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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31618 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Were elites of the trad past good Christians? Or did they play by Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi rules? Trump is a less impressive man than an average king, but hardly less moral.

But kings weren't elected, of course.

a natural aristocrat of noble lineage, raised from birth with the kind of education necessary to rule in a traditional society, even if there was a little philandering on the side.

That's what we have now, except that the people in these roles are selected by virtue not of lineage or skill, but depravity.

If you’re going to fight to have a country ruled by plebs then they rather ought to be held to the same standards as others of their class. They’re not ‘above’ anything, or anyone.

I wanted to say this explicitly, but isn't this precisely the problem? Reactionaries aka radical right-wingers aka trads are anti-egalitarian elitists (Tucker is flirting with them, incidentally). Mainstream republicans are, unironically, egalitarian democrats who believe rulers ought to depend on the consent of the governed and abide by the same rules as the hoi polloi; that they, normal people, must be represented in power by a champion as close as possible to their exact class, upbringing and attitude – sans, perhaps, minor adaptations to the Washington biome.

You ask for a coherent vision. There's no shortage of shitposting Twitter pseuds with half-decent academic chops who can do that. But it won't differ a lot from this scene, and in a democracy that sort of vision, frankly stated, is a political suicide attempt.

They were not particularly moral, but they didn't pretend that they were equal to the lower classes and that the lower classes could freely do what they did without suffering extra consequences. Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi is a good thing because it stops people who can't handle the consequences from doing things that will damage them with very high probability. This meant that the lower classes mostly kept to values that were better long term for someone who doesn't have a huge safety net.

One of the biggest problem with modern elite "liberals" (note they aren't really liberal) is that they treat the lower classes as equal to themselves, or at least their words say that. Then they tell the lower classes that they too can do what the upper classes do without suffering extra consequences but that is very much not true. The elite liberals have their safety net which means that even with the degeneracy they still come out fine in the end, the lower classes are not so lucky though and society slowly disintegrates.

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