>>512029979Neocons, for all their warts, believed sincerely in their vision of the world order. They believed that there existed evil and that America could overall be a force for good in the world. That was the ideal, at least -- I should know, I came up in neocon circles through the early aughts. Where it got sidetracked was in its naive willingness to entertain capital. Because the neocon movement was birthed in the wake of total McCarthyist victory, there existed a sincere, almost innocent belief in the supremacy of capitalism; that capitalism was something close to a moral good.
Obviously, this has been proven not to be the case. Neocons were subverted by capital and became an almost classically fascist arm of America whereby capital was Good. The natural extension of this, since capital was more than willing to reciprocate, was that if serving capital is Good, and if capital is willing to compensate for this subservience, then accepting money from Good is also Good. This ends in corruption and militarized defense of capital interests with a healthy side of corruption.
MAGA inherited the structural admiration of capitalism (alongside an incongruous disdain for its results: a capitalist class of elites) but stripped it of its moral character. In MAGA capitalism is no longer Good... it's something stronger: an implicit and unimpeachable texture of reality itself. As it's said, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Not sure where I'm going with this, except to say that MAGA is more dangerous in its implicit cynicism than neocons ever were. They're no less willing to use violence (only inwards) but even more willing to excuse corruption, because if corruption is an implicit texture of existence a moral judgment is not only not present but not possible -- it's like a blind person raised alone in a box with no contact with anyone but his own experience trying to conceptualize light, or vision. Anyway, we're fucked.
