At its heart, movement conservatism ascribes to the notion that societies are businesses and that social values must reflect and support the goals and mores of business.
Well now, anyone who has worked for a living knows intimately what having your life structured upon those values is like; and there aren’t too many people around who would want to live the entire day, every day, like those 8 hours at the plant. Do we really want our values to be framed in terms of profit and loss? Do we want business mores and goals to be operating fulltime in families and communities?
Do I want my country to be a business?
Temporary employment, constructive dismissal, income uncertainty, a permanent ‘fault-line’ between employers(inclusive of upper management) and employees—if you esteem these behaviours to be attributes properly belonging to human societies, if you are content for your own children to live subject to these values, then movement conservatism is the movement for you.
But if you see these things as operatives of a social model which benefits the top of the ‘food chain’ as it debases the lower end, then you are interested in making a better community, a better Canada, a better world, a sustainable world – for everyone.
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The mcons seek power just like every other political movement does; but the devil is in the details with respect to how they would acquire, maintain and distribute power. Money is power and they want all of it. Simple. They would share it only to the point of an acceptable marginal return. How they would maintain power in a democratic system while they economically marginalize an increasing number of voters –why that’s not complicated either:
They lie.
Our federal conservatives (‘fcons’ for short) might have given Trump an idea or two when the Harper government decided to kill the long-form census. The LFC was designed to provide politicians and planners with a comprehensive, reliable data pool which they could then use to develop and explain policy and planning. They replaced it with the National Household Survey, a tool capable of providing considerably less data— less reliable data because it was optional. Why do you suppose the FCons would want to do that? Why would they want to know less than before to assist them with policy and planning decisions?
It might just be because they wanted us to know less than before. The less we knew, the less inclined we would be to question their policies; the less capable the opposition would be to interfere with it. But Trump has dilated that wee little Machiavellian ploy into outright, unabashed bullshitting. He’s the president of the United States of America, a sovereign nation, for crying out loud.
The art of the boldfaced lie is the most important weapon in the mcons’ arsenal; but the lies they tell are effective only for as long as the listener does not bother to question. Irony of ironies, the mcons are thinking people; but they do not want citizens to be thinking at all – their success and the duration of Donald Trump’s presidency utterly depend on it.
You have freedom of choice because you have the ability to think. The mcons do not want you to think; but if you must insist upon doing it, they are prepared to serve you up bullshit aplenty—for as long as you are willing to swallow it.
The social model of movement conservativism is lacking in a rational basis. It is predicated exclusively upon ideology.
The mcons lie only to buy themselves time for to implement their hidden agenda. They know the truth – they’re smart enough not to tell it. If they were to tell it they would be shooting themselves in the foot. The truth is, the mcons’ want to implement a regressionist social model; one that facilitates opportunity for one group to the detriment of opportunity for another. So long as voters permit mcon-ish politicians to mock the truth without having a care, then we are providing them with the time to make this happen. Time—to make more of our country, their country.
It almost seems as if the mcons concluded that the rate of GDP growth would not be sufficient or sustainable enough to maintain the standard of living to which the wealthy are accustomed, without leaving the lower tier in a condition of compounding scarcity. In the 21st century new world order, people would be working a lot harder, a lot longer, and for a lot less money; leaving them neither the time or energy in reserve for their children or to recover from the stresses of the workplace. More and more mental illness, drug addiction and violent crime would occur as people buckle under mounting pressure.
Here then is the culmination of movement conservatism: the instantiation of a social model which facilitates the concentration of economic and political power into the hands of the mcons.
In the mcon utopia, their enemies are our enemies, their values are our values, our country is theirs.