Conservatism - What is it as a Philosophy?

Politics & Elections
1

Sure, but the self-labeled fiscal conservative may feel that the government isn’t being responsible with money and that a better job can be done. That isn’t a crazy sentiment on its face. My issue with such types is that they refuse to see the big picture that almost all countries run a significant deficit while offering roughly the same kind of medical care system and other such benefits. Thus, there is no country engaging in “fiscally conservative” best practices to point to. Thus, I see “fiscal conservatism” as a kind of unrealistic branding exercise.

The thing is I don’t think everyone who engages in such branding is “pretending” or trying to fool someone. Plus, I don’t assume that people have thought through their beliefs in any kind of deep or sophisticated way. I think probably 90% of people just kinda sorta believe stuff because it feels right to them for various reasons.

I call myself a “non-ideological Liberal” because I believe that, in the year 2024, we are not doing a good enough job of taking care of people and treating them fairly, and those who want to do better in this way typically label themselves “Liberals.” It’s not because, to me, “Liberal” points precisely to a particular political or economic framework (as, for example, Marxism does). So I wouldn’t say my Liberalism indicates an actual ethos either, but I think it does give people a roughly accurate image of how I lean politically. So would the label "“social liberal/fiscal conservative,” even though I think “fiscal conservatism” is BS for the above-mentioned reason.

All that said, I would be happy, however, to take better care of people and treat them more fairly while balancing the budget. Since no major country is able to do so, I think a fair question is, Why not? It’s something that’s been on my mind a lot lately. Is it even possible for a society to give its population everything it needs while balancing the budget? (Ultimately, I think we need a vastly different macro incentive system = economic system, and no, I don’t think Marxism is the way to go.)

Yes, it’s the whole “What’s the matter with Kansas?” problem. I don’t think most people who support the current power structure, however, really understand their own mind on it.

2

Ok, I won’t speak to history. What I will say is that if my labels are Reaganite myths, there are a lot of people who bought those myths and believe those distinctions sincerely. I have a few friends of my age cohort that believe such.

But you are saying that preferring a balanced budget over ever-expanding deficits and debt is just about conserving hereditary power.

In not saying the Republicans have been any good at that goal. I’m saying there are people who value that outcome.

The test isn’t about wanting that outcome, it is how they propose achieving it. Cutting social programs that address economic disparity and needs for adequate food, shelter, and medical care while giving tax breaks to the rich and cutting programs that oversee big business to protect workers’ rights and the environment while expanding spending on questionable military programs does demonstrate where there priorities lie.

So maybe you have me there. Their words may be benign, but their choices show their priorities, and thus their true agenda.

And then the two-party system means people who see one party as preferential to the other on some issues that they rank most important means they are stuck rooting for the party that is the lesser of two evils.

But my biggest issue with describing “conservatism” that way is that it doesn’t actually help fix the problem. All it does is drive the wedge in further.

Because people who see themselves as “conservatives” aren’t seeing themselves as oppressors, they see themselves as the oppressed. They are “oppressed” by the people that want to reshape American culture by changing the ethnic mix that thereby brings in alternative language, food, and other cultural changes. They are “oppressed” by the people who strip Christianity out of the public sphere and thereby lead to moral decline. They are “oppressed” by people who want to behave immorally and degrade our society, and promote those immoral ideas as laudable, even desirable. They are “oppressed” by the people that belittle them as backwoods redneck hicks for being rural and uneducated and working class. "And so they fight back.

Calling them out on the outcomes of their choices doesn’t work if you start by telling them that they just want to hurt people. You might be able to reach some of them (not the fascists, but the folks who just want to be free) by showing them the outcomes and by demonstrating that the changes they fight are not actually hurting them. But you can’t do that if you label them as haters and monsters and seek to ostracize them for just wanting to not feel under attack.

It’s a persecution complex to be sure, but you can’t disprove the persecution by persecuting them.

Yes, I can agree. It doesn’t help that in this particular cycle, the economic situation accidentally mirrors the predictions of the conservative myth.

“The economy was strong under Trump.” Obama-Biden oversaw the reversal of the recession and a handed a growing economy to Trump, but the growth slowed and then covid hit. Biden saw the recovery from covid with rampant inflation caused by supply shortages because of impacts from the global lockdowns. Then came the war in Ukraine, which created existential threat in Europe the way war in Afghanistan and Iraq didn’t, affecting financial markets and corporate stability. And the war impacted Ukraine’s food exports, a big supplier in Europe and around the world. That contributed to increased global food prices and the ongoing inflation.

“Gas prices were low under Trump and high under Biden.” Gas prices responded to a big business president, then covid hit and the lockdown occurred. Gas prices resurged under Biden as driving resumed, coupled with the inflation from the recovery, and compounded by War in Ukraine. One of the responses was to try to sanction Russia buy not buying oil from them, driving up the global price.

The economy is strengthening, and inflation is falling, no thanks to the House getting stuck in obstructionism and collapse that nearly shut down the government again.

3

We are all saying that those are values than no conservative ever practiced.
Reagan exploded the US deficit.

It is a retorical trick “conservatives” :people who argue the powerful and wealthy/ nobles are inherently better than everyone else) always use.
“Conservative” ideology is about conserving power with the people who have it. There is nothing more.

At its most fundamental conservativism is against the values of the French Revolution.
Against Liberté, Egalité, fraternité. For the rule of some corrupt King. Replace the king for anybody who promises to hurt the right people and you have a complete understanding of all conservative “thinking” in all of history.

4

What I’m saying is that Republicans, with the goal of conserving hereditary power, are phrasing that narrative differently so that it will resonate differently around the kitchen table.

As we can see from the above responses, many people (at least weakly in principle) are open to the idea of the government providing aid to people at their most vulnerable (very young, very old, disabled, unexpected job loss).

The task to Republicans, which they do very well, is to cast those programs as a money pit that will cause debt and deficits. That resonates in most voters’ kitchen-table amygdala, as most of them are facing, or have faced, or know someone who has faced debt problems. Social welfare is automatically associated with blowout deficits. It doesn’t occur to them that raising up a healthy and literate child pays back the expense in multiples over their lives. It doesn’t occur to anyone that state-sponsored elder care helps keep those workers engaged in productive work rather than tending to their aging parents. This is of course because racial stereotypes are doing a lot of the heavy lifting to prevent anyone from thinking of certain people as an investment rather than a liability.

Moderate voters don’t want to be seen taking a “devil take the hindmost” attitude as this is quite antisocial. But “fiscal conservative” is seen as a virtuous and neutral position. Having successfully set this frame, Republicans’ only task is to misdirect the “fiscal conservatives” away from the mind-boggling deficits that their own party runs. This is why they whip up an atmosphere of paranoia to justify outrageous military and police expenditures.

So in summary the permission structure is this:

  • Social liberal - I’m a nice person in principle
  • Fiscal conservative - debt is terrifying, it’s a shame social liberalism can only be created with ballooning debt
  • Strong military - ah, well, it’s true that debt is terrifying, but the rest of the world is even more terrifying. So it turns out we actually do need a mushrooming debt to keep us safe from the bad foreigners. We have to sacrifice everything to the military debt. Shame, really.
5

I’m sorry my report got posted before I was done. I was trying to request help in breaking off the content for the numerous posts regarding that topic to a separate thread.

6

Please give me a thread title you think is appropriate and I will break them off to a new thread.

7

In the old days, conservatism meant personal responsibility. Depending on your flavor of conservatism, it could also mean a strong national/global defense stance and religious opinions mixed in.

Today, it just means, “I’ll oppose whatever the blue team supports.”

8

Thank you, @Aspenglow .

While I agree with you on the outcome, I think that they have a great myth system that convinces a lot of people that they do.

9

I agree they have great propaganda.

10

I’m basically with you on this post. My only real quibble is that I think most people (90%+) who label themselves “conservative” do so on the basis of branding, aesthetic, and feel and not on actual research and cogitation.

Then you have a subset of “intellectual conservatives” who have put in a bit of work. How sincere they are–i.e., are they just “pretending” or not–is a different question. If they are selling themselves as pundits, the incentive system is probably clouding their self-perception.

The biggest point I will make in this thread, and I think it dovetails quite a bit with your own points, is this: The GOP has become what it is today because “conservatism” ran out of ideas and its experiments failed. Since organizations hate to de as much as any animal, the GOP was not about to say, “Whoops, we’re done!” Thus, they evolved first into a purely obstructionist party with the Tea Party, battling against anything Obama tried to do, and then into a fascist party under Trump.

I am not someone who vilifies Reagan as much as other Liberals. The 1970s, economically and politically, were a huge mess, and Reagan had his theory that cutting taxes and shrinking government would free the people to do whatever themselves, blah blah blah. But Reagan was at least a positive guy at a time when people wanted an escape from the malaise that Carter had correctly identified. Plus, Reagan was not a warmonger, and I think he handled the Soviet Union well. His second terms was, well… interesting. There is plenty to criticize Reagan about too, an infinite amount, but I don’t imagine Reagan conspiring in a smoky room with oligarchs to keep the poor down. Same thing with Bush the Elder.

Clinton was more or less as “conservative” as the Republicans. Then we have Dubya, who I think actually was the worst president of the US ever–even worse than Trump–since he was a warmonger and more or less totally fucked up, well, everything. AFAIC, the US as we knew it died on 9/11.

So after Bush, there was no more gas in Conservatism’s tank. Absolutely no ideas for the future. Zero vision. Reganomics a failure, ultimately, and America’s wars of choice a disaster and an embarrassment.

But there was still brand, aesthetic, and feeling with a powerful right-wing mediasphere to sell all that and more to the public. White people pissed off about everything, some stuff for good reasons and a lot not. A public generally bored and depressed by the unpleasant realities of the 21st century.

So the GOP morphed into the American NSDAP. These guys are amateurs compared to the actual nazis, who really could sell a brand, aesthetic, and feeling. But that’s all it is at this point. And if the GOP and Trump were to get their way, they’d head down the same murderous and ultimately self-destructive path, since, like the nazis, the feeling they sell the best is hate.

How does all this relate to “conservatism” as some sort of philosophy? It doesn’t! It pisses me off to no end* when the media refers to the fascists as “conservatives,” since they’re not even “pretending” to be that at this point. And yet, a child’s level of logic still holds sway over the public: Republicans are “conservative,” and therefore today’s members of the GOP are “conservative”! Seventy-somethings who vote straight R, since it’s the same R as it was in the late 1960s. Right?!

I guess to me the question of what conservatism is as a philosophy is a lot like asking, if we want to talk about the French Revolution some more, what the sans culottes or Jacobins stood for. It matters if you’re into a particular historical period, but it doesn’t matter today. Economic best practices in the world today are a creaky welfare state combined with very primitive tools with which to “manage” (i.e., bludgeon) the economy. None of it works particularly well, but no one on either the Left or Right has any revolutionary ideas (pun intended) for doing better.

I support the Left in the US because we’re the ones actually trying to be the adults in the room and govern responsibly, justly, and empathetically. Even if we don’t have some grand vision for the future, we have some goals in sight that we can actually accomplish (e.g., we have the power to end homelessness within a few years if we have the political will).

Anyone calling themself a “conservative today” is dealing in anachronism. As to whether the word ever meant much more than nothing, I think at this point it’s an academic exercise.

*H/T to Lo Pan.

11

As the line goes:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

It’s about privilege and persecution; everything else is handwaving meant to justify that. It’s not about “conserving” anything but the power of the conservatives in question, and the suffering of their victims.

12

But a significant number of conservatives are not in the privileged category at all. About one-third, or perhaps even half, are women or racial minorities, etc. There are even some LGBT conservatives. What power and privilege are they trying to conserve?

13

Imaginary ones (“I’ll be rich one day!”), and their hate. It’s not just about propping the privileged up; it’s as much or more about stomping on the untermensch. As the saying goes there are millions of people who would willingly be reduced to living under a bridge roasting a rat on a stick, as long as it meant that “those people” didn’t have a stick or a rat. It’s not about being on top, it’s about being one notch above the people they hate, even if it kills them.

And they aren’t all in the same “privileged” category, either; just because someone isn’t white doesn’t mean they can’t hate women, or gays, or Jews or whatever.

14

Are you judging Conservatism as a philosophy in the abstract, or are you saying that individual self-labeled Conservatives have bad head content that they hide? If the latter, I disagree.

I grew up in a Republican household. My dad, who was a fairly intelligent person but not, IMO, very perceptive when it came to politics, would have said that he supports the Republicans because they are good for business, better on the economy and defense, etc. He would have used the label “Republican,” perhaps also “Conservative” but probably only if prompted. He would have dismissed talk of trodding down the poor or whatever with a chuckle. As would any average Republican back in the 1970s or 1980s. Just because someone preferred the GOP to the Democratic party in any given era (except the era of Trump, lol) didn’t mean that people were thinking bad thoughts.

And where does it end, anyway? If AOC is to the left of me, for example, then am I relatively “conservative” and thus bad?

To me, American Conservatism is dumb and now irrelevant (and in the era of Trump, insincere), but in the past it was one template, however imperfect, for processing a large complex of things of the particular era. For example, in 1968, one may have voted for Nixon because one thought his position on the Vietnam War was correct and he would handle rioters and protestors better than the Democrat and would be “law and order” and all that. Not my cup of tea, and Humphrey would have been my man. But voting for Humphrey as well would have involved buying into a template explaining use of American power and thinking the economy worked in such and such a way that was OK, and so on. Making the better choice didn’t purify one politically.

Thus, if you say that being a self-labeled Conservative involves supporting bad power structures, etc., then so also does being a Liberal. It’s only a matter of degree.

15

There’s a scene in A Christmas Story where Randy is crying and poking at his food, and the Old Man says “stop playing with your food, or I’ll give you something to cry about.” I sometimes wonder if that isn’t a core idea of conservatism. Your job as a parent isn’t to make your children feel cared for and encouraged, but to toughen them up to face a lifetime of hard work and disappointment without complaint. If the idea of liberalism is to make the world better, conservatism believes that the world can’t be fixed (cerainly not by government) and the best you can do is prepare for things to get worse. That’s how they can buy assault rifles and survival rations and call themselves patriots.

This is an idea that has just occured to me recently, so I may revise it once it percolates in my brain for a while.

As for “fiscal conservatism”, ithink it can be a sincere belief, but it hasn’t been part of Republicanism since before Reagan. They raise spending, cut revenues, and complain about deficits when Democrats are in power. It’s a very seductive idea, you can keep more of your money, and it doesn’t mean you’re greedy, you’re doing it for the good of the country. I don’t know if that was the Republican’s original rejection of reality, but it’s a large part of it.

16

Your father was at best wrong, since the Republicans are none of those things and weren’t even then. And “dismissing thoughts of treading on the poor” is hardly a virtue when one is voting to do exactly that.

Conservatism is innately irrational, destructive and malignant; not simply on the modern US, but in every society in the world and period of history as far as I can tell. I’ve never heard of an example where “conservatives” were on the correct side of the issue, anywhere. It’s likely happened at some point, but probably by mistake on their part.

17

The point is that if I call myself “Conservative,” I don’t suddenly become all of the bad things you are describing. I don’t even necessarily think like or agree with other “Conservatives.” Nor do I necessarily differ from someone who calls themself a “Liberal.” I probably do, but you have to actually check.

That’s true even of self-labeled “MAGAs”–although the willingness to use that label correlates very strongly with stupidity and malice.

Nor does a label make one good or virtuous. Most of the self-labeled “Christians” in the country are full of shit and highly ignorant of their own religion. The ones who support Trump absolutely so.

I would say that “Conservative” is, for most who have adopted it over the past 50 years, little more than a bland identity vaguely pointing in a certain political direction. It has a lot less, say, electrical charge than something like “MAGA.” Are the correlations bad? Absolutely. Just not very strong for most people.

18

The first sentence contradicts the last, unless your point is that your father didn’t think any thoughts at all. That being a Republican was just a tribe he belonged to.

19

By the way, guys, this wasn’t a thread I started. It was started by a mod or something and attributed to me (that’s a thing?!). So it’s not really my ax to grind. If no one wants to come in and defend Conservatism (or at least the ability of people to espouse it without becoming insta-evil), then I don’t think it’s going to be all that interesting. I agree with you that the GOP and “Conservatism” have sucked for a long time.

20

I really think there are several veins/thrusts to conservatism in the recent past.

One, there’s the more philosophical vein, in that the general feeling is “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it”, and a certain reluctance to deviate from the status quo without definite proof that it needs to change. This is primarily with regard to public policy and government spending.

Two, (and it’s tied closely into one), there’s the conservative view on the role of government. Specifically that its role should be well defined and limited, and with a definite belief that just because the government has deep pockets, that doesn’t make it the first or best entity to try and solve issues, especially ones that are outside of the government’s defined role. So things like military spending are within their defined governmental roles and responsibilities, but most social programs are seen as outside that scope and/or matters of personal responsibility.

Three, there’s also a social conservatism that originally was more of a self-selection phenomenon (i.e. those who believed in economic/political conservatism also tended toward the religiously and socially conservative as well). This is where that sort of reactionary / “turn back the clock” movement comes from- they see a lot of the societal changes in the past 60 or so years as being fundamentally bad, because they yearn for a mythical America that never was, or that only was in a very narrow slice of time and space for a few people. And in large part, they feel left behind/left out, which is what fuels this retro-yearning.

Combine that with what amounts to a de-facto caste system in the US with regard to race, and you get a situation where the people who want to maintain the status quo and/or turn back the clock are often overtly racist in their actions, although they profess not to be racist. It’s less a matter of them explicitly hating on other races for being other races, it’s more that they’re not fulfilling the roles and expectations of the caste system, and are “out of their lanes” so to speak. So if your primary desire is to maintain the status quo, people of other races getting “out of their lane” is something that is going to feel very wrong on a visceral level if you’ve been brought up in that caste system and don’t realize it.

Now today’s Republican party has largely gone off the rails, and has embraced what would have been considered wild conspiracy theories and religious nuttery by the GOP establishment 25 years ago. That’s the largest part of the problem is that they seem to be trying to outdo each other in terms of craziness with regard to climate change, racism, social issues, etc… and drive toward an America that has more in common with Gilead of “The Handmaid’s Tale” than anything else.

What astounds me is the blatant and ugly cynicism and naked self-interest that seems to drive so many GOP politicians. So many of them say one thing, then turn around 180 degrees to curry favor when Trump looks at them. I mean, Trump said Ted Cruz’s wife was fat and ugly, and yet here’s Cruz, sucking up to him like his life depends on it. JD Vance once was a Never Trumper, called him an idiot and reprehensible, and yet here he is spewing platitudes and sucking up as the VP candidate. That sort of thing floors me.