(NC Scout / American Partisan) Frustration is a common theme among conservatives, and has been for some time. Its certainly understandable, as what draws people to conservativism is a desire for stasis. The ‘system’ works in their favor, more or less, and while they may grumble about the goings on of the day to day affairs of the polis, the social equilibrium remains largely unscathed. Much of what one sees online and elsewhere is reflective of this reality and is, for what several personal friends frequently lament, the reason we rarely saw ‘conservatives’ collectivizing in public forms of protest.
It is equally important, while we’re defining terms, to recognize what the term populism means. Almost exclusively a left-wing connotation, populism is, to the laity, when a people have had enough of the status quo. The proverbial system, the social structure and arching hegemony which provided that stasis of comfort to conservatives, is failing. Populism is a direct reflection of cracks in the ruling hegemony; a challenge to the order of things. The fact that populist revolt is present in a social entity is evidence that not all is well in the body politic. Taken to its extreme, populism seeks revolution; an overthrow of the status quo in lieu of new ideas, new blood, new thinking. Sometimes it works, often times not. It is for these reasons we find the would-be Woody Guthries of the world singing their old Wobbly tunes while asking questions conservatives never thought to ask. The vagabonds, the artists, the drifters; all social outcasts that Merton would label Rebels.
Continue reading “THE FOUNDATION OF POPULIST REVOLT, by NC Scout”
