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The Grand Ol' Pyre: Conservatives' Scorched-Earth Crusade Against Modernity [1]

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Date: 2024-06-19  

What is it about conservatism that makes it such a deliciously ripe target for satire? Perhaps it's the fundamental tension at its core — the cognitive whiplash of claiming to revere tradition while rejecting the most hallowed American traditions: a pluralistic, ever-evolving democracy. The mental gymnastics required to peddle this paradox would exhaust even the most limber of rhetorical contortionists.

And what, pray tell, is that naked truth? Why, the fact that conservatism is little more than a thinly veiled attempt to maintain the dominance of a self-anointed aristocracy over the great unwashed masses. The entire ideology is a Rube Goldberg machine of rationalizations, constructed to justify an unjustifiable premise: that some are better than others by dint of birth and, therefore, entitled to primacy in all matters social, political, and economic.

This arrogant fiction relies on what conservatives cleverly term the "destruction of conscience" — a systematic undermining of those nagging moral compunctions that might otherwise puncture their warped worldview. Through mockery and demonization, the conservative project inoculates its adherents against empathy, recasting basic human decency as a form of oppression to be resisted at all costs. Lest we forget, these are the same sophists who decried the Geneva Conventions as unconscionably equating America's noble cause with that of her enemies.

But fret not, for in their benevolence, the champions of hierarchy deign to offer us a path to liberation from such irksome conscience: the gleeful abandonment of all that is rational, democratic, and civilized. Why wrestle with ethical problems when you can declare opponents of the conservative order to be satanic forces bent on society's destruction? The Grand Ol' Pyre: Conservatives' Scorched-Earth Crusade Against Modernity Why bother with niceties like human rights when you can dismiss the notion as yet another pernicious liberal scheme to deny society's betters their rightful dominion?

It is a worldview at once tragically myopic and cosmically hubristic—a tapestry of delusion woven from golden threads of arrogance and iron strands of fear. To embrace it requires the renunciation of reason itself, an alchemy of willful ignorance that transmutes prejudice's worthlessness into a philosophical gem to be cherished.

And what, you may ask, lies at the heart of this ostensibly timeless wisdom? Why, the same eternal truths that sanctioned the subjugation of women and the enslavement of Africans, of course! Are not these traditions to be honored and conserved, their pedigree alone imbuing them with an unassailable rectitude?

To question such dogma is to indulge the most uncomfortable of liberal heresies — a violation of the sacred principle that some truths are immutable, impervious to the vagaries of human progress. That this notion stands diametrically opposite to the foundational liberal ethos of the American experiment seems not to trouble the conservative mind. Doublethink, as Orwell knew, is a potent polemic.

So let us raise a glass to these stalwart defenders of a mythological past, these iconoclasts who would burn the Enlightenment to the ground if it threatened their cozy primacy. May their relentless commitment to anti-rational obscurantism serve as a reminder of the depths to which the human intellect can plunge when sufficiently overindulged by privilege and insulated from progress. Indeed, it is a sight to behold — or perhaps more fittingly, something at which to laugh lest we weep for the future.

~Dunneagin~

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