Conservative power brokers do not believe in democracy
NOTE: this text was not written by me and is from user u/gdshaffe. The only changes were minor formatting for readability. I would merely link to reddit if they had a way to highlight comments, but they do not.
The original post.
“Anymore”. Time to break out an oldie:
Conservative power brokers do not believe in democracy. They never have. Conservatism emerged as a political philosophy in the wake of the French Revolution explicitly as a means to preserve the monarchy/aristocracy in all but name within a framework that could pass itself as democratic but that placed no value whatsoever on the actual ideals of democracy. Their idea of an ideal government is where a tiny group of unelected elites run everything with access to unlimited resources and luxuries, while the masses are played off against one another and trapped in a cycle of poverty.
This was what was explicitly stated by early conservative voices like Burke and de Maistre, and you can draw a direct line from them to the Grover Norquists and Mitch McConnells of today.
This is why so many conservatives have done a 180 on Russia over the past couple of decades: they idealize exactly what Vladimir Putin has managed to do there. They don’t look at Russia as a failed state because it is autocratic, brutal, and the masses live in abject poverty; they look at it as a playground where the wealthy and connected can do whatever they want and throw anyone who criticizes them in a Siberian prison.
The popularity and resilience of self-determinism in America is of enormous inconvenience to them. They have to play deeper in an actual-democratic framework than they are comfortable with, and have learned to subsist on propaganda and manipulation; they have become very adept at using wedge issues, and particularly at stoking the long-festering wounds of our country’s racial divide, to convince people to vote against their own interests. But it’s not enough, and they cannot survive without continuing to work against the idea of self-determination.
They will never stop working against democracy because they are diametrically opposed to it in the most basic of principles.