Flutterby™! : ascetic self-denial

Elf Sternberg: Jon Stewart proposes a policy that we cannot sell.

Capitalism isn't good, in this conservative formula, because it generates wealth. It's good because it forces people to live precarious, desperate, "disciplined" lives. It forces people into an ascetic self-denial, and fearful of the consquences of "paganistic self-expression" (as ur-conservative Isaiah Berlin called it).

Yes. That's what the modern conservative movement, with its alliance between ascetic branches of Christianity and the looter branch of wealth, has become.