Curiously, the agrarians, ur-Americans of Southern Protestant extraction, were influenced by the leading figure of the French Counter-Enlightenment, the arch-reactionary ultramontane Catholic Joseph de Maistre. Even in the present day, a Southern apologist for slavery has written a screed for something called the Abbeville Foundation extolling Maistre’s hatred of republics. Evidently, despising the very governmental foundation of the United States has become fashionable for a certain type of reactionary conservative.
Émile Faguet, a French author and critic, called Maistre “a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of pope, king and hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner."
Maistre hits many of the key themes of American conservatism: religious dogmatism, belief over evidence, anti-scientism, the imperative of obedience to hierarchy and a habitual brooding over violence.
The author then continues on to wealth accumulation.
I’ve been saying the cons are not real patriots and that they hate the real America and the ideals of this country for decades now. Of course all cons will deny this, but so do many “moderates” that seek to tone-police such truths…but it’s fairly obvious that the cons truly do hate this country.
Agreed. Most everything they do is anti democratic.