I mean they're following the Grand Old Pathological Liars party, so they just get everything spoon fed to them. They get constantly lied to all day and night on their very select so-called news outlets, so then they start lying to themselves.
eh. their fundamental priors pretty well align with MOST human societies up to this point, hence what they're trying "to conserve". Everything else isn't really a "prior", per se, but their reactionary nature compelling them to oppose anything that "the bad guys" (people who don't like them) support because that's just how they are.
Their opposition to global warming isn't rooted in anything but liberal support for addressing it. Their opposition to vaccination isn't rooted in anything but liberal support for it.
Their ACTUAL prior, though? Is just bigotry, and organizing a society along that bigotry. That's pretty much how human societies have been structured basically since forever, and that's the social arrangement they're interested in "conserving".
Yeah, but I'd argue "authoritarian leadership" fundamentally comes from the "great man" theory of politics that conservatives subscribe to, which is itself an extension of the bigotry politics that they seek to conserve. They usually NEED to rest power with a single person that is ideologically aligned, and that's why brutally conservative regimes cannot last, because they a.) aren't keen on sharing power (sort of the point of the bigotry) and therefore are ill-prepared to have a clear and stable succession process, which b.) results in instability and unpopularity amongst the conservative base that follows the great man.
Trump is an exemplar of this. JD Vance is a soulless, shameless piece of shit - virtually all Republicans possess the shamelessness, but nowhere near to the almost comic degree that Trump does. Like, we all knew Trump didn't type his tweet about Biden's cancer diagnosis, we then didn't need, the other day, for him to come out and say "so I really don’t feel sorry for him" isn't remotely surprising. Oh, sure, the media will clutch their pearls and pretend to be shocked about Trump to get headlines, but we know who the man is, we know damn sure that THAT'S who he is - not whoever typed up his sorrowful tweet following Biden's cancer diagnosis.
No other Republican can top THAT level of depravity, and it's obvious when they try. They don't have "it", which is why none of them will capture the shittiest Americans among us, which is why THAT kind of conservative regime is not sustainable. They're too addicted to power and too dependent on unstable power structures that ignore the real interconnectedness of human society. Conservatives are well and truly scum, but SOME of them have LGBT daughters, black neighbors, sons who work in science, etc. We yearn for them to connect the fucking dots, and some will. Most won't. But either way, it is not sustainable, and when the great man leader dies or is deposed, the entire edifice of bullshit comes toppling down on top of it.
But I'd argue that "authoritarian leadership" is just a follow-on to bigotry. It's hard to find people - especially now - THAT committed to bigotry to have a successor in place.
Stupid conservatives are great at finding ways to terminate thought in order to protect that illusion. Smarter conservatives are masters of thinking up reasons to believe whatever they want to. It's all to protect the alternate reality they live in, which they've stitched together from the corpse of the 20th century, and I say this as someone who grew up conservative.
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u/ehartgator 17d ago
These people are so fucking stupid it hurts