Conservatism and revanchism in America

Conservatives -- and especially the reactionary, the counter-revolutionary among them -- are revanchist.

Liberals seem regularly shocked by this.

When the Right does what it does most fundamentally, which is to oppose emancipatory movements of human beings outside the inner circle (in the US, those who are not white, male, heterosexual Christian citizens) -- it's intention is not merely to regain the equilibrium of the ancien regime. It's intention includes vengeance for the mere act of questioning privilege -- the challenge to privilege is as much a crime as the idea of emancipation, itself.

This has been true for centuries, and was as evident in the French counter-revolutionaries in 1789 as it was in the Confederates of 1861, as true in the post-Reconstruction American South as it was in the proto-socialist interregnum between the Paris Commune and the Bolshevik Revolution, as true in the anti-Communism and anti-welfarism of the 1930s and 1950s, as it is in today in which fascists seek to crush Constitutionally-protected right of assembly and protest and punish those who dare speak truth to power.

The fascists don't merely object to your desire for liberté, égalité, fraternité -- they object to the idea that marginalized people would dare confront their power. Police don't want to force you to conform to their will for social stability -- they want to punish you, even kill you, for expressing the right to be treated with dignity. They see a protest against murder of the oppressed as an attack on their very concept of America -- a nation in which the jack boots of the oppressor has the right to crush the marginalized. Ask a reactionary to critique BLM: the answer will involve a flag. For them: normative America *is* inequality, violently enforced.

Blue Lives "Matter" More Than Yours in the sense that they are weaponized for the powers-that-be to punish resistance. Otherwise, they have no value to those who use them.  To the Trumps, Mnuchins and Barrs, the cops are simply hunting dogs allowed to torment and kill the Master's prey. But don't forget that it is not the dogs who lead the hunt and it is not they who set the agenda, although they are admittedly a feral pack in the US far too often. Defunding the police may be needed, but that is just a start. The reactionaries will seek to oppress and punish with or without them, as the deputizing of mercenaries and border patrol agents in Portland showed clearly, and as history for at least two centuries has shown us. (The Paris Commune was put down in part by the French Army even though it had been disbanded.)

The revanchism, the blood-letting vengeance, we see in the streets of America today may be new in its current form and new in the risks it imposes on the future of the American Republic, which is tottering on the precipice. But it is not truly new, having been a central feature of the reactionary heart and mind for a very long time. These past few weeks have been our own la semaine sanglante. But this is a tree with deep roots and the emancipation of all human beings will continue to meet resistance from the reactionary right after Trump is gone. That is who they are. 

After all, their punitive nature is so incendiary they had to invent Hell to satisfy that fire within them.

Many thought that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the devastating set backs to labor unions, the reckless race to break all records in economic inequality since 1980, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and the ongoing exploitation of women and people of color in the work force, the Reactionary Right had lost its enemies and thus its fire. For some time, GOP leadership muddled over the option that horrified them: to become inclusive, generous, and law-abiding. But Trump found a simmering base, one still angry that blacks and women and queer and poor folks were still uppity, still expecting decency and marginal support, and the GOP realized there was still game in the strategy of hate -- and here we are.

The reactionary element in the US is thus a disease that can be suppressed but not eliminated. When Reagan and his followers killed off their enemies, the reactionaries became dormant, but a few forward steps such as the rights of gay people to marry, and the rights of transgender children to play school sports and use public restrooms, political correctness (which, outside of some excesses, was mostly about asking people rather than telling them what hurt their feelings and did them harm), and the concept of white privilege being introduced to mainstream discourse, stirred up the cancer, and it came back with a fury. Covid-19 is real and the suffering and deaths it is responsible for are palpable, but our incapacity to suppress it is also a metaphor for the resurgence of the reactionary cancer that has never been eliminated from our society. The reactionary's aversion to expertise and his anger-centered, blaming, vengeful nature was a very poor fit for the requirements of leadership in a pandemic, so the simultaneous rebirth of both a real and a political plague is not coincidence.