I wish more people would talk about far-right ideologies this way. The true mask off fash are smarter than conservatives and liberals, and their ideology is largely internally consistent. They start with different very basic assumptions about what is valuable, what things are good in and of themselves, and what things are bad in and of itself. And a large portion of that comes from a fundamentalist Christian theology-based ethics. For example if God says being gay is bad, it just is bad. If a fetus is endowed with a soul, it is a person, and "killing" it for any reason is not just murder but murder of a completely innocent baby. There is no argument against that. What you have to argue is that their entire system of ethics is wrong. And that's hard to do.
I wish more people would talk about far-right ideologies this way. The true mask off fash are smarter than conservatives and liberals, and their ideology is largely internally consistent. They start with different very basic assumptions about what is valuable, what things are good in and of themselves, and what things are bad in and of itself. And a large portion of that comes from a fundamentalist Christian theology-based ethics. For example if God says being gay is bad, it just is bad. If a fetus is endowed with a soul, it is a person, and "killing" it for any reason is not just murder but murder of a completely innocent baby. There is no argument against that. What you have to argue is that their entire system of ethics is wrong. And that's hard to do.
As someone born in a Evangelical family that watched fox news daily I can say this is about right.