The name is a bit misleading, as they’re not reactionaries who want to go back to an imaginary idealized past, but conservatives who want to conserve the past status quo. They’re more like Blue Make A Keep Being Imperialist.

But their strategy is really “interesting”. If they convince enough people that they’re still a powerful empire, their empire will magically stay strong (bending reality to their will, idealism logic, jedi logic).

Now there’s two kinds of people that they hate: people who powerfully fight back and therefore show the empire’s weaknesses (russians and iranians), and people who notice the empire’s material weakness and try to do something about it (fascists).

Both show the material reality that the empire is weak, so both (including their supporters) are considered traitors to the idealist imperialist cause. That’s where all the trump = putin bullshit comes from.

Idealist magic supposedly only works if every imperial citizen (the other people have already been dehumanized and therefore don’t count) believes in it, that’s why radlibs become so angry at nonbelievers. “If only the nonbelievers would all believe, we could have genocided russia with our minds alone long ago”, they think.

Then the question becomes, why don’t they just murder the nonbelievers? They try, by trying to convince everyone that the nonbelievers are dumb and lesser and all sorts of things, but that just doesn’t kill them irl.