Reactionary morality flows downward in a hierarchy. The higher one is, the more rightful their actions are.

With some variations it is as follows:
1) The maximum leader (Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, etc)
2) Political party
3) Wealth
4) Religion
5) Race
6) Sex
7) Locality

In this framework, it is not wrong for Donald Trump to engage in actions that violate Christian teachings. Nor is it wrong for wealthy people to do so.

Being in a less favored identity group means your actions are more likely to be immoral. But you can accrue greater regard by belonging to other identities.

Normally, a Black woman of low income would be viewed as inherently immoral, but if she identifies as a Republican Trump supporter, her actions automatically are imbued with rightfulness.

So long as she refrains from criticizing Republican elites, she will have greater moral authority than a White Democratic man.

Reactionaries are inherently anti-intellectual so they never will explicitly state or even implicitly acknowledge their moral frameworks, but it's observable in all of the decisions they make.

Example: Most reactionaries call themselves "pro-life," but they also uniformly oppose social welfare spending or regulations to protect parents and children...

This seems like hypocrisy to a non-reactionary, but it isn't. Social welfare policies for families are wrong because they will benefit poor people or people from racial minority groups. These people are inherently immoral in reactionary thinking, so they must not receive any benefits.

The only thing poor people should receive is religious instruction to make them virtuous.

Donald Trump was shocked when he first encountered reactionary morality. It was almost unbelievable to him, and he expressed that publicly in his infamous remark that "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters."

He was 100% correct in this. Shooting someone would be immoral based on Christian teaching, but because he is the tribal leader, this action would either be of no moral consequence or actually be a positive action.

This moral viewpoint should not be called "fascist" since fascism is actually a manifestation of it. What I'm describing goes back much further in history to two primary concepts that have been believed across many cultures and times:

1) Divine command theory
2) The great chain of being

The second idea flows from the first.

Divine command theory is the idea that all morality is determined by God alone. Anything God says is moral. Anything opposed to it is immoral.

This moral concept is repeatedly taught in the Hebrew and Christian sacred texts, most prominently in the story of Abraham being willing to kill his son Isaac in obedience to God as related in Genesis 22.

At the very end, God intervenes and stops Abraham from murdering his child, but this is pure happenstance. If Abraham had killed Isaac, it would have been the righteous action.

We see this taught in the later story of Jephthah told in Judges 11.

The tale of Jephthah is much less famous, but it involves an Israelite warrior chief who covenants with God that if he is given victory in an upcoming battle, he will kill the first being he sees upon his return home.

God keeps his end of the bargain and upon his return, Jephthah's daughter rushes to greet him, thus becoming destined to be murdered.

God does not intervene, however, and after a brief time, Jephthah murders his daughter as he promised. And is righteous for doing so.

The idea of Divine Command Theory was explicitly articulated by Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism when he was trying to convince a teenage girl to become his "spiritual wife" against the wishes of her parents and herself.

“Whatever God requires is right, no matter what it is, although we may not see the reason thereof till long after the events transpire,” he wrote to her in a private letter.

Of course, claiming that morality flows from God is a bit of a problem when it is blatantly obvious that there are no gods telling people what to do.

This is why the concept of the following the leader is so important. Since gods are not actually telling us what to do, we must follow the person/people who are God's chosen instruments.

The leader is God's direct, personal servant. His actions are always correct, because of who he is. To be moral, the only thing we can do is obey w/o question.

The identity of the leader is what makes his actions moral, not whether his actions correspond to prior religious teachings.

Unquestioning obedience is the first and only real commandment in this moral viewpoint. Everything else is secondary.

Giving your money to Trump or the scammy televangelist is not an act of stupidity, it is an act of submission to God. It is laudatory rather than foolish.

I prefer calling the moral system described here as "authoritarian thinking" rather than fascism or conservatism, but some people call it that.

Whatever you want to label it as though, it's critical to also understand that besides being a moral perspective, it is also a metaphysics as well.

This is what the "Great Chain of Being" refers to. God exists as the highest moral being, but also the highest physical being. All higher beings have the right to control lesser ones.

The Great Chain of Being was a concept developed as a merger of Aristotle's deistic naturalism with Christian Neoplatonism and used as the primary justification for both monarchy and the idea that the pope had the right to tell royalty what to do as well.

This moral and metaphysical framework is the "order" that authoritarian people are hearkening back to, even if they have never heard of the Great Chain of Being.

I could continue on with the philosophy and metaphysics but this thread is getting long enough. The reason I'm bringing these concepts up is to explain that this is why trying to use logical persuasion with your Trump-worshiping friend or relative is not likely to work.

It's unlikely to succeed because they have a completely different epistemology than you or almost anyone else.

Most humans transcended authoritarian thinking hundreds of years ago. But not some of us.

The best way to oppose authoritarian thinking is to understand that it cannot be compromised with.

Authoritarians are incapable of compromise with toleration because to do so is to invite spiritual and psychic death.

This is ultimately what attracted Trump, a completely unthinking person, to authoritarians. He does not care or understand their pseudo-intellectualism, but he understands their death drive.

I'm going to write this thread up into an essay at some point soon, but if you would like to see an earlier piece I published on the subject, here is a link: https://flux.community/matthew-sheffield/2021/02/why-do-republican-elites-keep-talking-about-dying-jesus/

Thanks for letting me explore all this here. I literally cannot get away with this stuff anywhere but the fediverse w/o attracting a lot of irrelevant debate or trolling! /end