Conservative Mysticism, the Market Gods, and the Ownership Club

I’m tired of modern conservative language passing as acceptable in the political conversation.

Terms like “big government” and “the size of government” have no place in an honest political discussion. It has been tolerated for much too long. It’s a con contrived by conservative strategists to tilt the table in their favor. This language goes under the radar. No one questions it. No one calls it for what it is, so it’s allowed to pollute the discourse and infect people with conservative ideas without them realizing it. This language is the agent that transmits the virus.

George Orwell, in his essay Why I Write, eviscerated the political language of his day, among other things. He stated that his main reasons for writing were to further the cause of democratic socialism and to halt the decay of our language; our political language in particular. Perhaps the most famous quote from the essay was this:

” Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

How is that not what modern conservative political language does? Conservatives engage in a kind of mysticism where they talk about government as though it’s some kind of substance; some kind of solid or liquid. They’ve made a metaphor into something to be taken literally. What is government made out of? What does it look like? What is its consistency? Where is it located? How do you measure its size? What’s the unit of measurement? Can we measure it scientifically? If not, how do we know when it’s too big? When our politicians say so on the campaign stump? Are they our only source of knowledge about “government’s size”? If so, then conservatism is a religion and they are the holy men speaking on behalf of the Market Gods.

Who are the Market Gods, you ask? The Market Gods are the people who tell the conservative pundits and politicians that the Devil is too powerful; the government is too “Big”. In truth, they’re not gods at all, though they may act like they are. This process is otherwise known as corruption.

When pundits and politicians get out there and start talking about “the size of big government”, they’re acting as the delegates of business owners. Why this should be so scary is because business owners, through this process of sending out representatives, take this country away from regular, non-business owning Americans. They trick people into equating their interests and our interests; the company’s interests and the employee’s interests. And that’s dangerous because the interests of the haves and the have nots are not the same and never have been. Ownership is not something people share. It’s not a club they want more people in. The less people in the club, the better, as far as they’re concerned. Less people in the Ownership Club means more for them to own.

“Big” is an umbrella term for everything about the current laws that they dislike; most of which should not scare regular Americans one bit. All kinds of things could be considered “Big Government” to them; anti-slavery laws, anti-discrimination laws, child labor laws, environmental protection laws, zoning laws, the tax code. The Market Gods are not citizens, you see. They’re super-citizens. They’re more important than non-business owning Americans because they’re more powerful than non-business owning Americans. They have private power whereas we only have public power.

People who speak on their behalf will continue to market themselves as closer to God than the rest of us; so we should trust them. When they say that government is too “Big”, we should trust them. When it’s infringing on (corporate non-) “personal liberty”, we should trust them, because that’s what the Market Gods are telling them; these pundits; these clerics in the church of conservatism. And if we don’t listen, they’ll punish us by intentionally sabotaging the national market, which they control. Their political language is nothing more than a coded system of threats, you see. We acquiesce because we’re scared, not because America’s owners are morally right. Their stranglehold is the result of coercion.

To the rest of us, the government infringes on our liberty when it limits us as non-business owners; when it stifles our humanity. Being a business owner should not be seen as the objective of citizenship. Citizenship is an end in itself, not a means to an end. The government should not be seen as a vehicle for accumulating private power. Citizenship, with everything it entails, should be seen as the only kind of power there is. It’s the only kind of just power in existence; designed to be equal, secular, participative, and public.

Humanity has spent centuries trying to define justice. Americans need to rededicate themselves to this pursuit. Modernism is a neatly packaged coup d’état we were hit with sometime in the last century when the Market Gods started accumulating all of their power. Postmodernism and neotraditionalism are deeply anti-conservative ideologies that eschew the abandonment of the pursuit of defining and securing justice. One can think of Modernism as an intense Americanization. Connection with the Old World, and thus history, fades. All of the Old World’s anti-authoritarian struggles are abandoned. The American right is born. It has formed it’s own identity, it’s own method of sustaining itself. The American people are not accustomed to fighting authority inside their own society. They’re not familiar with the idea that American society isn’t homogeneous and undivided; with a singular interest. They’re not conditioned to sniff out political language that manipulates public perception in order to consolidate private power. Conservative mysticism is contaminating our minds; even those on the left.

We’ve yet to declare sovereignty from the Market Gods and abandon business ownership as the objective of citizenship. We’re not a libertarian people. Authoritarianism has been made synonymous with the American identity. This century will be spent rediscovering the anti-authoritarianism inherent in being human and clashing with perhaps the most powerful authority in the history of the world; the American Ownership Club.