The dominant political ideology of the US , which I want to call conservatism because that’s what the US republican party calls it, but is arguably liberalism (and not the propagandized “freedom and prosperity for all” version), is built upon hierarchy. The capitalist class lives by a different set of rules, and sometimes bestow a lesser form of that to others- eg: white supremacy, patriarchy. People are not equal, in this view.

If you had led with this, without naming it, and without assigning it to a party, this would be completely accurate. I get prickly when people use these words to make it seem like the Democrats are an alternative to this ideology, because they are not. They are a faction within the same ideology.

Well I guess I’ll have to go get my PhD then! Heh.

I know it feels like that, but it’s not so bad as that. I don’t have my PhD in this stuff, and there’s plenty more for me to learn, but I did spend most of my undergrad majoring in philosophy so I have a little bit more of a leg up than people on this sort of reading than some others do. But it’s relatively accessible, and there are plenty of websites that help to explain a lot of this in easy to consume terms. Hell, an a.i. chatbot today will give you a decent primer if you just ask “is American conservativism actually a form of philosophical Liberalism? How did that happen?”.

And I think that idea of a “fair” order, with some on top, some under them, and a lot on the bottom is endemic in… what I would have called conservative thought but after all this I guess I’d now call liberal. Or maybe “right wing” is a parent category?

Yeah, it’s tough. I think what you’re pointing at is something I don’t think I’ve ever seen a useful word for. It could be “elitist”. Liberalism and Conservatism are both “elitist” ideologies, they just differ on the details of the elite. Using “right wing” and “left wing” gets all sorts of muddled, because during the period of Liberal revolution, Liberals were Left Wing and Monarchists were Right Wing. But now there are very few Monarchists and it’s not much of a real position in most places in the world, though it does exist in some places. Without Monarchists, Communists are now Left Wing and Liberals are now Right Wing. In those places with all three, one might assume we could say Liberals are “centrists” but the reality is that they will always side with Monarchists against Communists because Communism is ideologically anti-elite (even if people want to argue that in practice an elite does emerge).

In short, adding in “wings” can be more confusing in some contexts. But also there’s no real language for lumping the commonality between Liberalism and Conservatism in the way that you and I both see exists.

The “they” in my sentence was referring to what I called street level republicans

Oh gotcha. Yeah. Must people who don’t dig deep and learn about this stuff are thoroughly immersed in deliberately confusing propaganda and mostly align with symbols as they are used within their insulated social networks. This is true regardless of affiliation.

Yes, that [Lockean Private Property] does sound batshit.

Yeah, private property is a sacred cow and the primary lever for red scare propaganda (“they’ll take your toothbrush!”) but when you really analyze it it’s just the ability for a single human being to deprive all other living 8B people today, and all of their descendants, for ALL TIME from ever using a particular piece of the earth purely on the basis that I “applied labor to make the land ‘productive’”, but also I didn’t need to do the labor myself I could have paid someone to do it, or I could have bought slaves and made them do it, and that grants me inalienable rights to deprive all of humanity present and future from the fruits of the earth? Any contemporary human given an honest reading of Locke would be absolutely revolted by it, but, of course, it sounded fucking great to people like Thomas Jefferson who just wanted to breed slaves and sell them to farmers so they could grow cotton and tobacco on land that they stole from the natives they massacred.

Sorry.

I just don’t want the people who are resisting to resist “conservatives” exclusively. It’s not enough. It’s a Punch and Judy show. It’s Good Cop/Bad Cop. If we only get angry and resist conservatives, we’re inevitably going to get led about by the nose from the “liberals” who promise they’ll make it all better, when fundamentally their goal is to direct and diffuse our anger so we don’t destroy their genocidal gravy train.