Many left-wingers still insist that supporters of Donald Trump are conservatives, but Washington Monthly blogger David Atkins finds Trump backers “far less terrifying” than staunch right-wingers. In a Sunday post, Atkins opined that even though Trump’s base voters tend to be mean and “ignorant,” movement conservatives are “more morally objectionable” because they believe in “economic royalism.”
The “unregulated capitalism” that conservatives favor, argued Atkins, “is a totalizing ideology as impractical as state communism but lacking the silver lining of [communism’s] species-being idealism; as impervious to reason as any cult religion, but lacking the promise of community, salvation or utopia; as brutal as any dictatorship, but without the advantage of order and security.”
From Atkins’s post (bolding added):
As bad as Donald Trump may be, establishment conservatism not only created him but is actually more morally objectionable. This is because while Trump’s base is motivated by ugly and ignorant prejudices of all kinds, establishment conservatism is motivated by a far more morally objectionable ideology of economic royalism and callous indifference to the lives and aspirations of anyone but the richest and most comfortable. Between the two, Trump’s followers are far less terrifying than those of Ayn Rand, and not even Donald Trump’s rabid following cheers at the notion that the uninsured should die in the streets if they cannot pay for healthcare.
The establishment Republican ideology prioritizes capital above all else. For them, the market does not exist to serve people: people exist to serve the market. Unregulated capitalism can never fail; it can only be failed by those too lazy, useless and unproductive to serve and profit by it. It is a totalizing ideology as impractical as state communism but lacking the silver lining of its species-being idealism; as impervious to reason as any cult religion, but lacking the promise of community, salvation or utopia; as brutal as any dictatorship, but without the advantage of order and security.
