Curiously, the agrarians, ur-Americans of Southern Protestant extraction, were influenced by the leading figure of the French Counter-Enlightenment, the arch-reactionary ultramontane Catholic Joseph de Maistre. Even in the present day, a Southern apologist for slavery has written a screed for something called the Abbeville Foundation extolling Maistre’s hatred of republics. Evidently, despising the very governmental foundation of the United States has become fashionable for a certain type of reactionary conservative.

Émile Faguet, a French author and critic, called Maistre “a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of pope, king and hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner."

Maistre hits many of the key themes of American conservatism: religious dogmatism, belief over evidence, anti-scientism, the imperative of obedience to hierarchy and a habitual brooding over violence.

The author then continues on to wealth accumulation.

Wiki Link https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_de_Maistre

  • Silverseren@fedia.io
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    2 months ago

    When, of course, civil rights has little to nothing to do with it. The current issues with the country in terms of economy, such as rampant inflation, is the result of the very policies conservatives have been extolling for generations. To go back in the manner they want would mean to reduce and revert the impact conservative policies have harmfully built up over the generations.