1. "Excuse me ma'am, I speak wingnut." Ben Carson's comments linking the Kavanaugh accusations to the Fabian Society might sound like gibberish. But if you are fluent in right-wing mythohistory, it's perfectly logical.https://twitter.com/christinawilkie/status/1043272137677721600 …
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10. So instead of acknowledging politics based on mobilization against real problems (economic injustice, patriarchy, racism, imperialism) the preferred theory to blame some small group of eggheads (Illuminati, Masons, Fabians, Frankfurt School, Soros, etc).
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11. The weird thing is that the Fabians were, in context of socialism, the most moderate form of social democracy: advocates of slow, gradual change over many decades or centuries: the herbivorous left.
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12. Tangentially, the high-brow version of this is conservative intellectuals blaming large historical change on some philosophical heresy: gnosticism, nominalism, Machiavellianism, etc. As if ideas caused reality rather than reflected it.
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13. So: in 1940s and 1950s, lots of right-wing Americans were grousing about Fabians. Ben Carson is echoing this distant conspiracy theory in his remarks.
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You’re completely abstracting from theory of vanguard on the left; “conspiracy” is flip-side of “mass mobilization of groups.”
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Also true of false consciousness for Marxists and the MSM / Israel for Corbyn’s Labour Party. Extreme political movements need explanations of why most people don’t support them.
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Also, modern discourse on “conspiracy” begins in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, where it overthrows a tyrant and institutes republican government.
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Seeing social liberation movements as conspiracies is only one possible rationale for opposing them. Also the classic conservative notion that the world is essentially broken and any attempts to fix it are not only bound to fail, but will have unforeseen negative consequences.
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Also, conservatives see social hierarchy as not only inevitable, but healthy, and instinctually resist any attempts to dislodge it.
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