Saturday Report 2/24/24 - Why are conservatives calling for the end of democracy?

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— Why are conservatives calling for the end of American democracy? At the CPAC meeting this week, a well-known rightwing influencer, Jack Posobiec, went off on a rant about how important it is for conservatives to band together to end democracy in America and, presumably, replace it with Christofascism like in Russia. “Welcome to the end of democracy!” he declared. “We’re here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here,” he said as he held up a cross. “That’s right, because all glory is not to government, all glory to God.” This, frankly, should not be surprising. It was 1951 when Russell Kirk, the godfather of the modern conservative movement, published his book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot in which he laid out the importance of “classes and orders” in society. (I detailed Kirk extensively in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.) The middle class was growing like a weed back then — this was before Reagan kneecapped the labor movement — and Kirk warned that if too many people got into the middle class and were no longer “the fearful poor” that there’d be chaos in America. He warned that women would no longer respect their husbands, racial minorities would forget their “rightful place” in the social order, young people would defy their parents, and society would go to hell. The solution, dictated back in the late 1700s by British conservative Edmund Burke, was to gut the middle class and return to the “normal” social form of a small number of really rich people at the top, a tiny middle class of doctors, lawyers, and professionals who served the morbidly rich, and a massive class of the working poor. This was the world