This is the type of person currently running the UK, from which our own local conservatives draw inspiration…
This is the type of person currently running the UK, from which our own local conservatives draw inspiration and strategy. Jacob Rees-Mogg. You can see his respect for the whole institution of government in his pose. But it gets even more interesting. /1 https://t.co/quBJBy5PtC
Because modern conservatives so often reproduce a patriarchy of privilege and arrogance. Their fathers are critical. In Rees-Mogg’s case, this is his. Lord William Rees-Mogg. A purveyor of ‘sovereign individual’ ideas that are very on-trend with modern conservatives. /2 https://t.co/ZuHRWrL3fY
It’s a tedious yarn about getting rid of the State entirely; you can’t underestimate how much modern conservatives despise the State. And to understand that, as I Tweet about a lot, remember this same State emerged during the catastrophes of the late-19th to mid-20th century. /3
The State that removed a lot of the powers of these members of existing aristocracies, to fight plagues and wars. From the end of hostilities in WW2, in the 1950s, these aristocrats fought back, viciously. That’s where the ‘market economy’ came from, it was their invention. /4
Their way to bypass the hated State, and replace it with a mechanism that would ensure their perpetual dominance in society. I Tweeted this thread to show that this link survives to this day, in modern politicians. Dressed in expensive business suits and speaking the…/5
…pseudo-economic gibberish of ‘the city’, but underneath all that just old-fashioned aristocratic privilege, sneering at the common folk. Society is always social. Our own LNP is soaked in our own historical aristocracies. The wealthy landowners and industrialists. /6
They never even had a political party, they didn’t need one, they just ruled by birth, and divine right. Then unions organised the Labor Party. That’s the single only reason the LNP even exists today, as a reaction to that early ALP. Wealthy farmers and industrialists formed…/7
…a coalition, which survives to this day. They have almost nothing in common, except their hatred of unions and workers, and the temerity of those same workers organising access to the front bench of parliament for themselves. /end