re: #168 HappyWarrior

There’s no central concept or principle that’s actually being pursued. It can’t be coherent because its subcomponents aren’t coherent. Many of their positions rely on counterfactuals and hostility to scrutiny and analysis.

Supply side is garbage; Austrian economics is pixie garbage. Welfare for large businesses is good, even though it doesn’t produce the claimed results and hasn’t since the idea was shoved forward. Spending is good except when its bad. Welfare for individuals is bad, even though it makes money circulate through the market in a way that’s healthy.

Look at the 180’ drift from free market to protectionism. There’s no there, there.

Government is too big, except when it’s not big enough. Deficits don’t matter…sometimes. The federal government can’t be trusted, but the internal intelligence apparatus needs to be bigger and privacy laws slimmer. States’ rights are paramount when its advantageous.

The Constitution is precious, except when it’s black-robed tyranny, or when Scalia manages to channel the founders through the ectoplasm and knife a Warren Court precedent in the kidney. Civil liberties are for closers.

And that’s not even getting into the knots they’ve twisted the Bible in. Sample the Old Testament, sample the New Testament: retroactively read all bits as part of Revelations. Parables aren’t parables about salvation, they’re economic lessons. Leviticus is holy law, but only wrt gays, all the bits about debts and forgiveness don’t count. The Bible is literally true, but also has secret meanings that your megapastor and local creation scientist can explain (but you gotta pay).

And as we’ve seen, the alt-right are even deeper in the hash of not-fucking-thinking, and busy heaping the bullshit higher with further Protocols and Red Scare/Yellow Terror/Brown Menace fanfiction. The stank of the John Birch Society is all over the cryptic, gnostic internal logic of the GOP. Buckley didn’t so much exile them as airbrush their hairy asses.

This is why all the different bits connect only through the core conceit: that everyone else is utter depraved, and a priori wrong.