Talk:Fairy Tale Conservatives
From dKosopedia
I think that "Fairy Tale" might have a bit too many positive connotations to use as plain lingo... however, the exploration of the fairy tale delusions of conservatives would make a great book. It is very true that the conservatives don't have a plan to continue "moving into the future" ...they have an idea about how everything should be - and then it should stay that way. (Stop the press, stop the history books, stop science - this is utopia... the end.)
Fairy Tale Conservatives. A great phrase and I think it needs to be expanded to include conservative economics. Supply side (trickle down) Market based (unregulated) monetarist (banker's welfare) economic theory gets tried over and over and always results in the economy going in the tank but concentrates wealth. (its real purpose) They tell the people the fairy tale and the wicked step mother waltzes away with the dough.
Pyrrho 04:57, 26 Sep 2004 (PDT) I moved it over verbetim to a Applications: Economics page. The way I see the structure of the idea... Conservatives like fairy tales, they do, they are unabashed... the Western Hero is a fairy tale, and they do believe in monsters and heros. This preference for fantasy land is then seen in economics, for example, where it's not as clear to people what the results of other policies really were... they see the results but not much of the cause until they are told afterwards, giving them a wrong impression. The phrase cues the fact that we are addressing some failed policy being pushed again.
I like it because it's positive in that it grants that they want their theories to work. Or rather, ignored that question all together.
A related meme I saw somewhere (perhaps on George Lakoff's Rockridge Institutte site) is "market fundamentalist." As in, people who continue to believe in pure, hard-line free-market capitalism as the solution to all our problems, all evidence to the contrary. Seems promising to me, though of course to some people "fundamentalist" is a good thing.
Related usage
I've been referring to some of the strange things the neofashists need to believe in order to sleep at night as "Fractured Fascist Fairy Tales." As a meme, it has the benefit of recalling, for many, the humorous rhymes read by Edward Everett Horton on the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
But their "Tales" really do persist for decades, as they continue to defend them in the face of (or lack of) much factual information. Some historical "Tales" include Woodrow Wilson armed the merchant marine to willfully get the US into WWI, FDR allowed Pearl Harbor, Alger Hiss was a spy (big one), Nixon "didn't authorize" the burglary at Watergate, and Reagan "won" the cold war (no evidence).
