We’re always talking about conservatives, but it isn’t clear that there are any. Sure, people say they are conservatives, but we know for a fact that white supremacists and other various kinds of fascists will call themselves conservatives. There’s the term “crypto-fascist” for a person who is a fascist but hides under some other label for the sake of safety and to facilitate spreading fascism.
I’m no fan of Hillary Clinton (or Bill, for that matter), but she did say something that really stuck with me. You’ve got to read the whole thing to actually understand what she was trying to say:
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
Hillary Clinton, https://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/
Like most liberal politicians, she won’t use the f-word (fascist), but that’s what she means — that half of Trump’s supporters are fascists, and the rest are conservatives who have valid concerns that politicians need to address. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t mean “roughly 50%” when she says “half” — no one really knows what the breakdown is. Fascists latched on to her statement and pretended that she was saying all Republicans are “deplorables” — an obvious lie, but it worked for them because most conservatives never bothered to read what she actually said.
We can’t know how many Trump supporters are fascists, because almost no one is an open fascist these days. The racists (for example) will say, “I’m not racist, I just think that it is objectively true that white people are better,” or something equally racist.
I’m not letting conservatives off the hook — if there are conservatives, they are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with fascists, and they need to take personal responsibility for that. As you’ll see, I’m still not sure there are any conservatives. What I’d like to do here is establish what would have to be true for conservatives to actually exist, and that might help you and me figure out who is a conservative. That seems like something really worthwhile.
1. If there are conservatives, they have empathy for other people — even people who are not part of their tribe.
“Fascism is a collective realization of the Death Drive.” Sigmund Freud’s ideas are clearly very outdated and mostly wrong, but some of his broad strokes are still worthwhile, including this idea that psychologically damaged people have a deep inner drive toward destruction, not just of others, but also of themselves, and the entire world. A fascist movement is when a bunch of people who want to destroy everything get together and work toward making that destruction happen. Instead of empathy for other people, fascists feel contempt — especially if they believe that other person is weak.
On the other hand, if you were to find a conservative, their ability to feel empathy for other people is going to be intact, even if they might have different (or even wrong) ideas about how (or whether) to help other people. It’s tricky, though, because a fascist and a conservative might both say, “Well, if I help this person, it actually hurts them by making them weaker.” The fascist is lying, and actually enjoying that other person suffering. The conservative feels bad for the person who is suffering but legitimately believes that’s how the world works.
I feel like the Breonna Taylor case is a nice barometer — if you can discern whether you’re getting a sincere response out of the person. A person with empathy will feel like something really horrible happened, and they will sympathize with the everyone who is protesting. They might include some conservative conspiracy crap about how antifas are infiltrating the protest to do communism, but they’ll acknowledge that the majority of the protesters have a legitimate complaint.
2. If there are conservatives, they will care about what is true — and that means their beliefs about what is true can change.
Fascists don’t care what is true. The whole fascist approach to reality is to just make shit up, and they make it up based on two things: 1) Whether the shit they are making up justifies what they’ve already decided they’re doing next, 2) Whether the shit they are making up increases their power. For example, when Donald Trump said that Mexico is sending mostly rapists and murderers to the US, he was justifying building a wall and putting immigrants coming across our southern border in concentration camps; in fact, those immigrants were less likely to be criminals than US citizens. It’s a completely backwards way of determining what is real compared to how you’re supposed to do it.
If a conservative tells you that they’re concerned that antifas are getting funding from a powerful evil because the conservative noticed that they have shields that look mass-produced, you should be able to explain to them that the left have these little workshops where they make stuff or teach a valuable skill (we’ve done chicken processing, sign making, rabbit processing, and beehive making, for example), and that those shields were mass produced in one of those workshops. Upon hearing this new information, a conservative would express that they might have been mistaken. In contrast, a fascist will change the subject because they never cared about the facts in the first place — they’re just trying to get you to shut up so they can be more successful in pushing fascism (or just making you look weak).
Here, you’re looking for very small changes in what the conservative believes to be true.
3. If you give a conservative concrete evidence of fascists in their midst, they will take action against them.
This might be hard to believe, but it has happened more than once: Leftists gun people at a rally were able to ID people in attendance who were fascist media personalities, and the conservatives in charge ejected those people from the event. You should take this seriously and before you organize a black bloc to fuck with a conservative protest, see if they will respond to requests to remove fascists from the event (you’ll need to be specific and have clear evidence, which might be hard given that fascists disguise themselves). Then, with the fascists gone, and nothing but a bunch of militant patriots remaining, there’s really nothing to counter protest. Sure, the display that remains might not be your favorite aesthetic, but it won’t be a danger to anyone.
The trick, of course, is how much evidence you have to provide. A fascist will pretend that they’re open to ejecting fascists from the event, but no amount of evidence will make them admit that anyone is a fascist. If Hitler’s there, and you say, “Look! It’s Hitler!” they’ll say, “Oh, well but he’s not goose stepping so he can’t be a fascist.” You’ll have to be reasonable about how much evidence you think is sufficient.
Here’s some things that don’t differentiate conservatives from fascists:
- Thinking the US government is based on Christianity. It’s not, but that isn’t the point — even it if was, a conservative would respect the right of non-Christians to exist and be US citizens. On the other hand, a fascist has a version of Christianity that’s more about power than the teachings of Christ.
- Thinking that evil socialist lizard people are going to destroy America. They don’t understand socialism at all, but that’s 80 years of propaganda to cut through. Even many Democrats are afraid of the left for this reason.
- Thinking that the 2020 election was rigged. If literally everyone in your world said the election was rigged, you would believe it too.
- Thinking that a republic (representative democracy) is better than a real democracy. I’m not trying to say conservatives are saints — they’re conservative, and part of that is not trusting the average person to make good decisions about how the world is run — but that should not mean that they want to restrict the ability of any group of people to vote for their representatives.
- Thinking they may need to take up arms against the government. If the things conservative culture believes about how the world works were true, then taking up arms against the government would be both morally and pragmatically correct. People who think Satanic pedophiles are running the government but did not show up to storm the Capitol are literally more deplorable than people who believed those things and showed up.
If you’ve got a real conservative — with empathy, who cares about the truth, and who is willing to reject fascists — you’ve got a pretty good person despite the fact that they’re wrong about a lot of things. If we’re letting the “two sides” of evil — fascists and neoliberals — make us into enemies, we’re just working against ourselves. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that there are no conservatives — just fascists with varying degrees of skill at hiding. It takes effort to separate those two “baskets” and you’ve got to do it one person at a time.