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Conservatives Only Wish Their Pet Resentments Were Righteous
Authoritarian populism, Jordan Peterson’s scorn, and the prophetic tradition
Pity the conservative rabble-rouser!
Just imagine having all that indignation and no righteous way to express it because your policies are always on the wrong side of history.
Think of the scorn you see spewing from the talking heads on Fox News, or from Jordan Peterson or Donald Trump and his hordes that invaded the Capitol Building. They call themselves patriotic “conservatives,” they’re full of disdain for the state of modern progress, and there are clear reasons why they’re so bitterly angry.
The snag for them is that to state those reasons outright would give the game away and cast these conservatives as plain villains.
The conservatives’ trick is to present their disdain as though it were righteous even though it’s obviously not, as can be gathered from the monstrous effects of applying any so-called conservative solution to a societal problem that ails them.
The progressive tradition of displaying righteous, prophetic anger
The tradition of venting righteous anger is a long and hallowed one. In the Christian parts of the world, the tradition derives from the Jewish prophets who were portrayed in the Hebrew scriptures as chastising Jews for being morally impure, which supposedly accounted for why those people kept getting conquered by unstoppable empires, like the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Hellenists, and Romans. According to the scriptures which were edited for this priestly purpose, the Jews blamed themselves for these calamities. If only Jews had been more stringent in obeying God’s commandments, the official record maintained, God wouldn’t have abandoned them.
The Jewish prophets are famous mainly for their righteous anger since they were supposedly on God’s side, and the God of Jews is furious at the least sign of sin. God filled Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Jonah, Amos, and…
