Right on the head
In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.
Three-quarters of a century later, Trilling's statement remains broadly true, as a glance at conservative books will attest. The hundreds of conservative book titles that have geysered out of Regnery, Broadside and other right-wing imprints in recent years are almost invariably distinguished by their numbing sameness: a shrill cry of victimhood, a hunt for scapegoats, a tone that alternates between hysteria and heavy sarcasm, and a recipe for salvation cribbed from Republican National Committee talking points and Heritage Foundation issue briefs. The fact that they sometimes hit the bestseller list is principally due to the well-funded conservative media-entertainment complex's bulk-purchase scam.
A desire for hierarchy and human inequality. This belief derives from the medieval religious notion of the Great Chain of Being, whereby there is a place for everybody and everybody must know his place. It justifies economic exploitation and denial of political rights. Conservative writers propagandize on its behalf with a straw-man argument: Any gain in equality costs society an equal or greater loss in freedom; egalitarianism is the mere soulless equality of the gulag, where we cannot own property and must share toothbrushes. This sentiment pops up consistently in the works of American conservative theorists, from Buckley's "Unless you have freedom to be unequal, there is no such thing as freedom," to David Brooks' hankering for rule by a wise elite. American-style laissez-faire economics and libertarianism are largely based on this idea.
The only acceptable society is based on Christianity. Never mind the establishment clause of the First Amendment; conservatives will forever try to smuggle in more and more official endorsement of religion until the United States is effectively a theocracy. The rationale is that some sort of divine or transcendental dispensation is the sole basis for a just temporal order. Translated into the bumper-sticker mentality of American Christian fundamentalism, that means that if people don't believe in God, there's nothing to stop them from running amok and killing people. This thesis would have been news to medieval crusaders, the Holy Inquisition, Francisco Franco's Falangists or the Russian Archbishop Kyrill, who has blessed Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the resulting carnage.
https://news.yahoo.com/theres-no-thing-conservative-intellectual-160001070.html
