No Worries - Big Daddy Will Take Care of Us

When the movie The Lion King came out, one review I read panned it for its "un-american" theme. The movie was un-american, the reviewer claimed, because the oppressed animals who suffered under the dictatorship of a usurper did nothing to liberate themselves. Instead, they just waited for a more congenial strong leader to come along and rescue them.

That's not the American story. That's not independence. That's not freedom and liberty.

That's authoritarian submission. That's slavery. That's conservatism.

Digby, on the Yearning To Be Subjects:

Today's Paul Waldman piece about why people consistently support cutting the estate tax is interesting even if I still don't understand the psychology that makes average Americans so committed to allowing very wealthy heirs a loophole you can drive a gas guzzling limousine through. But it did remind me of this essay by Phil Agre that used to get a lot of circulation in the early days of the blogosphere. It's important to understanding just how important this estate tax concept is to our fundamental view of democracy and specifically American democracy, particularly how it relates to conservatism. But it's larger thesis is one that gets more and more relevant every day.

From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.

The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals often theorize that conservatives use "social issues" as a way to mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy, are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply to be aristocrats.

More generally, it is crucial to conservatism that the people must literally love the order that dominates them. Of course this notion sounds bizarre to modern ears, but it is perfectly overt in the writings of leading conservative theorists such as Burke. Democracy, for them, is not about the mechanisms of voting and office-holding. In fact conservatives hold a wide variety of opinions about such secondary formal matters. For conservatives, rather, democracy is a psychological condition. People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.

The defenders of aristocracy represent aristocracy as a natural phenomenon, but in reality it is the most artificial thing on earth. Although one of the goals of every aristocracy is to make its preferred social order seem permanent and timeless, in reality conservatism must be reinvented in every generation. This is true for many reasons, including internal conflicts among the aristocrats; institutional shifts due to climate, markets, or warfare; and ideological gains and losses in the perpetual struggle against democracy.

In some societies the aristocracy is rigid, closed, and stratified, while in others it is more of an aspiration among various fluid and factionalized groups. The situation in the United States right now is toward the latter end of the spectrum. A main goal in life of all aristocrats, however, is to pass on their positions of privilege to their children, and many of the aspiring aristocrats of the United States are appointing their children to positions in government and in the archipelago of think tanks that promote conservative theories.

read on, there's much more ...

I would just add this:

"Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions." --- Thomas Paine

When the teabaggers, rethuglicans and other conservatives talk about "liberty," "freedom" and "security," remember that what they really mean is liberty from autonomy, freedom from independence and the security of serfdom.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?