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let me be clear, ace: i think conservatism is a joke.
i'm interested in a kind of anthropological way about the fact that an ideology as incoherent as conservatism manages to attract a demographic. i think it's an interesting analytic matter, so from time to time i like to poke at it as a problem, try to figure it out. what holds this nonsense together? what are the patterns of investment that you can see that enable people to cobble together a sense of coherence from within this space?
i end up doing these thought experiments here because my contempt for the content of conservative ideology rules out my doing anything more formal with them. so i don't do sociological work on contemporary american conservatism--which i could do---primarily because i know that i think it such a farce that it renders an analytic positions problematic. so a priori, i would tend to overprivelege the power of repetition and the media apparatus that enables it. this because i figure no-one in their right mind can think this way.
but i do have a more serious interest in how ideological frames of reference operate, so i learn stuff from these thought experiments that makes it way into the other work i do...
my principal motivation for these experiments, then, moves in an entirely different direction than you might imagine.
but whatever.
i'm sure none of this will matter to you and like some sad old trotskyite you will prefer to imagine your viewpoint as somehow still the center of the world because it's yours.
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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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