🧡 Reactionaries evaluate moral choices through identities rather than principles.

What others may see as hypocrisy is actually consistent commitment to the power dynamic they obsessively follow.

The rightfulness of an act is not determined by moral principles but by identity of the person or group committing it. #philosophy

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.

@mattsheffield I love this thread but as a religious studies scholar I want to be clear that this moral foundation is both framed by but also simultaneously vigorously opposed by other moralities in the Hebrew Bible and the NT. The story of Isaac is balanced by the story of Abraham arguing for Sodom, etc.
@jewishreader There are many different moral viewpoints and entirely different theologies in the Bible, but the belief system I am describing was the regnant one in the West for a long time until it was gradually displaced, first in Judaism and then later with the establishment of secular and Christian humanism.