Nicely elucidated. Yeah, these GOP fascists have no integrity and no self-respect–and then the public fails to notice it and provide consequences as well?! It’s just too much.
Re: OP
See also,
&etc.
~Max
I want to add that in a philosophical sense, I feel like the first couple of points of my post are not necessarily a bad thing in our two-party system. Having one party press for progressive-style change, and the other having an attachment to the status quo isn’t bad, if both parties are willing to deal and compromise. It’s sort of the best of both worlds- you don’t get stuck in the mud, but nor are you doing unfettered change either, and if both sides actually agree, then things can get done in a hurry.
But what’s mired us in the current BS is that today’s MAGA/nutter GOP types have steadfastly refused to actually deal and compromise. They’ve even gone as far as to paint the Democrats as the enemy and traitorous, and any Republican legislator who compromises or deals with them as traitorous and RINOs. It’s not a recipe for good governance, that’s for sure. And it’s dangerous, IMO, in that the mindset doesn’t actually address governing, but rather looks at all of it as some sort of win-at-all-costs competition, regardless of the policy or the consequences. That last one is pretty much the kicker for me- the idea that everything Democrat must be fought is absurd and counterproductive, as well as flat-out dangerous when things like public health and public safety get caught up in that nonsense.
I’d like to add a macro point: One thing that modern MAGA-ism gives its followers is a feeling of righteous anger and fighting-for-good-against-evil that can be incredibly thrilling. (It’s not just MAGA supporters who can be vulnerable to falling for this sort of mindset, but they are the most prominent practitioners of it today.)
What happens when you suggest that MAGA or QAnon should compromise? That would totally puncture the balloon. If you get a kick out of feeling like the world is full of evil villains and you’re fighting your righteous part against them, you can’t give in because then all the fun and fulfillment and meaning is gone. It really, really deflates the morale.
I know some MAGA people in my personal life who actually relish bad news. They LOVE reading about how terrorists, illegal immigrants, groomers etc are running amok and doing immense harm. They LOVE stories like “education system recommends that students participate in necrophilia,” however fake or misleading that news may be. Why? Because it feeds the good feeling; that the world is evil and they are fighting on the righteous side.
It also becomes strange to describe a movement as “conservative” when it is trying in effect to enact a restoration- a return to values that have not been in currency for a lifetime or more.
As a former conservative I can say there is a lot to this. Though in theory there is supposed to be a balance; it’s not like ancient Sparta where you leave a newborn baby outside and if it dies, oh well, it wasn’t strong enough to make it in this world. You’re supposed to take care of your family. But not by coddling them; your kids need to be taught how to take care of themselves as they grow up, so that they can be self-sufficient and productive members of society, who obey the law and make the world better just by being in it and living their lives. There should be a balance of protection and encouragement, while not sheltering them too much and putting them in situations to learn how to grow into adults.
There’s a heavy emphasis on learning to be accountable for yourself and not being a parasite. Of course, at least today that doesn’t seem to be what conservatives actually strive for. Their biggest spokesperson is a criminal loser who inherited and frittered away all his wealth. Lawbreakers from the January 6 riot are to be celebrated and defended. So many leaders among the conservatives whine and make excuses and complain about how everything is someone else’s fault. All of that self-sufficiency talk is crap. While the normal person at home voting for conservatives may practice it, the people they take guidance from for the large part don’t.
I like John Kenneth Galbraith’s take:
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
There’s not much to argue with about the way to raise kids that you describe and about being accountable and not being a parasite.
Where it all breaks is when people with that mindset lose their compassion for others and start viewing the unsuccessful or insufficiently self-sufficient as morally lacking and parasitical and/or burdens on society. It’s really easy to think “I made the right decisions, and as a result I deserve all I have. That bum over there clearly made bad choices, and he’s where he is as a result.” That sort of thinking is why pretty much any addiction treatment or support programs are looked at with disdain and condescension on that side - it’s viewed as a lack of moral fiber, intestinal fortitude and a resultant series of bad choices, not some kind of literal disease. Same thing with mental health treatment- it’s bad choices and weakness, not physical disease and/or flawed thinking.
None of that was ever something they truly believed or practiced, however; it was just rhetoric. They support radical change and try to break everything they can; the opposite of “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it”. And they don’t want government to be “well defined and limited”; they want it to have no limits or restraints. They just want to remove all positive aspects of government and turn it into purely an instrument of oppression, persecution and conquest. Welfare no, police beatings and murders yes.
And they’ve always been like that; all that’s changed in the last decade or so is that the masks have largely come off, and more and more of their victims are tired of playing along with the lie that the Right is well-intentioned. “The cruelty is the point”.
Isn’t that wildly hyperbolic? I feel like that was the driving philosophy for decades, even if there were assholes involved.
You’re right that today’s conservatives/GOP have little relationship to that way of thinking though.
I agree. I think this is why Trump managed to get the vast majority of the Republican Party on board the Trump train. The distribution of people on a left to right graph is no longer a bell curve. It’s instead a bimodal distribution with a trough in the center right part of the graph and a hump at the far right. Being center-right just isn’t politically feasible any more. It was back during the days of Eisenhower and Nixon, and to a lesser extent Reagan, but the Newt Gingrich came along and kicked out one of the supports, and then Trump came along and finished it off. Those in the center-right had to choose. Become a Democrat, become a MAGA, or end up like Liz Cheney?
What does this mean for conservatism? It no longer exists, or if it does, it now goes by the name of mon-progressive liberalism.
Let’s take another tack.
One thing we’ve heard over the years is that both Republicans and Democrats suck. I heard this all the way back in the 1980s when I was a kid. Both serve the same corporate masters, etc. Any difference is superficial and is actually designed to fool you into thinking you have a choice.
If we grant your statement that the right has always sucked, then how do you defend against the argument that holds that everyone sucks? If the right has always had bad intentions–then maybe everyone does?
You allow for no gradations of badness in your critique of the right. “They” always were such and such. But what makes someone belong to that category of “they”?
The Government is the government for all Americans; those that don’t suck, and those that do. If a political party sometimes makes decisions that support the people who suck, that’s because it’s supposed to. If a political party always makes decisions that support the people who suck, that’s because the party sucks, too.
Some of the most vitriolic arguments boil down to a disagreement about definitions. Here it is particularly fraught.
The OP asks about Conservative philosophy. That’s an easier topic than conservationism in practice. Let me offer some definitions.
Liberals are empirically oriented reformists. Socialists are more concerned about justice and less about empirical observation, which puts them to the left. Communism is defined by a particular set of policies, most notably authoritarianism and state ownership of big companies at the very least.
Conservatives grant the need for change, but prefer to be careful and slow about it. Reactionaries are defined by their opposition to Liberalism: they react by accusing Liberals of being Socialists (sometimes Communists) and accusing Conservatives of being RINOs.
Reactionaries self-identify as conservatives. Conservatives self-identify as moderates.
Liberals self-identify as liberals or sometimes progressives. Socialists self-identify as socialists or sometimes progressives. Communists self-identify as communists.
Got all that? There’s a distinction between Conservativism as a coherent philosophy, and conservatism as a sociological phenomenon. Since I’m an empirically oriented liberal, I usually use a sociological perspective: conservatives are what conservatives do. And what they do is engage in Reactionary politics.
Is there a way of creating a coherent philosophy of Reactionary politics? Sure. And it’s mostly bunk, because Reactionaries are liars or bad faith actors at best. They are the very last people you would ask if you want to understand conservatism or the hard right. After all, they casually tossed away decades of allegedly core beliefs over a matter of months in 2016. How is that possible? The question answers itself: the sort of people who toss out core beliefs overnight are people who didn’t have those core beliefs to begin with. It Was All a Lie.
Capitalization in this post was intentional: capital letters indicated philosophy while small letters implied sociological observation of self-identified respondents.
Nice sociological explanation. I have no disagreement!
First, I’d reply that “Everyone is the same” is a talking point for the far right and far left, and not to be taken seriously. It’s an idea pushed by people who want to end democracy and burn the present society down so they can rebuild on the ashes, and are therefore trying to discourage voting and encourage violence.
And second, harming the public is and always has been a defining feature of the far Right. All the way back to when the term was coined and it meant support for the aristocracy (and thus, crushing everyone else).
That’s not true of most other political factions; leftists for example certainly can be ill-intentioned, but “rational, well meaning leftist” isn’t a contradiction in terms. The best you get on the Right are the outright delusional ones who ignore the real world and the effects of their actions, talking about how great they are making everything while spreading suffering and tyranny. The Left can do good; the Right cannot.
To be charitable there are a lot of people who only have time and mental space to engage with retail politics such as “personal responsibility is good” or “limited government is good”. These things are inarguably true, and that’s why Reaganism does gangbuster numbers among people who don’t have the time, ability, or interest to see if it actually passes those tests.
Of course with the advent of the internet all these beliefs are exposed to the cold hard light of day. As people are wont to do, they can’t handle the cognitive dissonance, so they do a mental maneuver like “how can I possibly be bothered about minor inconsistencies when we are LITERALLY IN A WAR FOR CIVILIZATION”.
That’s not exaggeration by the way, stop by Elon Musk’s Twitter feed. Everything that inconveniences him is literally the end of civilization, everything that helps him equals the boundless dominion of mankind over the entire universe. This is how far people will go to avoid the thought “maybe not everything in the world is for me.”
I started the thread as an offshoot from the Supreme Court Justice thread, or rather got a mod to start it. I’m marshalling my thoughts about my objection to comments that started the hijack in the other thread.
With the well-documented exception of actual Communists of course. They had the cognitive dissonance to see anyone who disobeyed or questioned them as ipso facto counter-revolutionary enemies of the people– even when that was somehow a majority of all of the actual people.
This is something you hear a lot when discussing “Conservatives”.
It is a canard.
It sounds reasonable but “Conservatives” have never any quarrel doing absolutely revolutionary stuff in support of their Anti-(French)revolutionary agenda. (think “conservative” judges throwing out decades of jurisprudence to outlaw abortion)
Again stuff that "“Conservatives” like to say about themselves, and something that sounds reasonable in conjuction with the word “Conservative”, but again an absolute canard.
Conservatives have no limits in what they want to control, what you do in your bedroom, which bathroom you use – they have opinions on that and will not shy away from draconian measures to remove any sense of privacy.
Excactly, pointing to some mythical past when everyting was as it is supposed to be are two of the 14 hallmarks of facism, (according to Eco)