bigbadwolf said:
Conservatism, on the other hand is not radical; it views all -isms (including capitalism) with suspicion and is based on tradition, kinship, and local roots. Conservatives and fascists might find common cause, and enter into expedient but temporary marriages of convenience -- but they're very different creatures.
Bigbadwolf - you've clearly been reading your Burke! But sadly Burke is wrong on this point. Conservative movements are often deeply radical, as is conservativism in America today - and fascism was in Europe 80 years ago. Traditionalism is not the defining characteristic of conservatism. The fundamental commitment to human inequality is what ties conservatives together, something that is painfully clear in Neil/Denver's various posts on this forum.
The left-right spectrum is in reality an equality-inequality spectrum. How much inequality you're willing to tolerate, and the spheres in which you tolerate it - political, social, economic, legal, religious, etc - will indicate precisely how conservative your instincts are. The remaining details of a conservative movement, whether pro-capitalist or anti-capitalist, religious or secular, tribalist or nationalist, are merely historical flesh on an underlying inegalitarian skeleton. Conservatism will use whatever historical resourses available, including all sorts of -isms, to defend and advance inequality in the world. Capitalism is the perfect example. Conservative monarchists stopped opposing capitalist development when they realize what a powerful instrument of inequality capitalism could be.
So don't be duped by the claim to tradition! Conservatives frequently invent traditions, like the myth of a national identity, or the ethnically pure "volk" under fascism, to justify their inegalitarian cause. In America, conservatives are currently trying to invent a tradition of a Christian founding to justify the superiority of Christian values in public life. Whether a conservative movement is radical or not depends entirely on how egalitarian current social conditions are. America is a relatively egalitarian society these days, so the conservative movement is self-consciously radical in contrast. American foreign policy, though, is deeply inegaitarian across the board, and thus conservatives, like Democrats, tend to embrace a slow-moving "realism."
Fascism in all of its shades was the most inegalitarian movement of the 20th century. Viscious, deadly commitment to national, economic and of course ethnic inequality. It was thus conservative to its core and horrifying in its obvious attraction to persons under severe economic stress. There is, I think we could all agree, a lesson in that. If ever there was an argument for progressive reform, like ObamaCare, it's that by gentlely increasing equality in our society we can potentially forestall another disasterous hyper-conservative popular reaction like Europe experienced in the 1920 and 1930s.
