Curiously, the agrarians, ur-Americans of Southern Protestant extraction, were influenced by the leading figure of the French Counter-Enlightenment, the arch-reactionary ultramontane Catholic Joseph de Maistre. Even in the present day, a Southern apologist for slavery has written a screed for something called the Abbeville Foundation extolling Maistre’s hatred of republics. Evidently, despising the very governmental foundation of the United States has become fashionable for a certain type of reactionary conservative.
Émile Faguet, a French author and critic, called Maistre “a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of pope, king and hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner."
Maistre hits many of the key themes of American conservatism: religious dogmatism, belief over evidence, anti-scientism, the imperative of obedience to hierarchy and a habitual brooding over violence.
The author then continues on to wealth accumulation.
There’s a reason they stop reading the Constitution at “We the people…” and celebrate the Confederacy.
The bigger words past that point in the document tend to give them trouble 🥺
If they ever get to the words “promote the general Welfare”, they’ll ban it in schools for promoting socialism.