Using Contradictory Discourses As A Political Strategy...

[Chris]

If conservatives didn't whine what would they do? Oh the horror of it all, someone doesn't like them and mommy is at home. Chicken Little lives. It reminds me of a made up world in which speakers give meaningless straw man talks about the falling sky and the end of time. Really weird. People listen as if something in these talks has anything to do with the real world. Make up a word, call it something, and claim the end is near, snake oil salesmen never left, they just changed coats. No worry folks the Post modernist is really a nice guy. Agree or disagree the sky is holding.


"The best one can say here, and I am saying it, is that postmodernists are good critical deconstructors, and terrible constructors. They tend to leave that job to those patient liberals in their society who are still willing to attempt to sort out at least some of those differences between truth and fantasy, which postmodernists blur in a whirlwind of pessimistic assumptions about the inevitability of class or psychological conflict." Christopher Butler

Oh, this has nothing to do with conservatism, especially not as you miscontrue conservatism.

[Chris]

I don't wish to take this off on a a tangent but I would hardly classify Rousseau as Counter-Enlightenment. On the contrary, he represents the Enlightenment at its worst.

Hegel took it one step further, from Karl Marx and the Great Socialist Revival

Marx’s salvation scheme was built on a mystical foundation supplied by German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Though the New York Times eulogy for Marx touted Hegel as an advocate of a “rational liberal state,” Hegel was derided in his lifetime as the “Royal Prussian Court Philosopher” and for promoting the notion that the State is “inherently rational.” Hegel deified government, asserting that “the State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth” and “all the worth which the human being possesses — all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.” Hegel scorned any limits on government power: “The State is the self-certain absolute mind which recognizes no authority but its own, which acknowledges no abstract rules of good and bad, shameful and mean, cunning and deceit.”

[Marcus Aurelius]

Hegel understood that the inherently rational and idealistically divine side of his bread was the one being buttered.