Every year since 2000 Jon Lebkowsky and Bruce Sterling engage in a State of the World conversation on the WELL (www.well.com) with the members of the WELL, one of the first online communities. Here's one part of that conversation which jumped out at me.
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inkwell.vue.487 : Bruce Sterling & Jon Lebkowsky: State of the World 2016
permalink #102 of 178: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Tue 12 Jan 16 00:21
*So: what is really different in 2016 about the modern radical "conservatism"? The problem is that the global market neoliberal capitalism of the go-go 1990s, the Washington Consensus child of a previous Clinton Administration, has nothing much to offer to "conservatives." It is a libertarian ideology, it is globalized, flat, de-cultured, agnostic, value-free. The economic liberty offers nothing to conserve. There is no cozy status-quo to be conservative about, under Internet Counterrevolution.
*The haywire global market is not a force for anyone's cultural stability. It suffers repeated wrenching crises -- vastly bigger and weirder than bonkers little Bitcoin, even -- while the only visible major winners from the decaying status quo are the Chinese Comintern and maybe 80 people, the lottery-winners, the few, freaky, off-the-charts mogul oligarchs, who are the one percent's, 1% one percent. These freaked-out Koch Bros types, yanked from their obscurity by the invisible robot hand of the 2010s market, are nowhere near "conservative." No genuine and sincere political or cultural "conservative" would ever trust these contemporary monsters with a burnt-out match.
*The "Stacks"? Worse! Bezos owns the Washington Post!
*So, the dismally bewildered American "conservative" Right is, in historical fact, super-radical now. They're not conservative in any historical sense of that term. They're one sneeze away from armed insurrection. They would promptly go for that, in a full-bore Tea Party style, except for the stark fact that the various cults of the fractured Right would first turn their Walmart guns on each other. Like any social group seized by unreasonable fanaticism, they fear their own heretics much more than they fear the unbelievers.