Onyx Lynx

You value most what was denied to you or your oppressors are hellbent (see ALEC sponsored voter ID suppression laws as a prime example of that). in trying to take away from you. It's also never far from our minds that people shed blood and sacrificed their lives in order for us to get our precious right to vote. .

Those statements are uttered far too frequently from people who want a third party in the United States or who support third party candidates because they don't like the Democratic or Republican candidates for whatever reason.

My father, a World War II veteran, entertained my schoolboy dreams of military fame and fortune. But one day while sitting in the family car, he told me we were going to take a trip to the VA Hospital. He wanted me to see the “basket cases”—men with no arms or legs, their bodies destroyed by war. I was scared, embarrassed, as my made-in-Hollywood and by video game militarism and masculinity wilted away. I never did take the trip to the VA. It’s easy to play wannabe soldier when you don’t have to face the human consequences of when the bullets are real, and the pain is not pretend.

Neoliberalism is a product of late 20th century capitalism and a belief that the market should control every aspect of social, political, and economic life. It uses the language of “efficiency,” “choice,” “freedom,” “hard work,” and “opportunity” to seduce the public into believing that the “the Commons” ought to be eliminated. Corporations, in this twisted vision, should run all things. The concept of collective bargaining, positive liberty and freedom, and that the state and government can do good, are anathema to it. Neoliberalism transcends party lines. To varying degrees, it is the political religion and a type of uncontested commonsense for both Republicans as well as “New Democrats” like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Oh, so people making under 50k are voting for Hillary. I guess they're not "real progressives" either, joining the ranks of the impure and unclean such as red state Democrats (who don't count), Southern Democrats (who reall[y] really don't count), Democrats over 40 (who don't count), Dems making over $50,000 (who don't count and are probably all paid shills) and black Democrats (who never counted but if they would only do exactly what we tell them to do maybe they would).

Of course, Ross [Douthat] acknowledges, reactionary thinking isn't always entirely proper:

Those politics were frequently racist and anti-Semitic, the reactionary style gave aid and comfort not only to fascism but to Hitler, and in the American context the closest thing to a reactionary order was the slave-owning aristocracy of the South.

But let's not ignore the good side! Reactionaries do make assumptions that sometimes correspond to the truth! At least Ross thinks they do!

Reactionary assumptions about human nature — the intractability of tribe and culture, the fragility of order, the evils that come in with capital-P Progress, the inevitable return of hierarchy, the ease of intellectual and aesthetic decline, the poverty of modern substitutes for family and patria and religion — are not always vindicated. But sometimes? Yes, sometimes. Often? Maybe even often.

If you just subtract the racism and anti-Semitism and keep the assumptions that might sometimes be valid—maybe even often, Ross thinks!—what's not to like? That's just how science works, right? (Spoiler: No.)

The primary joke here being, I think, that if you do that job, if you really try to pull the unacceptable filth out and reduce it to some kind of decent, general, neutrally philosophical set of points, what you get is so much evidence that Robin's Reactionary Mind has it more or less exactly right.