Food for thought below.
"The rise of conservative politics in postwar America is one of the great puzzles of American political history. For much of the period that followed the end of World War II, conservative ideas about the primacy of the free market, and the dangers of too-powerful labor unions, government regulation, and an activist, interventionist state seemed to have been thoroughly rejected by most intellectual and political elites. Scholars and politicians alike dismissed those who adhered to such faiths as a "radical right," for whom to quote the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter politics "becomes an arena into which the wildest fancies are projected, the most paranoid suspicions, the most absurd superstitions, the most bizarre apocalyptic fantasies." How, then, did such ideas move from their marginal position in the middle years of the twentieth century to become the reigning politics of the country by the century's end?" Kim Phillips-Fein ('Invisible Hands')
"As a political force, American conservative movement has been morally and philosophically bankrupt for decades, which is one of the big reasons we are where we are right now. Largely in the interest of preserving their own power and empowering a massive money-grab by the class they represent, Republicans have cobbled together cynical coalitions by trying to appease multiple constituencies with competing and often contradictory interests: Libertarians, the Christian right, the post-industrial white working class, finance capital and the billionaire caste. "
From Edmund Burke to Mr. Burns: In the age of Trump, conservative thought has died at last
"All conservatism begins with loss," Andrew Sullivan writes. "If we never knew loss, we would never feel the need to conserve." That’s why the first and still canonical conservative text is Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France," a lamentation on the uprooting of that country’s monarchical order. And that’s why America, as an experiment in modernity, hasn’t had many genuine conservatives in its history." 'A Guest of My Time' 'The Kennan Diaries,' by George F. Kennan
