The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere. . . . The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition,However, I cannot quite understand who these subjects were? What social group did they belong to? I cannot read the whole article as this time as I'm having severe vision and related eye strain problems. Can someone highlight what it says beyond the fears of communism and focus on the weaker (domestic) problems distracting from the world wide theater. One could easily substitute "muslim" or "socialist" in the descriptions I did read. I'm gathering, though, that the author is saying that this nearly violent non policy/practical/programmatic grousing is prevalent in good economic times. He seems to say that the country tends to focus more on panaceas and solutions during depressions. Why are we seeing a good economic reaction during a bad economic time?
We have, at all times, two kinds of processes going on in inextricable connection with each other: interest politics, the clash of material aims and needs among various groups and blocs; and status politics, the clash of various projective rationalizations arising from status aspirations and other personal motives. In times of depression and economic discontent — and by and large in times of acute national emergency — politics is more clearly a matter of interests, although of course status considerations are still present. In times of prosperity and general well-being on the material plane, status considerations among the masses can become much more influential in our politics.posted by Librarygeek at 1:33 PM on August 5, 2010
Slight typo: his last name was spelled Hofstadter.
Conservatives (not necessarily Republicans) have been on the wrong side of every meaningful social question that has faced this country since slavery. 'nuff said.Repeated for truth; I'd appreciate hearing any counterexamples.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 4:34 PM on August 5
Women, who comprise a numerical majority of the population, have been denied a just portion of our nation's rights and opportunities. We reaffirm our pledge to work to eliminate discrimination in all areas for reasons of race, color, national origin, age, creed or sex and to enforce vigorously laws guaranteeing women equal rights.They included it in every platform from 1940 to 1980.
The Republican Party reaffirms its support for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Our Party was the first national party to endorse the E.R.A. in 1940. We continue to believe its ratification is essential to insure equal rights for all Americans. In our 1972 Platform, the Republican Party recognized the great contributions women have made to society as homemakers and mothers, as contributors to the community through volunteer work, and as members of the labor force in careers. The Platform stated then, and repeats now, that the Republican Party "fully endorses the principle of equal rights, equal opportunities and equal responsibilities for women." The Equal Rights Amendment is the embodiment of this principle and therefore we support its swift ratification.
It is impossible to identify him by class, for the pseudo-conservative impulse can be found in practically all classes in society, although its power probably rests largely upon its appeal to the less educated members of the middle classes...As well as the movement's opposition to change and modernization in any form:
He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin.
[The pseudo-conservative] is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics for the past twenty years.In classical Fascist style, like the average Tea Bagger, the pseudo-conservative desires to live in constant, eternal struggle against a vaguely defined "enemy", even to make a living from that act of struggle:
I am aware, for instance, that wealthy reactionaries try to use pseudo-conservative organizers, spokesmen and groups to propagate their notions of public policy, and that some organizers of pseudo-conservative and “patriotic” groups often find in this work a means of making a living — thus turning a tendency toward paranoia into a vocational asset, probably one of the most perverse forms of occupational therapy known to man...There are the instinctive appeals to violent nationalism, the separation of real American and not-real American in present-day politics through ugly, racist and bigoted rhetoric:
Nor will they explain why those who profit by the organized movements find such a ready following among a large number of people, and why the rank-and-file janizaries of pseudo-conservatism are so eager to hurl accusations, write letters to congressmen and editors, and expend so much emotional energy and crusading idealism upon causes that plainly bring them no material reward.
In this country a person’s status — that is, his relative place in the prestige hierarchy of his community — and his rudimentary sense of belonging to the community — that is, what we call his “Americanism” — have been intimately joined... Because we no longer have the relative ethnic homogeneity we had up to about eighty years ago, our sense of belonging has long had about it a high degree of uncertainty...The extension of that nationalist appeal is disdain for intellectualism — a populist disdain for an intellectual elite, which we can find embodied in the appeal of empty-headed, folksy figures like Sarah Palin:
In their search for new lives and new nationality, these immigrants have suffered much, and they have been rebuffed and made to feel inferior by the “native stock,” commonly being excluded from the better occupations and even from what has bitterly called “first-class citizenship.”...
Of course there is no real reason to doubt the loyalty to America of the immigrants and their descendants, or their willingness to serve the country as fully as if their ancestors had lived here for three centuries. None the less, they have been thrown on the defensive by those who have in the past cast doubts upon the fullness of their Americanism.
Some of the old-family Americans have turned to find new objects for their resentment among liberals, left-wingers, intellectuals and the like — for in true pseudo-conservative fashion they relish weak victims...Hofstader comes so close to recognizing these aspects of the pseudo-conservative-cum-Tea Party movement before denying them altogether:
Naturally it is resented, and the demand for conformity in public becomes at once an expression of such resentment and a means of displaying one’s own soundness. This habit has a tendency to spread from politics into intellectual and social spheres, where it can be made to challenge almost anyone whose pattern of life is different and who is imagined to enjoy a superior social position — notably, as one agitator put it, to the “parlors of the sophisticated, the intellectuals, the so-called academic minds.”...
There has been, among other things, the emergence of a wholly new struggle: the conflict between businessmen of certain types and the New Deal bureaucracy, which has spilled over into a resentment of intellectuals and experts.
Indeed, the idea that it is purely and simply fascist or totalitarian, as we have known these things in recent European history, is to my mind a false conception, based upon the failure to read American developments in terms of our peculiar American constellation of political realities.It can't happen here, he asserts, because Americans simply cannot fall prey to Fascism — it remains an assertion without any defense but its own incredulity at the very notion.
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posted by grumblebee at 1:21 PM on August 5, 2010