I get the impression that today the roles have reversed - that nowadays, conservatives think liberals are evil and liberals think conservatives are stupid.
A constant refrain of liberalism is that conservatives are uneducated and vote against their own interests, while highly-educated folks tend to vote liberal and support measures to fight climate change, etc., and the possession (or lack of) a college education is a huge factor in whether one votes D or R - and in particular, the uneducated foolishness of conservatives who refuse to get vaccinated is a huge reason why they’re dying in such big numbers. And a constant refrain of conservatives, especially in the Trump era, is that liberals are evil geniuses who are masterminding all sorts of evil in the world, such as the (fake) pizza restaurant human trafficking ring, Hillary had her opponents assassinated, QAnon’s claims of evil Democratic conspiracies, the Covid vaccine somehow being the Mark of the Beast, etc.
Both sides have always thought the other side is stupid and evil. Absolutely nothing has changed there. The #1 top complaint of AOC is “she’s so stupid, what a dumb dummy”.
What’s changed is that we’re hearing more directly from lower-class conservatives than at any point in the past. In the latter 20th century, conservative elites made heroic efforts to create the impression that they were the head of a principled intellectual movement.
Now with the advent of the internet and social media, we’re hearing more from everyday “conservatives” than ever before. It’s no longer possible to pretend they’re any sort of principled intellectuals when many of them are proclaiming themselves to be racists, bigots, anti-science, anti-education, anti-equality.
Of course, nobody with two eyes ever really fell for the lush tapestry of bullshit that is conservative intellectualism. They’ve let the mask slip. It’s a relief that we no longer need to debate that fiction, now that the real conservatives are energetically telling us that that it’s never been part of who they are.
I understand the point made by the OP and I think it has some truth to it. Personally, I think conservatives are both stupid and evil. I was going to make a thread a couple of months back titled “Is there anything good for which conservatives stand anymore?” I figured it would get thrown to the pit. In all honesty, the Republican party is sprinting lower and lower and lower. There seems to be no limit to which they will not disgrace and dishonour themselves. The latest attacks on democracy are obvious and truly revolting. We’re seeing a proto-fascist party turn into a fascist party before our very eyes. I don’t care what issue someone thinks (*) the Republican party stands for (guns, crime, abortion, “culture war” which they made up, etc.), they are voting for fascism. And if someone votes for fascism, is standing with evil and that makes them complicit in that evil and hence evil. It isn’t like the Republicans are trying to hide it anymore. 2016 taught them they don’t need to hide it. Republican voters don’t care. They’ll be lied to about made-up issues (e.g., culture war is the big one right now) and they’ll believe it. In my opinion, that makes them stupid. No critical thought, no original thought. Whatever the right-wing media wants them to think they will goose step right along with it. You can see it time and time again, although it was especially prevalent with Trump because Trump was so incredibly stupid it just made it stand out more.
Trump says something stupid.
RWM supports what Trump says no matter how incredibly dumb.
RW voters hear what RWM media says. Parrot it. Trump also sees it on RWM.
Trump when asked about his absolutely moronic position says “I hear people are saying it…”
???
Profit!
(*) Psst. Little secret. They don’t give a flying fork about any of those issues. They use these to get people to vote for them so they can pass tax cuts.
Any sentient human should have understood that conservatives have put being deliberately, actively evil as the cornerstone of all their beliefs and actions since the McCarthy era.
The only difference in the decades between that era and today is while everybody thought McCarthy was as stupid as he was evil, people mostly thought that conservatives as a group were dangerous because they weren’t in fact stupid. Nixon was hated, along with his gang of war criminals, but their intelligence wasn’t doubted. Reagan was an amiable dunce, but his cronies in his administration and Congress were wily plotters who mostly outmaneuvered the Democrats. Bush II was more of the same, or perhaps less of the same, depending on how stupid you think he was and how much control Cheney had.
Trump was known to be an idiot decades before he became president. That’s why the entire Republican party failed to take him seriously. Politics has never lacked clowns who gained office because of their mouths, but they never made it nationally because no one else in power would give way to them. After he was elected, the entire power base had to bow and scrape or else lose influence but you could see how they held their noses the entire time. Even a world-class toady like Lindsey Graham took every opportunity to back away from Trump whenever he thought Trump went too far over the stupid line only to walk it back when that line proved to be imaginary.
It’s fun to watch Mitch McConnell writhe as the stupids undermine every action he tries to take. Stupid is a remarkably good counterforce to evil, it turns out. But the loudest voices in the party are not faking stupid to outmaneuver the liberals; they truly are as stupid as what comes out of their mouths.
Note carefully the stupidity Krauthammer - himself evil but not stupid - attributes to liberals: they believe that people are fundamentally good. Conservatives, however, believe that people are fundamentally as evil as they are, and that when given approval for evil they will totally embrace it. His personal stupidity was the belief that the elite conservatives could control the masses’ expression of evil because they always had. Then came Trump. Krauthammer was one of the founders of the never Trump movement. He saw - I said he wasn’t stupid - that Trump was a existential threat to democracy. Well, tough shit, Charlie. You and David Brooks and all the rest of the intellectual conservatives got exactly what you had supported all these decades. When the real face of conservatism was exposed you recoiled in horror. Seven decades too late.
There is, was, and can be no justification for conservatism. No good has ever come from conservative government, conservative policies, or conservative economics. As Krauthammer said, wrongly applying it to liberals, “[T]his is contradicted by, oh, 4,000 years of human history…”
I think it’s important too to distinguish conservatism in general from the modern GOP, fox news and its supporters.
“Conservatives are stupid” could be taken as simple partisanship, and the kind of naive ideology that used to be blamed for many of the problems in the country.
But what we of course mean is the specific flavor of conservatism in the US right now.
And I’m afraid it’s both stupid and evil. It relies on misinforming people into reflex hatred of the other. Into thinking the solution to their problems is just to knock down blacks, democrats, trans etc.
And it needs to be called out without reference to “both sides”. Calling this shit “both sides” is part of what’s enabled it to go so far.
I would say “naive” rather than " stupid ". That’s what believing people are good is essentially about. And now the conservatives are the trusting ones who don’t question Trump’s wisdom and the libs are the skeptics demanding to see evidence, and calling them naive.
Fully agree. I used to describe myself as conservative. I used to vote for the Progressive Conservative party (in Canada). There used to be at least some reasonable intelligence behind conservatism, but it is long gone. Take a look at the so-called intelligent conservatives like Ben Shapiro. Like, what? Ben Shapiro isn’t an intellectual. He sets up strawmen and beats them down. He likes to beat down college kids by coming prepared to a debate (and quite often lying, because he knows the kids won’t have the facts handy to refute him). He doesn’t engage in real debate. He runs and whines when he’s actually challenged. This is conservative intellectualism as it exists today.
So yeah, conservatism has changed, and especially with Republicans. It has been on a steady decline since at least Reagan but it started rolling downhill with the Tea Party, and then promptly fell off a cliff in 2016. I honestly don’t know how Republicans get even a single vote anymore. Anybody voting Republican in 2022 is voting to help end democracy in the USA. And any American that actually loved their country would vote against this.
Are the Democrats perfect little angels? Oh heck no. But they are at least trying to be a governing party, and heaven help them, they still actually try to work with Republicans. They are Charlie Brown kicking the football to the Republican’s Lucy. One of the biggest things I fear is that they will stop trying. That they will realize the only way to win is to be as awful as the Republicans. If that ever happens, then America is truly doomed.
GOP legislators etc: not stupid, by and large, but monstrously selfish and cowardly. Those with any principles are hounded to death, so the winnowed group is just the above.
GOP voters are belligerently ignorant and tribal, believing any lie at all if it bolsters their self-centered ethos.
I would like not to believe either group actually evil, and the rulers of the party are not as stupid as they seem.
Very little connection between the foaming cruel drivel of today’s GOP and the staid stalwarts of fifty years ago. But also: the GOP is less than a third of today’s electorate, and then, it was more like half.
The Dems are naive, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that, although there is virtue in believing things like working for the common good, and everyone deserves a chance. Virtue may not triumph, clearly.
I would tend to agree that the GOP politicians are not stupid. For example, McConnell? That guy ain’t dumb. Evil, heck yeah, but not dumb. However, what has happened is they’ve catered to stupid and crazy for so long that it is starting to infect them too.
Trump, Greene, Boehert, and Gosar are really dumb. There are probably others but they really stand out. I think this will be the new trend for GOP politicians because this is the party base they’ve created.
I would love to think that the Democrats could use this to their advantage to outsmart them, but sadly, they won’t because there is too much division within the party. While with the Republicans, they strictly enforce staying in line. Stray from the pack and you will be ostracized and removed.
Liberals are heavily invested in promoting government programs for our citizens. Conservatives are heavily invested in Donald Trump. Answer: NO, the roles are not reversed. In fact, I think they’ve become more defined.
I don’t want to start a tangent, but just had to express my agreement on this 100%. I can’t recall a time Ben ever made a solid point. Not one.
He gish-gallops a bunch of things and, at best, some of the arguments are based on cherry-picking. The others are, as you say, outright false facts and evidence-free rhetorical points.
He is unable, or unwilling, to follow the most fundamental principles of logic, skepticism and standards of evidence.
I’d say this is accurate, but I think the average GOP base voter does want to cause harm to people they view as outside their tribe at this point. Taking kids away from parents, destroying the ACA just to one up Obama, etc. These are policies designed to inflict harm on people the GOP base doesn’t like.
As a liberal one thing I see is that leftists think the right are stupid and evil because of what the right actually does. The right thinks the left is stupid and evil because of what their news outlets say the left wants to do someday.
I think the right has definitely decided liberals are more than stupid, we’re evil. In the old days they would say liberal polices would ruin American. Now they’re saying liberals are trying to ruin America.
There’s definitely been a sort of sea change in the “personality” of the political factions here in America.
In the 70s and 80s, if you went close enough to a rally to hear the tone of voice of the speakers at the mike but not close enough to make out the words, the leftists’ voices were “protestey”, a bit whiny, angry, outraged. The right wing rally speakers’ voices resonated with disgust and contempt, authoritarian anger, judgmental disapproval.
Now the leftish folks (at least the mainstreamish lefty folks) sound like junior high schoolteachers trying to evoke some interest, with some incredulous tones of disbelief stirred in every few measures. (The serious left still sounds angry, outraged, and full of indignant protest). The conservatives come across as smug, like juvenile delinquents doing a wink-wink / nudge-nudge to each other while they harass and torment the citizens they’ve surrounded, with some weird rising notes of WTF are they smoking inflected in there as well.
I think that this trend of enlightened centrism is probably the worst factor. I wouldn’t say that enlightened centrists are stupid or evil, but they certainly are naive and lazy.
They start with the premise that both sides are as bad as the other, and so make excuses for one side, while nutpicking and strawmanning the other in order to create “balance”. This ends up simply distorting the facts, and gives cover to the Republicans, while making the Democrats have to go through a quagmire in order to make any progress at all.
At least Republicans actually believe in something, even if that something is short sighted selfishness. Enlightened centrists like to claim to be the “adults in the room”, while they are really the biggest babies of all.
I can’t blame Republicans for being Republican, any more than I can blame a snake for being a snake. But I can blame the enlightened centrists for enabling their behavior, doing their best to equivocate and normalize it.
It’s a prisoner’s dilemma, and the winners and losers are not the actual politicians, they’ll be fine no matter what. The people affected by the game are the American people, as well as the entire world by extension and influence.
It would be best if they both work together to achieve shared goals, and to compromise on conflicting ones. It is less good for everyone overall if one side refuses to work with the other, but is slightly better in the short term for the party that is the one that refuses than for the party that tries to cooperate.
And the worst case is both of them refuse to cooperate, as you say, it is this scenario that America is doomed.
Republicans are holding the American people hostage to their demands, knowing that the Democrats know that if they fight or refuse them, then everyone loses, and loses big. They count on the Democrats to continue to care about the American people, all of them, not just people who vote for Democrats, as the biggest weakness for them to exploit.
Becoming more so. Democrats tend to want people smarter than themselves in charge of things. Republicans tend to have a mistrust of people they think are smarter than they are. We’ve seen some real stupid people being elected in the last few cycles. Republican voters pick their candidates based on the hatred and ignorance that those candidates express, rather than their capacity for governance.
Well, everyone has a different definition of evil. If we are talking about being in league with the forces of The Dark One, then only a few Republicans qualify. If we are talking about being, promoting, and legislating short sighted selfishness, then pretty much all current officeholders meet that criteria.
They are naive in the same way that expecting your boss to pay you is naive, or that your neighbors are not going to kill you and steal your stuff is naive. They think that most people are fundamentally good, and if given the proper tools and motivations, will do the right thing.
It is a naivety that our society is based on, and losing that naivety means the breakdown of civilization itself.
There’s also the fact that you can outsmart a person that has a gun to your head, but that doesn’t stop them from pulling the trigger. They are much more willing to resort to violence if they don’t get their way.
Becomes more true all the time. There were a few Republicans who dared to question the party line, and they have all been primaried or otherwise marginalized.
So he really ought to identify more with the modern conservative that he claims to be criticizing.
Difference is, is that he thinks that he, and the elites who should be in charge of the party, are so much better than hoi polloi. They catered to the bigots, encouraged and enabled them, all the while feeling nothing but contempt for such easily swayed masses. Now that those masses are starting to actually assert their power, suddenly, they are surprised at the monster that they have created that is no longer under their control.
I think that that is a disturbingly large minority of GOP voters, but not the average GOP voter. The average GOP voter is simply indifferent to the troubles of anyone not in their group, and are more than willing to allow them to endure any amount of suffering in order for them to work towards their goals. This includes both the pragmatism of a zero sum game, where you can only get something by taking it from someone else, as well as allowing intentional inflictions of suffering to keep onboard those whose goal is to see the suffering of others.
The right is based on fear and paranoia. They get any number of votes because of the fears that are fanned up by right wing provocateurs, that have virtually no basis in reality. At best, they nutpick some college student saying something young and naive, and try to claim that it represents the views of the mainstream, and more often, just make it up out of whole cloth.
It’s a form of projection. They cannot understand the concept of selflessness or altruism, so view any action as having ulterior motives they can understand through their lens of greed and hatred.
Even more remarkably when the Democrats do stand and fight, the Republicans somehow manage to make it “See the Democrats are bad because they refuse to work with us!” and people actually believe them. AHA has got to be one of the most blatant examples of this. The Republican argument was that a bill so large needs ample debate, and need to be bipartisan (when Democrats are trying to pass it). And the Democrats made a good faith effort to let Republicans have a say (which the Rs use to sabotage the bill). But when the Rs are in charge, did they include Democrats at all? No. Did they take their time? No. It is unreal to me that people cannot see through Republican BS.
To me, it is axiomatic that Conservatives think Liberals are stupid, because they are not evil.
It’s what I call the “Criminal’s Fallacy”. Criminals, for narcissistic reasons, often think everyone thinks just like they do. They claim that anyone who is rich got there by nefarious means, that all corporations are criminal, that all politicians are corrupt, etc. And if someone is not criminal, then they are “rubes”, “easy marks”, y’know - stupid. So, substitute Conservatives for Criminals in that discussion, and it scans.
The key problem IMHO is that once a body politic reaches the point where the position is as you state, it is fucked. Because it is extremely hard to (a) keep not being awful and (b) not lose.
Time and again I have heard both hardline D’s and crowing R’s say that D’s are going to keep on losing till they start playing hardball, as the R’s do. I remember participating in discussions on these very boards after (I think) Bush II won the second time - in which R dopers admitted their party had lied and cheated and misled, but said (in effect) “suck it losers, till you learn to play hardball you’re going to keep losing and you deserve to do so”.
But of course against that there is the point you make which is entirely valid.
To adopt the old adage about arguing with pigs - once one of the major participants has made the decision to become a pig you are in an impossible position. If you don’t fight the electorate doesn’t have the integrity to vote for you, so you lose. And if you do fight you end up with both of you in the mud being pigs.
Fully agree, which is why I’ve often said the only people who can stop this are Republican voters. If the Republicans get obliterated (and ideally if their voters contact to tell them why), then they’ll change. Sadly, based on recent elections, it does not appear that Republican voters actually care about the USA. They care about hurting liberals. The cruelty is the point. Republicans wielding the culture war stuff (which is entirely made up by them) is powerful, but it is having severe negative effects on the USA. The politicians don’t care. They’ll get their short terms gains (tax cuts), but the USA pays the price.