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conservative discourse is built around a kind of statement the features of which raveneye outlines quite well above. i think that the cult analogy is a bit overstated, but i can see where it comes from.
a different spin on parallel considerations:
for the faithful, there must be something reassuring about a politics made up almost entirely of transcendent propositions, particularly that type of transcendent statement which purports to describe the world but never in any particularity--you can see it everywhere in conservative politics, from the assumptions about markets through their kind of flinstone realpolitik---for example, the various policies/problems associated with cheney.
the reassuring character follows from the non-falsifability of the statements. it is also the feature that enables you to see conservative politics in general as a kind of neurotic flight from contemporary reality, from globalization for example....cheney is in this regard but an extreme example of what can happen if folk in a position to generate actual policy elaborate their sense of the world, and themselves in the world, across this discourse.
conservative discourse in its contemporary american form is primarily an oppostional frame of reference that does not translate well at all into power--partly because the discourse itself is an incoherent hodge-podge of often conflicting assumptions/images---partly because it tends to reproduce the worst features of the conservative obsession with its own victimization (the history of the united states since vietnam is the sourceof this----and so in this as in so many regards, conservativeland is not understandable without recourse to the contexts that it responded to/came out of)---the sense of being victimized translates into an absolute opposition to every and all critics of the ideology, who are crushed into a fantasy of the left and understood as a bloc as enemies whose main function is to repeat the process of being-victimized itself (that is to threaten conservatives with a repetition of the history of the states since the vietnam era, a history that much conservative "thinking" is set up to erase)---you can see this playing out in cheneythought at almost every turn---removed from its oppositional situation, conservative discourse almost immediately become authoritarian--but it is a kind of accidental authoritarianism in that i doubt that even dick cheney fully recognizes the extent to which his positions fall squarely into the old radical nationalist political tradition....and i also wonder if these tendencies that you see growing out of applied conservative discourse would be as they are if the folk who espouse them were capable of seeing their politics in a longer-term historical framework.
it is this ignorance of history that in a sense makes conservative ideology as dangerous as it is in the hands of someone like cheney.
the sense of being-victimized certainly resonates with the history of the nixon administration, like it or not.
at the same time, it is clear that cheney is playing the administration's bad cop. i do not believe that george w bush is so wholly out of it that the kind of policies now associated with cheney and rumsfeld could be developed and implemented without his knowledge. bush is presented as the affable dunce--cheney/rumsfeld as the darkside--but i think that is mostly rovespin geared toward preventing the president from being held politically to account for the debacles his administration has foisted on the rest of us.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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