Better Conservatives? Where?! (A response to Coffeecat)

The BBQ Pit
1

I was gonna post this in the thread I’m quoting you from, but it’s kind of out there for ATMB, so let’s do it here instead.

The current republican congress has gained victory first and foremost by decimating democratic norms and grabbing power wherever they can. Many of their number are just straight-up terrible people, like Louie Gohmert or Steve King. Racists, white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, science denialists… And that’s congress. The current republican president is not just phenomenally unpopular, but stupid, gross, vapid, and dangerous - and literally everyone except united states conservatives seem to grasp that. The point here being that the room for conservative republicans to be reasonable or rational has shrunk drastically. It is not a coincidence that when you think “republican on the dope whose posts you’re glad to read” it’s usually a pretty short list - at this point, the partisan split in America is very much between the smart party and the dumb party, and so you end up with a situation where smart people flee the republican party in droves, and those who remain have to make ever-more-extravagant concessions to the party. “No, really, it’s okay to support Trump, because…” Looking for a smart, reasonable, rational republican is becoming more and more like looking for a smart, reasonable, rational young earth creationist.

This isn’t just a problem on the Dope. We usually get the better ones, because we filter. We have our “echo chamber”, which means that people whose entire schtick is post after post after post of “GET ON THE TRUMP TRAIN, NEXT STOP PWNING-THE-LIBS-VILLE”* doesn’t get to stick around. Go to ChristianForums, and you’ll see what happens when the echo chamber is expanded to include that kind of person - discussion does not get better, it gets impossible unless everyone with half a brain collectively blocks the fuckers. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, the “smart” people who endorse Trump? Yeah, they’re mostly hardline single-issue voters, and that issue is often race. The Trump supporters on rationalist forums generally hold that we need to keep the unwashed hordes at bay via better immigration laws to protect American interests because they have lower IQs and that’s genetic and you see where this is going. Again, we tend to filter those people out; “being a shitty racist” is one of the things the mods tend to take poorly to.

Let’s take the Kavanaugh thread for example. Is it a coincidence that every single republican there has staked out a position pretty damn close to Starving Artist? UltraVires has also offered truly disgusting rationalizations for what’s going on, to the point where I’m shocked that SA took a vacation first (“maybe he wasn’t actually trying to rape her” - fucking really!). Shodan got a warning for making a pretty fucking gross, victim-blamey rape joke. Both UltraVires and Shodan believe that this is a democratic “playbook”, and that if this succeeds, the same thing will happen to every republican judicial candidate brought forward afterwards. And why shouldn’t they believe that? That’s mainstream republican thought now! Their president was elected despite 22 fucking accusations of sexual assault, and bragging about it on tape; if you don’t think that this is a democratic playbook, how the fuck else do you rationalize this? If you start accepting that most women don’t report being sexually assaulted because of the consequences, if you look at what’s happened to Ford’s life since she made the accusation**, if you pay any attention to #MeToo, if you don’t pretend that all these accusations were bogus against Trump… Well, then you have to come to terms with the fact that you voted for a serial sexual abuser to be the leader of the free world. And at that point, why not just fucking double down on his supreme court nominee?

So I don’t know where you want to go to find “better” conservatives. They don’t exist. Or rather, to the degree that they do, they’re not republicans any more. They’re independents or democrats. Because decent people don’t support Trump. Decent people don’t support Kavanaugh. Decent people don’t vote republican. There is no such thing as a good republican. No good republican pundit. No good republican politician. No good republican justice. No good republican voter. Period. They do not exist any more; being a republican disqualifies you as a decent person.

*I’m really not exaggerating for effect here. Seriously. You do not want the /r/The_Donald crowd around any rational discussion.

**Doxxing, death threats, driven out of her fucking home, and don’t even think for a goddamn minute that UltraVires wasn’t fucking scum about that, too.

2

You do realise that you’ve just enunciated why many of the intelligent republicans don’t come here? Try changing the word ‘republican’ to ‘Jew’. Try recasting the accusations against Kavanaugh as him allegedly having attended Communist meetings in the McCarthy era. There is - as yet - zero evidence against him.

Take a good look in the mirror and you will see that the problem is you, not them.

3

Okay, fine. You tell me. Where are all these “good conservatives” hanging around these days? :slight_smile: Where can I find them? Because my experience here has been that the “good” conservatives have either gone crazy or switched sides lately. adaher and Bricker are about as good as it gets, and bravo to them for being better than… fuck, I dunno, Der Trihs?

(Also: wow, comparing political ideology to an ethnic group, that’s not tasteless at all. Republicans are shit because of what they do. There’s no fucking comparison to antisemitism here.)

4

Really? You’ve just proved my point. Are Bricker and adaher shits? They’re Republicans. Yes, there are Republicans who are shits because of what they do, but to class someone as a shit because they’re a Republican is just like the 1930s or the 50s.

5

There are no “better conservatives”.

If they existed, they’d immediately become Democrats.

You just answered your own question.

There. Are. No. Good. Republicans.

You may as well ask “Well, what about the good Nazis? The ones who believed in Making Germany Great Again, and liked The Fuhrer’s tax policies, but felt kinda ambiguous about the whole genocide thing?”

6

So the problem isn’t the people trying to actively bury and destroy any investigation of a credible crime committed by someone up for a lifetime appointment to an incredibly powerful position, or the ones diverting money from cancer research to put kids in concentration camps, but the ones who express distaste for those people.

Did you vote for Trump because liberals annoyed you? And have you ever argued that those pointing out racism are “the real racists”?

Now, now, I could see such (hypothetical) conservatives trying to actively change the Republican party from within, steer them away from the whole “trying to use force of law to oppress entire groups of people” thing.

I wonder if any such exist.

7

Will what your saying, still hold true if in Nov just enough shift their votes, or refuse to vote, and the tables turn? Yes, Trump might still be president, but suddenly there is not a check against his worst policies?

8

We in the UK have prior experience of things being deemed credible when there was no actual evidence which later turned out to be untrue.

I’m British. I have the perspective of someone living thousands of miles away.

9

Uh… Dude? Bricker didn’t vote for Trump. adaher didn’t for Trump. This is that other class of conservatives we’re talking about - people who saw where their party was going (a decade and a half late, but hey, better late than never) and said, “Wow, I will have no part of that”. I respect that. Every other republican here? I can’t say anything anywhere near as nice.

This board may not put kid gloves on when it comes to republicans, but again, I really have to ask - where are these “better” republicans? Where’s that legendary creature who voted for Trump and isn’t a craven shithead?

10

So the right thing to do with Kavanaugh is to dismiss the claims against him without investigation because…? I mean, you do know that the purpose of an investigation is to gather evidence, right? Do you usually dismiss someone’s claim of assault or rape because they can’t immediately present you with hard evidence? What if all such claims were treated that way?

Many pardons. Maybe change the “did” to “would”?

11

That’s just sad. :frowning:

12

Don’t put words in my mouth. But I’m still waiting for actual evidence to appear.

13

Well done. You just dissed half of America. No wonder they don’t vote Democrat.

14

Did you really think comparing those who have enough power to get an admitted molester elected President to Jews would go over good? :eek:
Name the top three Trump-supporting politicians that you think are good people.

“They came for the misogynist lying shitheads and I did nothing…and I felt shame for not doing enough to prevent their rise in the first place.”

15

Yeah, and Republicans were and are actively working to guarantee any “actual evidence” would never appear. That was my point, and I think that’s a really bad thing.

16

Name the “Good Republicans”, then. I work with Trump supporters every day, and what spews out of their mouths in everyday conversation is simply disgusting.

17

You cannot diss someone for not having the manners you do not possess yourself. Where are your bitter words for what Republicans up to and including the President have said and continue to say about their political opponents? Show us that you aren’t yet another hypocritical piece of shit.

18

“Waaah! The mean liberal said the fact I voted for and support a dangerous incompetent idiot makes me look bad! I know what to do - I’ll double down on my support for said dangerous, incompetent idiot!”

:rolleyes:

Leaving aside that this thread is not about extending an olive branch (should be obvious from literally everything about it), and instead is trying to disillusion some folks… Well okay, wiseass, how do you get people doing a stupid harmful shitty thing to stop doing that harmful shitty thing without making them feel bad about it?

Actually, answer that one after you answer my previous question about non-fucking-terrible Trump supporters and where to find them. And if you can’t… Please, just fuck off. This kind of bullshit tone policing was old in 2016; After three goddamn years of this country being The Donald Trump Show, it’s actively rage-inducing.

19

Only 26% of voters identify as Republicans, according to the latest Gallup poll.

20

Do we know how many of them claim to have voted for Trump and still support him?