Jayu

Conservatism, at its core, has always been a purely reactionary opposition to liberal and progressive politics. In the modern era, it has felt the need to wrap itself in something resembling a positive ideology which presents thinly falsifiable policy positions, regardless of how narrow and mutable those ideological boundaries might be.

Well, there's two major divides within conservatism as it plays out today, right?

Classical liberalism, we can call one, and then populist conservatism...

Classical liberal Republicans/Libertarians are highly principled and highly progressive with very positive, engaging values - think about these old guys like Paul Findley who were fundamentally isolationist, anti-war, pro-Palestine conservatives, that truly believed in Hayek's Constitution of Liberty and that the key to bettering humans is through decentralization of power, minimal government, and human freedom.

And then there is conservatism that goes back to, like, tradition or populism.

Of course, these things often combine, but I think you need to treat conservatism with a lot of nuance because otherwise you are just dismantling a strawman.

Because until recently, abject, reactionary nihilism has been seen as a losing position.

Revolutionary nihilism is how radical liberalism was portrayed by Dostoevsky in the Devils - a great book - and it does make sense, because we see at its root that some of these radical movements actually were about reinventing all of society around totally new principles and annihilating what has hitherto been normalized in Western civilization...

Yes, there is like the Nietzschean reactionaries who want to build the New Man, but yeah, it's still a losing position. I do not even think that guys like BAP are even on that level - like some of the hardcore neopagan LARP squad certainly envisions a completely new basis to muh Western civilization. But it's not like Varg Vikernes is a viable option - in spite of how wildly popular Black Metal became after hipsters getting into blackgaze and shit after ironic Pitchfork album reviews, not even one of the most seminal figures in the genre can be anything much more than a joke for having these beliefs.

I think one of the problems we have is the paranoia about this stuff - you act as if the right is really some monster that is rising to swallow the country in a wave of Fascism, but it's not the right who are anywhere near successfully removing their opponents from ballots.

... It's doubly true for blue collar workers in Asia.

White collar workers get like 15-20 days off a year in Korea, and these are also used for sick days - at enlightened companies, you can work from home on a sick day and have it not count as leave...

I don't know that much about what goes on in blue collar work, but something tells me the workplaces for natives just that are just a few steps above the blue collar labor done by migrants living in barracks in isolated locales working 60+ hour weeks aren't the type to liberally give sick days.