Loving the state

Loving the state

by digby

We know why religious fundamentalists hate feminism. We know why misogynist creeps like Rush Limbaugh hate feminism. But why do conservative intellectuals hate feminism (assuming they aren’t also twisted creeps like Limbaugh?)

Here’s Mark Steyn to explain it to you:

The hatred of Big Government is not just about taxes then is it?

Once again, here’s Corey Robin to explain Mark Steyn:

The priority of conservative political argument has been the maintenance of private regimes of power—even at the cost of the strength and integrity of the state. We see this political arithmetic at work in the ruling of a Federalist court in Massachusetts that a Loyalist woman who fled the Revolution was the adjutant of her husband, and thus not be held responsible for fleeing and should not have her property confiscated by the state; in the refusal of Southern slaveholders to yield their slaves to the Confederate cause; and the more recent insistence of the Supreme Court that women could not be legally obliged to sit on juries because they are “still regarded as the center of home and family life” with their “own special responsibilities.”

Conservatism, then, is not a commitment to limited government and liberty—or a wariness of change, a belief in evolutionary reform, or a politics of virtue. These may be the byproducts of conservatism, one or more of its historically specific and ever-changing modes of expression. But they are not its animating purpose. Neither is conservatism a makeshift fusion of capitalists, Christians, and warriors, for that fusion is impelled by a more elemental force—the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere.

There you have it. That’s what this is about.

h/t to Jack Shafer