And I also think that there’s a strong sense in which “conservative” means “not wanting things to change from the way (we imagine) they used to be.” Many people don’t want to deal with new stuff. Very few people want to deal with new stuff all the time – which modern society to an increasing extent over the last couple hundred years expects people to do, and even to not only manage to do but to greet with cries of delight.
And there’s something to be said for this; especially since modern society often seems to want every new thing to be greeted with those cries of delight, without first investigating whether it’s actually useful enough to counter whatever damage it may cause, or more interesting than whatever it may wipe out: to do which it’s necessary to pause and try to discover what the damage is and what might be wiped out. Stepping hard on the gas in a car with poor steering and brakes is a really bad idea. Good conservatism can supply useful brakes and sometimes even steering in some cases.
But I think a lot of the bad conservatism comes from a related but distinct tendency – to assume that there’s exactly one right way to live and that therefore anybody suggesting another way to live must therefore be saying that all the ways that don’t match the new suggestion – and therefore all the people living, or who have been living, in ways that don’t match it – must be essentially Wrong. Thinking like that leads to feeling threatened by potential change in a highly unuseful manner; and does a great deal of damage. But I think that’s where a lot of the opposition to, for instance, gay marriage comes from.
(And I don’t think there’s anything “conservative” about much of the recent behavior of the Republican party. Defending trying to throw out well over 200 years of the peaceful transfer of power is not conservative. It just isn’t.)
I like that explanation.
Though I’ll add that some conservatives used to self-identify, and be identified by others, as actual conservatives; not reactionaries. I suppose there are some of them left, but they’ve mostly been driven into hiding by the reactionaries – and the reactionaries have mostly been taken over by a personality cult.
I think that embrace of change has been a big part of American exceptionalism. When automobiles were invented, we charged headlong into making them. People who wanted to make movies moved to California for the weather and created an industry. Locomotives used to be powered by wood, then coal, then diesel. I’m sure each of those changes caused their share of upheaval, job loss, and social problems, but for the most part we worked them out.
The problem with Republicans (who seem to think they are conservatives) is that they learned the wrong lesson. They seem to think that the way to restore American greatness is to keep making cars just like the old ones, and to keep pumping diesel fuel. The switch to electric cars, wind, and solar power will cost some jobs, but it will create others. We’ll have fewer coal miners, and more people climbing towers to repair wind turbines. Some country will design, build, and sell those things. We used to jump at those kinds of chances. The future will belong to the people, and the countries, who aren’t afraid of it.
I agree that we need to jump to non-fossil fuels: but part of the mess we’re in is because we jumped so wholeheartedly into fossil fuels. And I don’t think we’re ever going to get our water clean of all the stuff we’ve gotten into it by jumping enthusiastically into the Next Big Thing, whether it’s microplastics or PFA’s and all their cousins. I could go on.
– however, as you say, the “conservatives” rather dropped the ball there. I remember saying to somebody quite a few years ago that I would think better of conservatives if they actually wanted to conserve things, but they seemed instead to be trying to use everything up as fast as possible.
I’m not sure that we have “worked out” the damage done by automobiles; I think we’re just so used to them that we take their damage, social and environmental, for granted, because almost none of us has ever lived in a society without them. Socially, of course, they have advantages as well as disadvantages, which makes the balance trickier; and to some extent this is true environmentally, though there they reduce damage locally in many places(no manure problems) but cause more of it on a planetary level and in some localities.
But isn’t the right-wing reply: yeah, “we” charged headlong into making automobiles; and by “we” I mean ‘private industry.’ “People who wanted to make movies” sure did — like you were just saying — create an industry; if you say the future will belong to those who get into stuff like the electric-car business, then wouldn’t the response be, hey, let the government get out of the way, and — if it makes good business sense — why wouldn’t private industry hereabouts then jump at those kinds of chances?
Conservatives hate green technologies, because they’re in the pocket of fossil fuel companies. When they say they want the free market to reign, they really just mean the companies giving them money.
Any major shift from one technology/industry to another is going to have some degree of upheaval. People and places who were reliant on the old paradigm are going to suffer an economic downturn. When I said we’ve “worked out” the problems of switching from horses to automobiles, those were the problems I had in mind. We aren’t still dealing with high unemployement among horse veteranarians; property values aren’t collapsing as people move away from cities building connestoga wagons.
There are, as you point out, negative consequences to our long-term use of automobiles that we’re still dealing with. Those are exactly why the world is shifting away from internal-combustion automobiles, and a problem that conservatism would preserve out of some fear that electric cars will be worse, somehow.
I would draw a definite distinction between “conservatives” and “Republicans”. I take this thread as an attempt to define the former, in part by explaining how Republicans aren’t conservative anymore. I don’t know who is, but it’s not Republicans.
Private industry will jump at the chance. Fortunes will be made. The question is where it will happen. I’m not advocating for the government to get into business and start making electric cars. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things within the role of government that will prepare the U.S. to take advantage of the change; admit that climate change exists, fund research into developing better batteries, establish standards and permitting for charging stations, etc. If we “wait and see”, as a conservative might advise, it’ll be too late, and we’ll be importing all our electric cars from somewhere else.
Ok, so what inspired me to have this thread split off was a comment from HMS_Irruncible
at the top of the thread.
He’s saying the only thing Conservatism is about is retaining hereditary power, by which I think he means not only aristocracy, but also class and racial privilege. Those are the things being conserved.
So when conservatives talk about social change, they are really reacting to kids of power via some other group gaining the same status. Loss of privilege.
When conservatives talk about low taxes and economic restraint, they really mean keeping the money themselves instead of sharing with society.
When conservatives talk about small government, free market, fewer regulations, they really mean let us do what we want and make all the money.
This is my understanding of the argument.
So the difference between conservatives and reactionaries would be in extent they want to go to retain power. Conservatives want to prevent new changes, reactionaries want to roll back previous changes.
What set me off was this notion that there can’t be any good faith conservatives. Now I’m not talking about Republican Party leadership. I’m talking about people who are average citizens.
Now maybe most people don’t examine the details too closely. They hear the propaganda, the stated goals of the left and right, and don’t look too closely at the way those ideas affect real lives, and the actual outcomes of the political methods.
But to project that all conservatives just want to hurt others is a huge hyperbolic projection.
They see themselves as protecting people. Protecting from wasteful spending on programs that don’t really help, protecting from the spread of wronging, protecting society from social upheaval.
So what if their idea of protection is to limit how others do things?
Sure, there are people who want to retain privilege. Many of them don’t see that it is an unearned privilege. They think it’s a right by virtue of divine influence or historical legacy.
That doesn’t make them evil, but maybe ignorant or blind.
I get that right now we are in a harsh time, where the wild reactionaries have taken over the R party. From their perspective, the crazy socialists have taken over the D party.
If we have any hope of reunifying the country without a bloody revolution, we can’t be systemically eliminating the voice of the middle from either side. Yes, the right has moved to eradicate the moderates from their party. The best way through is not to discard them. That just makes them choose, and their identity as conservatives or republicans will draw them right.
Acknowledging that they exist and that their habitual party has failed them doesn’t mean rejecting our own notions of social change, progressive goals. It just means encouraging them to look at the effects of the extremists and inviting them to course correct for their party, by letting it collapse under the weight of its own chaos. Welcome them to sanity instead of rejecting them to stay in the crazy.
For once I’m going to argue on the opposite side of the question, because I’ve had this debate many times now and feel like I understand all the viewpoints.
…but this isn’t a counter-argument. Or would you change your position if we gave cites tying the label “conservative” to Republican Party leadership and specific policy positions they endorse? I doubt it, because you identify as a conservative yourself and nobody but you gets to choose your identity. Well, that’s an argument the no-true-Scotsman fallacy specifically addresses. You don’t get to choose your own identity without social context, and in the same way that a Scostman is a man from Scotland, a conservative in the U.S. is someone who wants to retain or reinforce the existing hierarchy of power. You don’t get to run around saying conservatism just means being careful when everyone else who identifies as conservative is racist, sexist, elitist, extremist, etc.
I’m classifying your given position under not even wrong, with a strong whiff of bothsideism. Sure, you can call yourself a conservative and mean careful and scrutinizing of change. But the reality (you must admit) is that the word is rarely used in that sense alone, and it does not take away one iota from the argument HMS_Irruncible put forward, which applies to the ~40% of the country which votes Republican.
And about that context you mention. I think we are at an inflection point in global society that has caused a fascist reaction not just in the US but in many countries around the world (viz, the UK going nuts right now, among many other examples).
I would say the inflection point is going from the ultra-high economic growth and change that occurred owing to the industrial and technological revolution (roughly 1700 - 2000) to a period of lower growth and change (some would say stagnation) in almost every dimension: technology, art, fashion, social mores, etc. (roughly 2000 - present).
In particular, capitalism just doesn’t work very well any more. We Liberals tend to ascribe infinite power and resources to companies, but I think the fact is that it’s harder than ever for companies to innovate and make money. One can point to things like AI (maybe) and the metaverse (lol, maybe not) as the next big waves of change, but one must look also at the absolute fuck-ton of money being thrown at these things with very little return on investment. Further, I have worked in the advertising industry since the 1990s, mostly for big Japanese companies, and have seen how they struggle to get anyone to give a shit about what they’re doing. Compare that to the 1980s, when as simple a thing as the Sony Walkman was selling millions of units and was so exciting that it was getting tons of free press on TV.
Since it’s hard for companies to make money, they have settled into grifting their customers instead of serving them. Companies that used to feel like allies, such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook, now feel like uncertain friends at best, enemies at worst. Customer service has been weaponized against the people. Terms of service are full of traps and tricks. Nothing feels easy anymore, and even a wad of cash in hand doesn’t feel like enough to get stuff done.
Perhaps Conservatism made more sense before this shitty new era, since there was change, often dizzying, to oppose in a responsible way. Perhaps Reaganism made sense before we finally had to accept the fact that a huge state, burdensome and unlikable in its own special ways, was necessary to supply people with the basics and keep corporations in check.
Social and emotional inertia is hard to counter. There are a lot of people still alive who remember when you could have a big family with one breadwinner, and it all just seemed to work. People believed in Jesus, and everything was fine. That was just yesterday, so why doesn’t it work today? We can’t we just replicate that? What happened to Disneyland, “Alcoa Can’t Wait,” and the Apollo missions?
The Liberal strategy has been to plod ahead without much vision, since there’s not a country in the world that seems to have any, but at least with the intention of making things better. In the 1990s, however, the GOP with Gingrich began to grift like the corporations, i.e., not even intend to govern but instead to rig the game for the sake of its own survival and the enrichment of its supporters. This trend has culminated in the fascist takeover of the party.
In terms of game theory, it makes perfect sense. If the party ever had a philosophy, it was now obsolete. It was a choice between creating some sort of relevance for itself or simply dying. Now it’s a choice between completely taking over the system or dying. That’s what Orban has done in Hungary. That’s what Putin has been doing since 1999. That’s what Brexit was about: something that people could give a fuck about for awhile. And I don’t need to tell anyone here that that’s what Trumpism is about.
I think one funny thing about American Conservatism today is that I never, and I mean never, hear about how the proposed policies are going to relate to life in, say, 100 years from now. OK, so we ban abortion. In the year 2124, what is that going to mean? Will that turn out to be a stable element of society, or will we still be fighting about it? OK, keep weed illegal. Will that make sense in the year 2124? People are just going to give up on being high forever? And so on. I really think these people imagine life in the future as being exactly like today.
We Liberals do not communicate our vision very well, but at least the envisioning of stable change is implicit in our actions. For example, is it really plausible that our current shitshow of an insurance system will be a stable element of society in 2124? Is it plausible that we’ll be putting up with homelessness and the damage it does at that point in time? I think not.
I don’t have a snappy conclusion to the above, but that’s part of the point: the snap of low-hanging fruit from the limb is gone, and while very few understand that the slowing of change is the new change, only Liberals are moving foward.
Many of them don’t even think of it as a right. They just think of it as “the way things are”, or were.
Agreed. The results can be evil, though.
Quite a lot of non-evil people, of any sort of politics or for that matter in other areas altogether, have done things which have evil results. Sometimes they don’t see those results as having been in any way caused what they’ve done.
None of that changes the evil. May change my attitude toward the people, though.
Yes. A good example is the antebellum South (and by extension, the whole US, really). Anyone not specifically fighting against slavery was complicit in it.
I’m sorry, I don’t follow. I agree the Republican Party leadership label themselves conservative. I was differentiating good faith from the party that backs Trump no matter what.
Actually, I’m a progressive. Back when I was young and uninformed I considered myself a moderate - back before Fox news. As I’ve become more informed, and the country’s right has rejected the middle, I’ve discovered I am liberal, and at least progressive. My extended family, however, holds a number of conservatives and more that a few Trumpers, to my dismay.
Is everyone who identifies as conservative racist, sexist, elitist, extremist? Or are you suffering from a visibility bias. The obnoxious are coming out of the woodwork and sucking up all the air, and the moderates find themselves faced with either the reactionarires in charge of the party or switching away from their identity. That’s a hard place to be. I try to reach out to them to encourage patriotism over party.
I tend to think too many are caught up in parties as teams instead of philosophies. They’ve picked their team, and now support it thick or thin without evaluating why that team.
I have appreciated the perspective on display. It has helped me reevaluate what conservatism is at its core. I definitely see the points about how the party can claim one thing until they are blue in the face, but if their policies are at odds with their message, then they aren’t being honest.