The phrase Conservative Syndicalism popped in my mind. I looked up Syndicalism, and found this: Syndicalism is a current in the labor movement to establish local, worker-based organizations and advance the demands and rights of workers through strikes.
Here is my point: a local union, working with a local company, working for specific objectives, is ABSOLUTELY something which is consistent both with conservative economic and political ideas.
Conservatism is about small-ness. It is about combatting the large with the small in aggregate. Conservatism is Main Street. It is keeping your town weird. It is small businesses, and police officers you know and who know you. It is the crowded ice cream shop on Saturday night.
What it is NOT is Amazon buying newspapers to advance their political agenda, which means more rights for corporations and less for people.
Obviously, this is why most small towns are conservative, and most big cities are Big Government. You vote what you know.
But back when Republicans were partnering, say, with Standard Oil to crush workers, that was NOT conservatism. That is Fascism, which is a bastard hybrid between free markets for the large, and authoritarianism for everyone else.
And today, what Amazon and Big Tech–through censorship and buying press and buying elections–has done to crush Main Street is not all that different from what John D. did or tried to do (I remember small details about small skirmishes, but am not fully up to speed on that era) to protect his own obscene profits.
Planned or not, the RESPONSE to COVID wrecked Main Street. Qui Bono? Among others, the owner of the Washington Post. And Amazon recently deplatformed America’s Frontline Doctors, who have been fighting to get honest information out into a world largely denuded of it. OBVIOUSLY, this pandemic has been GREAT for Jeff Bezos bottom line and market position. If you simply subtract the merest whiff of human decency, and why wouldn’t he be among the front line ranks of the plague pushers?
You have to be a Republican in 2021 if you want any chance at all of reigning in the corporate power elite. They know this: that is why they are all staunch Democrats. They are buying what they need, with as much money as it takes.
And as I keep saying, the Constitution is all about distributing power. That was the whole point. They wanted enough potential power in the Federal Government to protect the nation from foreign aggression, but enough in the States to prevent tyranny. Government is supposed to have distributed power at all levels, from the Federal on down to small school boards, and planning committees for the 4th of July parade.
Conservatives can absolutely support welfare: we just want it provided by local governments, not national ones. And this makes more sense. As it works now, the Federal government takes money from one part of America and spends it somewhere else. How does that make sense? And how can any centralized bureaucracy ever spend that same amount of money more intelligently than those in direct contact with the problems at hand? They can’t. They don’t. In general, they make things worse and either don’t realize it, or feel empowered to deny it, both since they are so far from the actual people involved.
Decent people need to wake up and realize that if they don’t want people who are ugly, nasty and mean telling them from far away how to live their lives, they need to get the locus of control back into their State Houses and City Halls.
Conservatism is not about what is right, but who gets to decide. Who can decide better than small groups of people who live in the same towns, and will have to live with the results?