “freedom”, whiteness, etc. (in short, the status quo).

This may have been a bit of a tangent, but I felt it was necessary to highlight what conservatism truly is within the context of capitalism. Materially, it always serves the ruling class, and it’s used to absorb half the population into a capitalist paradigm under normal circumstances (the other half is “progressive” liberalism, where the people who might be more prone to sliding left are absorbed into the dominant ideology with concessions for marriage equality, some workers rights, some corporate regulation, etc.).

anotherwellkeptsecret:

pet owner: *hears noise*

pet owner: 

(via coccyodynia)

thatdiabolicalfeminist:

“I prefer intelligence to beauty” doesn’t make you deep, you’re literally just replacing one ill-defined social standard based on the interests of the privileged, with another.

Both ideas are social constructs and they’re both being defined by the same white supremacist, classist, ableist cisheteropatriarchy.

When people think about what it means to be intelligent, we largely imagine the kinds of intelligence likely to be found in wealthy abled white cishet men, discounting the contributions of anyone else, with notable exceptions who are praised for their resemblance to those same powerful white men - just as when people think of beauty we’re trained to think of a white wealthy thin abled cis woman, and anyone else can only be beautiful by resembling that narrow ideal.

“What does it mean to be intelligent?” is a question with as infinitely many answers as “What does it mean to be beautiful?” but they’re both shrunk into tiny narrowly-defined boxes in order to be used as tools for maintaining power. Both constructs should be aggressively questioned and reimagined in order to become something other than weapons against those who do not hold social power.

(via gee-quinn)