"Some are born to be ridden, and others born booted and spurred to ride them."

The real face of conservatism

Tom Perkins "believes in government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy."

Yes, he does.

From Tom Perkins to the tea party to Rush Limbaugh to Paul Ryan, the Right truly believes that the wealthy are better than everyone else. . . . 

We have to understand what progressivism is up against. 

Our belief in the fundamental equality of all people is not shared by our opponents. 

Our belief that all Americans should have equal rights and an equal voice in our democracy is not shared by our opponents.

Conservative rejections of the kind of political equality asserted in the Declaration of Independence and again in the Gettysburg Address to be founded in natural and divine law go all the way back to the revolution, when those who weren't loyalists were anyway monarchists and proud upholders of the ancien regime, based squarely on the hereditary power of the king and the lords temporal, and the power ex officio of the lords spiritual.

The ones who prefer Burke to Locke are the ones who come closest to being honest about it, though even Locke was not committed to republicanism without reservation and did not see any but absolute monarchy as firmly excluded by natural law.

The conservatives of America sided firmly with Britain, attacking republicanism on the continent in defense of monarchies far closer to being genuinely absolute than the British.

Within the last week, an article was published at the American Conservative extolling the virtues of the Russian autocracy of the 19th Century, the most absolutist of European monarchies at every phase of its history, praising it as a laudable exemplar of conservative government, both in form and in policy.

And it was unsurprisingly the conservatives, after all, who defended or at least found it easiest to accept slavery in America, right up to the Civil War, as consistent with their basic political views.

Conservatives fundamentally loathe popular government, and accepted the American Republic from the beginning only with the gravest reservations and most profound resentment, realizing full well the American plebs would have killed them all rather than accept monarchy and aristocracy here, where they had for practical purposes never existed.