I’d like to hear how anyone reconciles Republican policy with actually being conservative. They seem like they’re at odds to me and Republican policy is often radical and extreme
So I would consider myself at least reasonably inclined to thinking and somewhat conservative. Note, however, that does NOT mean Republican. When I use conservative, it’s in a different context than the modern “conservative movement”. The modern movement seems to be more regressive than conservative. Conservative in my way of thinking is about calm, measured progress. Don’t upend everything in massive sweeping changes… but don’t reject change either, change is necessary and inevitable. The more moderate Biden-y neoliberal wing of the Democrats is probably the closest to that these days - the more progressive Democrats with wanting massive social upheaval type changes and the Republicans favoring the repeal-and-replace burn it down and maybe fix the ashes approach to undoing those changes, neither of which appeals to me.
Nope, had to look it up (I think I’m a bit older than Destiny’s original target audience), but just from a summary written about his political discussions I could see his brand of a pragmatic take on traditional liberalism being a good fit and am now curious to watch a couple of his videos.
You won’t get an honest answer, because an honest answer is about how they want to go back to 1950s American, where straight white men were the only demographic that mattered.
The most honest answer you’ll get is from some fucked up tweaker that is too gone to hide their unabashed racism and hate of people they share a community with and see every day. “I hate those __” is as clear as it can ever get and I think it’s consistent
While I don’t disagree in principle – corporations need to be paying taxes, and in fact, so do wealthy individuals – the effective tax rate on wealth since the 50s has changed very little. Those extreme tax rates you see from the era – 91%, 80%, etc., often only applied to a literal handful of households or businesses.
And, again, because our tax system is progressive, those extreme rates only applied to income above extreme (for the era) thresholds.
The biggest issue is not the tax rate, but that corporations (and rich individuals) have so many different ways to avoid paying any tax at all. To the point that, in 2020, it was literally newsworthy that Amazon had to pay more than $0.
Straight white men weren’t even particularly well off as a whole. Yes, The upper middle and upper class were almost exclusively white men but that was a small portion of their entire demographic. What they really want is to be able to go back to a time when they could beat their wives, divorce was not available, black people had to call them ‘sir’ or get strung up, and all the gay people were ‘where they belonged’, i.e. France, dead, or in the closet.
Apparently I won’t receive any answer, which further highlights the issue. “Someone curious about beneficial conservative legislation? Gotta be a trap, go around.” The hoop is entirely open and a yet they refuse to dunk, because they lack the ability.
I mean, I think I’ve noticed that there is a much lower presence of right wing ideas on lemmy in general. My conspiracy is that is because a large amount of right wing sentiments are coming from fake to try and make it look like the sentiment is there. There is clear evidence this has happened with Russia in the 2016 election and the Rand Paul sentiment that preceded it.
I think you don’t see that on lemmy because it’s not a popular platform ATM so opinions tend to be a little more genuine.
4chan is probably the counter example to my belief.
My comment was caught in the outage, so forgive me for paraphrasing. 4chan used to be just as progressive as we are here, before they poe’s law’d themselves into a nazi haven. Upside, their fall created a broad online understanding of radicalization methods, which I’ve found several people consistently using here, like disillusionment and appeals to open information sharing. No, telling nazis to leave isn’t censorship, rando 1 through 8. Anyway, that’s all to say that they’re probing for opportunities to do the same thing here, and, like you, I can only wonder if it’s actual bigots or state actors.
right-wing imprints in recent years are almost invariably distinguished by their numbing sameness: a shrill cry of victimhood, a hunt for scapegoats, a tone that alternates between hysteria and heavy sarcasm, and a recipe for salvation
Man this rings true for my experience growing up in a conservative area
Add in a constant effort to trap you in a “gotcha” moment (typically built on some weird binary logic) that they think is the end all of the discussion and it’s so spot on
One thing to understand is that our ability to reason comes down to how we weigh our knowledge of the material in question. Someone can be extremely knowledgeable (and through that knowledge, intellectual) about one topic; and dumb as rocks in another. One of the culture shocks for me when I started working in the medical field was not just the existence, but the prevalence of stupid doctors. You’d think that someone who could become a doctor would be an all around curious and open-minded person… and when they’re talking about their area of expertise, it 100% seems that way; but once they deviate into other areas, it starts to show that they’re just as much a joe-dipshit as the rest of us.
So, you could have someone who’s intellectual as fuck in the context of like orthopedic surgery; but even in other parts of the field of medicine, their brain hits a brick wall and suddenly your ortho doc drinking the covid conspiracy theory koolaid; or conned by some talkshow host into paying money for NFTs; or swallowing the lies about dragshows somehow being about grooming children.
There is absolutely such a thing as a conservative intellectual: just means they’re really smart in some unrelated area; and really stupid with politics. There are also plenty of folks who buy into the hatred spewed by the political rightwing. Tricking rednecks into voting against their own interests is one thing - a bigger problem is that for a lot of voters, the cruelty is the point. They don’t give a fuck about children: they just want to hurt trans people. They don’t give a fuck about fetuses: they just want to hurt women. Assuming that conservatives are just politically stupid is actually giving them the benefit of the doubt - cuz the alternative is that they’re just evil… and evil paired with intellect is both real and incredibly dangerous.
I don’t think they mainly “want to hurt”. I think what they want is to control: force others to follow their own moral beliefs or even to just do what they think will be good for that doing the forcing.
What we think as Evil is not done by charicatural evil people with who enjoy hurting others, rather it’s done by people who see themselves as good people and have massive excuses to hurt and even do harm to others, and sometimes that’s to such a level that they believing they’re actually helping those other people their forcing to comply with their own morals.
So a lot of that stuff is Moralism, practiced by people who actually see themselves as good people, which is why you’ll also find people who believe themselves to be lefties trying to force others to comply with their own beliefs (rather than, you know, trying to convince them). That said, this kind of leveraging social systems to stroke their inner authoritarianism seems to be a lot more common in the rightwing.
PS: By the way, I think it’s because of this paradox of people who see themselves as good people forcing their moral compass on others all they while telling themselves they’re “doing the right thing” that is so difficult to stop this kind of thing. Such righteous autoritarians are extremelly defensive when confronted with what they’re doing because they genuinelly think they’re good people doing what’s-right/needs-to-be-done/some-other-excuse.
Oh for sure – but I’d categorize those as the ‘politically stupid’ variety. They’re the ones convinced that they need to step up in defense of all the damsels in distress from the trans boogeymen just waiting to pounce in womens’ restrooms. They think they’re doing good, it’s just their gullibility has been taken advantage of and steered into unwittingly supporting horrible things. Not evil, just stupid, and thjus a tool for evil.
Then there are the ones who just straight up hate trans people. Evil.
It’s more of a spectrum than a dichotomy, but the modern ‘red team’ falls somewhere between those two points.
DUDE… I don’t even work in the medical field. But I have such a similar experience. I grew up going to private schools and had lots of friends as doctors… so many of them were dumb as rocks outside of their area of expertise… Especially socially. To this day I constantly meet doctors that have no “social” or “street smarts” and are dumb as hell at technology, etc etc etc. I know that becoming a doctor takes a lot of effort, and focus, and specific knowledge… But… There’s a certain intuitiveness that comes with being generally “smart”. And for whatever reason, doctors don’t have that. I don’t think all doctors are “stupid”. But it seems like a profession you send someone who is stupid into, to do well… I really hate saying that but I relate so much to your comment its crazy lol.
The social bit is pretty wild. I’ve seen doctors - in the middle of surgery - lash out yelling at the techs and nurses, throw instruments, stomp their feet… straight up like a toddler, but with 20+ years of education. You’d think part of medschool would include some basic social and leadership training. I mean, in terms of the team dynamic, the doctor is always the leader, and it’s not a great look when your leader is throwing a tantrum like some 4 year old who just got told ‘no’ for the first time in their life and is an hour passed nap time.
The other extreme exists too ofc - some of the absolute best people I’ve ever met are doctors.
The takeaway is there isn’t really a correlation, or at least not near as much of one as you’d expect. Take almost any slice of the population and you’ll find a handful of genuinely outstanding human beings; a few absolute wastes of oxygen; and a horde of folks scattered in between. Take a slice exclusively of doctors, and… same. You’d expect that slice to be heavily weighted on the positive end, but the reality doesn’t pan out that way. I suspect you’d get similar results with a random sample of physicists, or highschool students, or people living in some ghetto - you get the point.
The only times I’d expect it to deviate much from that are population samples that are in a position to abuse power. CEOs, oligarchs… looks at thread title …those guys.
Gab is actually a Mastodon instance, so you can directly see what people in the Fediverse can/will do to fringe content ... defederate
The problem is that outside of tankies, the far left basically wants people taken care of and treated like people and the far right wants certain types of people to not exist (how they want the not exist part to happen is up for some debate amongst the right, but, they still need to be gone and gone quickly)
In a practical sense, you cannot really compare the two.
Yes, there are whackjobs on the left too, but they're not taken seriously by anyone and not getting prime time TV coverage of their runs for office.
If we get away from practicalities and talk pure theory, then I guess other arguments can be made, but if we're restricting ourselves to the things as they are now with labels as they're typically used, the far right is barren as far as intellectualism goes.
i’ve seen other forums starting out as pretty open-minded and becoming that… so it’s definitely possible… i think gab is not that far right. i would not mention the names.
I know plenty of conservative intellectuals, they are not Republicans though. Look up topics on individual freedom, limited government, or the rule of law to find thousands of examples.
Most would call themselves moderates as conservative is a poisoned title, but they exist.
So ask yourself, what perspective have conservatives been groomed view the United States? Roger Kimball describes it as, “A damsel (America) is locked in a dark castle, which was once a glorious palace in years gone by.” But now “liberal elites, the bureaucracy, academia” have sapped “her vitality,” turning her “weak and infirm” due to a dastardly belief system in “left-wing ideology, political correctness, egalitarianism. Using this metaphorical trope, Kimball continued to describe citizens as having turned into weaklings who secretly long for a return to national greatness. This view of decline and decadence, so core to the conservative intellectual tradition, is prone to eventual faith in a strong, authoritarian leader. And thus, Donald Trump becomes, for Kimball, the only one ready to rescue the country from its demise.
Their perspective is so vastly different due to indoctrination from years of talk radio, right wing news, and sites like facebook, reddit and 4chan where echo chambers reinforced the indoctrination.
The aspect free minds are missing us that, to quote Kimball again, “Trumpism represent[s] conservatism at its essential core, a kind of return to its roots in monarchism”. This “monarchism” is now being nurtured by a populist faith—a combined belief in the supposed goodness of the masses, led by the sort of paternalistic authoritarian leader that conservative intellectuals can get behind.
A free mind can obviously see through the deception has it is full of holes. If you don’t believe Steve Bannon is the next Pluto than you’ve already come to the conclusion that these buffoons are actually fascists attempting to strip American citizens of their rights and to gain power through the courts, through the power of the mob, and to gain power through forced religion, just as the Nazis did in the 1930s. The difference is they have absolute imbeciles in charge who have mucked up the process and exposed what they are doing. The mirror was broken for the vast majority of the American people to see. Thus this movement stalled, but it isn’t dead yet.
Conservative simply means to preserve the status quos at large in society. It doesn’t have anything to do with limited government as it’s nothing more than a convenient selling point. You can see it in their policy pretty clearly I think.
The people I know that support very limited government tend to support the idea of radical changes from the current trends. Ironically I would say by now to support a limited and small government you’d have to support some radical departure from the norm
So like libertarians are kinda radical in some of their positions but they consider themselves more conservative than republicans. Who’s the actual conservatives here? I think I’d say neither really fit the bill but then, who is conservative? Tbh I don’t know anyone that’s like “this is pretty good let’s just stay course”
Which imo makes us have to ask why is this happening? Is this obfuscation of political positions in our language a deliberate thing? Because that’s some shit that’s happened historically with fascism so idk
… individual freedom, limited government, or the rule of law…
There is nothing inherently conservative about any of those values. Depending on the ruling government at the time, those concepts were often considered decidedly progressive. In fact, it could be both at the same time depending on which freedoms, which limits, and which laws you’re discussing.
Conservatives at every point in history redefine conservativism to encompass the values that most benefit themselves at the time. If conservatives own businesses and do not control the government, they support limited government and deregulation. If conservatives face competition and can capture regulatory bodies, then strict guidelines and requirements are absolute.
The reason why conservative intellectuals don’t exist is simply because any non-trivial thought dismisses most arguments they have and would make them leave their conservative position. They ignore constant massive contradictions, bad faith arguments and misused language. The closest you could come to an intellectual position as a conservative is to openly say you want to power trip, enslave, kill, imprison people that disagree with you etc, which you obviously wouldn’t say(in this lemmy instance).
There absolutely are conservative intellectuals, they just don't tend to endorse MAGA.
Here's a great example: https://scholars-stage.org/ Knocks it out of the park all the time. Then again, he rarely spends his time talking directly about culture war topics.
Gotta feel like these rare folks are screaming into the void lol. The majority of the people who would most likely align with them have admonished such vocabulary as elitist long ago. I kinda love to see it
It regretfully doesn't matter how intellectual they are if the two-party system forces them to let their anti-intellectual minorities run the party. Once a governing body decides that keeping power away from "the other team" is more important than their principles, they cease to have the merit of those principles. Middle of the road negotiation simply ceases to exist. Either you have an overwhelming majority and don't need the other party's consent, or you have a narrow majority and policy making gets held hostage by the most belligerent minority faction within the party. When that belligerent faction is anti-intellectual, the result is the current shitshow.
Since American politics are right-leaning on the Overton window, that makes both parties more susceptible to getting kneecapped by their most right-leaning belligerents when they hold a narrow majority. A narrow Republican majority gets kneecapped by the Freedom Caucus, and a narrow Democrat majority gets kneecapped by the likes of Sinema and Manchin.
You… know it's possible to be a conservative without being a Republican, right?
If you want to say there are no politically relevant conservative intellectuals, that I would agree with. the Republican party is currently dominated by grifters, so anyone involved is going to be doing a lot of shoddy post-hoc justifications. But to say that being conservative of any stripe bars one from actually thinking deeply and critically is narrow minded.
You… know it's possible to be a conservative without being a Republican, right?
Well yeah, I’d even say Republican policy is at contradictory with current popular conservative rhetoric. I think we’ve muddied these terms up too much in the us.
To any conservative though I think my most simple question is, what is it specifically they want to conserve? They don’t have small and limited government, and we never have? What about the status quo is so appealing if we can all admit there are major problems? It’s like even “conservatives” are saying significant changes need to be made and that’s just convoluted lol. I think “Republican” is so unpopular of a label among the youth that they have to hide behind other labels like “conservative” and “libertarian” even when it makes no sense
While I do agree that's where OP article is going with this...
American right produces fuax intellectuals that are more focused on justifying current regimes existence at any costs. it is not logically congruent or grounded in any sound philosophical underpinnings beyond I am rich, I got mine, slave for low wages BC you are poor and stupid, youare poor stupid BC your parents suck, I am good cuz I gotz money, I am better BC I crawled out of rich womans vagina, look at these tests score, they prove whyte b smart...
American left shares much of similar clown idealogy, although there are some independent thinkers but they end shilling tankie shit which ends with some weird positions just to create opposition to the right
Either way, you can't have an intelectual discussion within the framework of two party political system and most Americans can't get over this hurdle.
People always shilling some predetermined point for "their side" this is literally definition of anti intellectualism
Either way, you can't have an intelectual discussion within the framework of two party political system and most Americans can't get over this hurdle.
I think you can when you reduce the parties to progressivism and conservativism. Aka change vs do not change. But in the us we have conservatives claiming that label while crying for systemic changes at the same time.
So I think we can have a discussion in this framework but first we have to un-muddy what labels we assign to which ideologies and we categorize people appropriately. But these people can’t even categorize themselves so it’s a real mess. The current sides as they’re commonly laid out don’t seem like the actual sides in real life imo
And honestly I think the most straight forward way to frame it right now is authoritarian vs not on many social issues
Reality is definitely something the conserved brain cannot handle. Cracking open that tin can is sure to relieve some of that debilitating pressure bearing down on the logic of basically any situation. In my exerience not one conservative has a good argument about their viewpoints, as their viewpoints are grandfathered in and pasted over their ability for compassion, logic and critical thinking. If the world weren’t in the hands of people using dumb conservatives to rob and maintain wealth, it would be classified as a mental illness akin to schizophrenia.
Well not every intellectual was born in the past century. Virtually all of these would be conservative based on our modern values. Virtually no one 100 or 200 years ago would have been in favor of gay marriage. There were plenty intellectuals 100 and 200years ago.
You have to remember that the people you are replying to are literally delusional.
Conservatives love to convince themselves that everyone else secretly think just like them. Any time someone doesn’t agree with them or they get pushback, they start blaming far-left minority groups. The funniest part is the “Correct the Record” idiocy(It was super pac that existed in 2015-2016 and they think it’s still secretly operating and influencing social media), which is such obvious projection that it’s literally funny. But they’re so stupid they think they’re being subtle…
I don’t hate republicans because I do know some in real life unfortunately and do tolerate their existence. However republicans definitely tend to have less capacity for critical thought. The only intelligent republicans I have known personally have been rich business owners, and I attribute their affiliation with greed/malice instead of stupidity.
Back in 2016, Hillary had both of those in which people were paid to go online and argue with people who said negative things about her. For example, someone could say “Hillary did X” and people who worked for either CTR or ShareBlue were paid to go and explain how the allegation was incorrect.
If you want a right-leaning platform then go find one with a small, toxic community, heavy censorship and immature leadership.
Find a place of freedom and somehow the majority ends up being considerate and liberal. You can come to your own conclusions about why that is but it seems pretty obvious to me.
On the surface personal responsibility and free market, howeverz there is no thing really conservative about it it gets twisted into some perverted way to punk minorities and to obtain preferential government treatment.
For example koch brothers and few other select clowns fundd Prager U... To shill these ideas...
Kuck brothers are some of the largest well fare queens in the US...
They don't oay much taxes either due to their lobbying.
I’m of the belief police should be disarmed and laws put in place that gun violence of any kind is a minimum 50 year sentence. Select police can be armed, but not everyday peace officers.
I’m of the belief that the act itself should be what’s considered. If you murder someone, it should be because you murdered someone, not because of what you used to murder someone with, whether that be a car, knife, or gun.
You didn’t justify any of those positions. I wouldn’t call most of them good and the only good one of them, “people should be treated equally,” is not at all a value conservatives have. Just ask one about giving trans people basic human dignity.
All that was asked for was positions, but sure, I’ve done this long enough on reddit I have most of my arguments memorized by now, and some are targeted towards leftists.
The people should be armed too, because if they’re not, only cops will have guns. And ACAB. Hell, even Marx said “under no pretext”
People should be treated equally. This one is obvious, even if we disagree on the details.
Abortion is murder. If you agree that we shouldn’t abort as the baby is coming out, then where do you draw the line? When the brain starts functioning? Viability? When the heart first beats? Murder is serious, and I side with caution.
Immigration lowers wages by 2% for every 10% rate increase. It’s basically corporations hiring scabs and hiding behind a false diversity claim.
People should be treated equally. This one is obvious, even if we disagree on the details.
“The details” are “LGBT+ aren’t people.”
Viability?
Sounds good to me.
And your ancestors were probably immigrants unless you’re fully Native American, so maybe you shouldn’t complain about them. But if you’re Native American, yes. Immigrants have fucked you over for a long time.
Heavy immigration hurts wage slaves... Where they are born is not relavent. Cute phrasing on this one BTW... Shows your bias nicely.
Nobody is killing babies. Again phrasing showing bias. Also, if this your ideological position. Get a life.
America first is not a a political idealogy, it is a brain dead position that practically means nothing aka "anything I like is america first!" "Anything you like is communism"
2nd amendment protect rights to own guns, nothing ideological about that. Red herring to get cOseRvatives riled up.
With that said, equal treatment under the law and socially, does indeed stand on its own but it ain't left right thing IMHO. We can all agree that's just the right thing to make our society function. Which it currently does not for various reasons.
I agree with some conservative positions like Americans have an individual right of freedom. I can and should be able to live my life in manner that I want to without the government forcing me to live it another way. I view things like LGBTQ rights fall under this surprising core conservative belief. Now most conservatives would view it as individual freedom mean they can be a racist bigot and discriminate, but that isn’t individual freedom.
I also agree with the concept of limited government, but from the view that government even in its best state is a necessary evil. It should not govern our everyday lives but it must serve the people. Government isn’t a power, it is a service that ultimately serves the people.
The government is a tool to ensure the good will, safety, and prosperity of the people. What we can’t achieve on our own gets done through the collective power of the government.
Liberals aren’t trying to force government on people, they’re trying to ensure that the rights of everyone take precedent over someone’s perceived “right” to discriminate.
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