I absolutely stole that from somewhere else. It had a similarly revelatory effect and has been wedged in my brain ever since. (Oh hey, I made a note of who to blame: r4b1d0tt3r, MD.)

Not to speak ill of the dead, but… there’s every chance the reasonable bastards you knew would update their bullshit and be even worse. I think your professor did you a disservice in exactly the way I’m sore about. Fascists are conservative. Fascists are hyper-conservative. That never means they’re extra-vigilant against change. They openly demand transformative destruction of existing society, so they can reinvent something that’s always been around. If that sounds contradictory it’s a side effect of how it’s total fucking nonsense. They’re just saying words. It’s not a rational worldview. It’s the innate tribalism of the human animal, cranked to eleven via modern rhetorical gimmicks.

“Branding” is the only place conservatism makes any goddamn sense, because it’s a story they tell. They’re lying. They’re just saying words. When you were in college their reputation was bullshit they made up about times before you were born, and when you were born their reputation was bullshit they made up about when your parents were young. Right now they’re surely selling bullshit about twenty-odd years ago. I’m sorry to say I haven’t paid much attention on account of US politics being such a dumpster fire that your worst scandals seem quaintly desirable. We’ve got people wistfully apologizing for George W Bush’s rainbow of doom and torture prisons, or the Gingrich-era witch hunts against against homosexuals and liberal activism, or the goddamn AIDS crisis under Reagan. Even here, you’re hand-waving that absolute scumbag Richard Nixon did one good thing under intense duress because he expected it to flounder. This is a con job that has been pulled on you. And us. On the world, really, at scale and continuously, to this day.

The traditional branding of conservatism is “we did everything good, but now we’re angry.”

That myth of eternal innocence as justification for outright violence is the only consistent story of this tribalist mode. It is pure ingroup-versus-outgroup storytelling. Good things in the past? Us us us, fuck them. Bad things now? Well they must have stolen the good things from us. (Nevermind who was in charge!)

When you find yourself saying ‘by this definition of conservative, leftists are conservatives,’ that is a shit definition. My apologies to your professor.