I’ve written a good bit of late about political conservatism and its various strains and components. It may be time to bring all this back around to Christendom. Thus, I’m thinking of this as “fusionism to fascism” week.
I’m going to consider healthy, and perhaps less healthy, pathways to combine a thick religious traditionalism with politics. One of the week’s major essays will consider the traditionalist attraction to authoritarianism. The other will look at fusionism, a characteristically American expression of political conservatism, and consider whether it has promising possibilities. (If you’re not sure what fusionism is, stick around! I’ll explain. If you’re not sure what fascism is, definitely stick around. I appreciate people with enough honestly and self-knowledge to admit that they find fascism a fuzzy concept. It is rather fuzzy.)
These are all fraught topics in the world today. It seems plain that political religions are rampaging across the globe, opening all sorts of terrifying possibilities, but everyone is struggling to figure out which theoretical or historical touch points are most relevant. I’m not an oracle, but at any rate I have a few opinions to offer.
As a teaser, I will just say though that while my general feelings about Western politics in recent years have been exceedingly negative, it feels to me at the moment like there could, just maybe, be openings to something positive over the next few years. I could be wrong. Now and then though, interesting times do go somewhere good.
When I tried to make images for this post, I kept getting frustrated by “AI safeguards” that will not allow me to use images or symbols connected with Dangerous Political Movements. So, I finally gave up and asked it to make me a satirical Unsafe Images image.
See? Whatever else happens, a mad dash from fusionism to fascism is unlikely to be boring.