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eightyonekilograms:

Elite Conservatives Have Taken an Awfully Weird Turn

As it leaves behind American values, has the right gotten too strange to win elections?

The New Republic

It boggles my mind that right-wing intellectuals went “the radical Left up in their ivory tower is forcing an unpopular agenda on Americans!”– which is not even completely wrong; I think they take it way too far but there is a weak version of that claim which is definitely true– and decided to respond by making an even more insular, elitist, unpopular, and just generally deranged ideology, that you could only understand or agree with if you are just as Twitter brain-poisoned as the bluechecks you despise. Like, my guys, my dudes: Joe Sixpack, the stalwart Republican voter from North Carolina, wants lower taxes and to not need a hunting permit. He does not want Catholic sharia, and you all are in for a world of hurt if you insist that this is the future of conservatism.

To steal from @discoursedrome this is less a beta edition thought and more an alpha, but this seems key to me:

“The growing fascination with Catholicism—particularly sedevacantism, which denies the current pope’s legitimacy—”

Yes, nothing says “traditional Catholicism” like denying the authority of the Pope.

Now, historical jokes aside, that’s pretty damn odd, isn’t it? Converting to a new religion and demanding deference to it from everyone while also immediately denying its actually existing structure of authority?

One thing that’s really hard to get your head around about certain kinds of extremism is that they seem to be poses, or jokes, or affectations, and yet simultaneously are used to legitimate incredibly extreme behavior.

The part of Catholicism where we repeal women’s suffrage is much more appealing than, like, the part where you defer to Papal authority.

If you listen to conspiracy theorists, and here I’m talking about, like, “The Jews are lizard men from the core of the hollow earth” conspiracists, they have a recognition between each other that they all belong to the same club.

Often, as an outsider it’s shocking how two people with conspiracies that are absolutely mutually exclusive and cannot both be true will have these shockingly civil conversations where each promotes the other.

Rather than dissolving because of small differences within the same doctrine, people of what would seem to be radically different doctrines often recognize each other as allies due to something beneath the explicit content of what they say.

Nazism was of course famous for having all kinds of batshit mysticism which the ordinary person would scratch his head at.

I think there’s a tendency to analyze the weird right as being ideological in a way that I’m not sure that they are.

Now, historical jokes aside, that’s pretty damn odd, isn’t it? Converting to a new religion and demanding deference to it from everyone while also immediately denying its actually existing structure of authority?

i mean. you could say the same thing about someone converting from being nonchristian to protestantism.

i am even less a fan of sedevacantism that i am of mainline catholicism but seems weird to say that that a conversion to specifically sedevacantist catholicism is less legitimate than another kind of catholic conversion

It’s not weird to deny the authority of the Pope in general, lots of people do that.

It’s weird to go from not acknowledging the Pope as authority at all, to demanding that the law enforce deference to the Catholic hierarchy AND announcing that you yourself won’t defer to it because it’s illegitimate.

put that way, it strikes me as peak entitlement—

—everyone should have to obey these strict laws except me…

I agree, but that’s not my main point.

Rather, I think that for the kind of weird right Catholic type in this article Catholic doctrine is downstream of a certain set of priorities, rather than vice versa.

Like, rather than, “Catholicism is very important, therefore I follow the rules of Catholicism” instead you have, “I have an emotional desire to move society in a certain way, and crazy Catholic theocracy expresses those emotions.”

And what I think happens is that other people who are having the same emotional understanding of the world come to a sort of unspoken understanding that rival doctrines to that kind of Catholicism will be tolerated to the extent that those rival doctrines express a similar emotional response to the world.

And of course it’s easier to make that room if you just bypass the Pope.

I’ll try to explain better later.

Sedevacantism like professionals, petit bourgeois, gentry, and dissident scholars going “the Pope’s entanglements with politics and power in the secular world have led him to stray from the proper Godly path as we know and reaffirm to each other in in our small journals, we should not take him as the final word!” is retro-proto-Protestantism though, that’s the weird thing

(via erik-even-wordier)