They've Always Been Fascists

Something to think about. (Hah! Sounds completely real to this reporter.)

I’d like to propose a different take. This was both the inevitable path of conservatism, and Reagan was a bit of a detour.

People tend to forget what U.S. conservatism was prior to 1945. Before that point, the U.S. right was openly pro-fascist. We even had an attempted fascist coup in the Business Plot. After the war, with the full horrors of Nazi Germany on display, fascism had to move underground. . .

[B]etween the pressure to disavow Nazi horrors, and the need to present a good face in opposition to the USSR, conservatives picked up liberal imagery and ideals. They talked about individual rights and small government (even if they didn’t really mean it).

But now that the horrors have faded, and the Soviet threat no longer exists, the true conservatives can come back out of the woodwork. This is what conservatives have always been, what they have always wanted. Since the US has never had a monarch for conservatives to champion, we get the alternative, an idealized version of the “nation,” narrowly defined, with an all powerful leader at its head to enact the will of “the people.”

Aka. Fascism.

Over at the Bulwark subreddit, someone (maybe the same person?) expanded on this idea:

Was the rationality (as we all consider it) of Buckley banishing the Birchers to the outer darkness for 2 generations (1950s to 1990s) the CORE of the US political right, something to which the US right may one day return, or the EXCEPTION which began dying off as Buckley grew old and faded away from politics?

I’d claim Eisenhower through G H W Bush when Buckley’s conservatism was the preeminent strain was the EXCEPTION. G W Bush’s presidency was a last gasp, not unlike John Quincy Adams’s presidency for the Federalists.

IOW, if the Buckley conservatism period of the 1950s thru 1990s was the aberration, and Reagan was a bit to the reactionary side of Buckley, then there’s a fairly straight line from the America First movement of the 1930s to MAGA with Reagan more of a regression to the reactionary trend line vs Eisenhower.

I can’t answer this question, but it’s something I’m going to chew on for a long time. People naturally assume that the intellectual paradigms they are born into are the default state. But that’s not necessarily true. Why couldn’t it be the case that “modern conservatism” as it has euphemistically been called—meaning conservatism as it existed in the Republican party from roughly Eisenhower to the Bushes—was a temporary aberration? What if True Conservatism was always the blood-and-soil view that dominated the American right before the Cold War?

What if Trump isn’t a fulfillment of “modern conservatism,” but the book closing on that errant period and conservatism returning to what it has traditionally been in American history?