Further Musings on the Difference Between Conservatism and the Right Wing...

Where to begin our musings on conservatism and right wingers?

Let's start with definitional accuracy.

Those right wingers who call themselves conservatives today are not conservatives. They are laissez-faire liberals. Classic conservatives, of course, reacted against Enlightenment liberalism and "democracy" along with Enlightenment radicalism.

Right wingers have an unfortunate tendency of being unable to distinguish empirical fact from ideologically correct fantasy, descriptive statements from normative demagoguery and delusions. Whether one likes reality or not is immaterial. Racism is real even though the notion of races is a fiction, whether in the US, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Class inequalities and gender inequalities are real whether one likes it or not. Any approach worth its salt must begin there, with empirical facts. How one responds ethically and morally to these realities is a different matter. 

There have been and are a variety of social ethical approaches to economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic facts There have, of course, been conservative thinkers. Plato, Burke, Comte, and Tolkien come to mind. Conservatives, generally speaking, opposed--I am obviously speaking normatively here--industrialism, capitalism, and democracy. Conservatives, at least those worth their salt, advocated for the rule of the best, whether they regarded those best as philosopher-kings, the English manorial elite, aristocrats, kings, scientists, or a frankly idealised priesthood of old. They did not advocate for the notion that morons like Trump and his nouveau riche ilk were either the best or the brightest. Conservatives treasured and treasure books; I doubt if a know nothing like Trump has ever read one. 

Because of their normative emphasis on looking backward and treasuring aspects of the past conservatives have offered little in the way of social theory on either modernity or postmodernity other than that capitalism, industrialisaton, and "democracy" were negative in their consequences for "tradition". There has been no Marx, Weber, or Durkheim among conservatives. Right wing no nothings probably have never heard of those intellectual giants who attempted to understand modernity other than to demonise them. All this said, conservative Niall Ferguson has explored the coming of modernity and postmodernity but his work is very derivative. Ferguson's interesting documentaries essentially update Marx, Weber, and postmodernist thinkers. Daniel Boorstin's book The Image--Boorstin was a consensus conservative/liberal a la Hofstadter and Bell who was very critical and dismissive of McCarthyist right wingism--did prefigure much postmodernist theory but conservatives have not really pursued it while right wingers either don't know much about it or simply demonise it as if social theory and one's response to it was or should be a low level theological or dogmatic enterprise.

One thing conservatives historically were not was utopian. This, once again, distinguishes them from contemporary right wing faux conservatives who curiously believe, they are laissez-faire liberals after all, that with capitalism the radiant future has arrived, despite or in spite of the empirical realities of poverty and inequality. True conservatives, of course, would and did defend inequality and rule of the best and brightest, however defined or delineated.