Just google “CNS news atheists” and you’ll see what I mean.
You’re right, this is a fantastic article, and it touches on some ideas I hadn’t considered since I’m mostly outside their bubble.
It linked to this article and I read it too, and this is another great example of what happens when you pop the conservative bubble and actually go… uh, what are we really doing here, guys? The results of what we’re saying have real world consequences.
Doesn’t matter to those who want to be told stuff that already exists in their head, and are simply seeking validation and feeding their own ego.
It’s refreshing to hear a conservative publication use a word correctly in a sentence that I have actually never heard of before.
“obstreperousness”
Why aren’t intelligent conservatives on the forefront of conservative media? Surely you’d want to put your brightest stars on the cover, not the dumbest ones.
Really wish I could get people who should know better to stop saying “Conservatives” when they’re talking about Reactionaries.
It’s hard to find intelligent people who think that the current consensus on anthropogenic global warming is a massive conspiracy, that basic macroeconomics is a massive conspiracy, and that the evidence regarding abstinence-only sex ed is a massive conspiracy.
The biggest sin that mainstream, supposedly “neutral” news commits is pretending that the current core ideology of the modern GOP is just as grounded in reality as the current core ideology of the modern DNC. The current Republican platform is riddled with ideas which are simply, empirically not true. As in factually incorrect; not merely debatable, but at odds with reality as we observe it to be.
If your party actively rejects the work of the educated, you have to expect the educated to reject you. You might as well ask why the anti-vaccine movement has such a paucity of immunologists in its ranks.
It’s difficult to fully deconstruct the amalgamation of various movements that fall under conservatism, libertarianism, nationalism, fundamentalism, etc, that make up the Republican party.
People use the term *conservative *as a shorthand, because the thing they have in common is their opposition to liberals / progressives. They’re all basically anti-Progressives.
I’ve long objected to being put on a left-right axis, or even a two-axis system of identifying someone’s political leaning with a number or coordinate, because people’s political leanings are the sum of their individual policy positions and political philosophies. We’re dumbing ourselves down by simply saying “I’m a liberal” or “I’m a conservative” because it doesn’t have much meaning when some liberals are extremely different from other liberals, and might have more in common with Republicans on some issues, and some could never bring themselves to vote Democrat because they’re not liberal enough.
The GOP seems to be a loose alliance of:
Nationalists, (Bigots) who are of the Michael Savage variety, who emphasize stronger border controls, reduced or paused immigration, emphasis on making English the official language, and emphasizing socially conservative culture war positions. They tend to go with the GOP even though the GOP is quite complicit in encouraging illegal immigration because businesses like cheap under-the-table labor and many industries rely on migrant workers, particularly in red states and farming states.
**Neoconservatives **(Imperialists) of the Dick Cheney variety, who want more American military presence overseas, and believe in military interventionism and unilateralism, which drove the George W. Bush era and continue to make up a large portion of our foreign policy politics even in the Obama era, though markedly less so.
Social conservatives (Reactionaries) of the Mike Huckabee variety, whose primary emphasis is on tradition, religion, and fighting a culture war with liberals over abortion, gay rights, transgenderism, religion in government, denial of services to undesirables, prayer, god images, etc, while not necessarily requiring a specific foreign policy or caring that much about racial or language issues, but there’s some overlap.
Libertarians of the Rand Paul variety, if they’re not voting for Gary Johnson, for much the same reason Bernie supporters or Green party supporters may end up voting for Hillary Clinton. With their flat tax advocacy and lack of interest in matters other than reducing government controls and giving businessmen even more power than they currently have, this is the movement for plutocrats and anarchists.
Establishment Republicans, who can be any blend of the above, but favor working within the system in order to bring about conservative changes, which have gotten more and more ideological over time, notably so since the 1980s and 1990s.
Tea Partyers who are political outsiders, populists, and radicals, who favor destroying the Republican establishment and replacing it with something more radical and less compromising, focusing on ideological purity and the drifting of the already far right and obstructionist and uncompromising Republican party into an even further right party.
Single-issue voters, like Pro-lifers and gun nuts.
All of these oppose liberals for various reasons, oppose Democrats most of the time, and progressives in particular. But they come in many different varieties.
The term conservative could reasonably be applied to all, but I’m open to suggestions.
This is interesting, although predictably biased; the biggest howlers it contains are the twin ideas that Wikipedia is somehow a news source, and that it’s liberal. Shades of Conservapedia, I suppose, but it would be gauche to suggest it too strongly. I suppose Wikipedia is liberal in that it contains an actual, unbiased account of the evidence that global warming is real and humans are causing it, but saying that’s liberal would be equivalent to saying the GOP is actively pushing a delusional dogma, so it must not be liberal at all.
Further, the mainstream media is by no means liberal. For example, where was the liberal bias in 2003? No, the mainstream media is center-right, as this article elaborates; basically, it’s convinced that it has to walk a line in the center, regardless of how far to the right the GOP has drifted, making it moderately conservative by default. NRO just thinks that, as with Wikipedia, because it isn’t actively toeing the line 100% on GOP talking points, it must be liberal.
IMHO the Reactionaries make up the vast majority of the GOP, atm. I’m good with just calling them that, and letting any actual conservatives who aspire to respectability have the choice of sucking it or reconsidering whom they wish to be aligned with. 
So true. I have all the respect in the world for a conservative who actually has something relevant to say and actually knows more about a subject than me, and is an expert in their field of study. That matters to me more than their politics. But for many people, their politics matter more than intellectual honesty.
That’s why it’s becoming ever more disheartening when I realize that brand of conservative is dying out, and the level of actual expertise behind conservative bloggers and media personalities is less than my own. When literally anyone who can ***google for five seconds ***and find neutral or even unfriendly sources and can still debunk you, you shouldn’t be speaking in widely-circulated and widely-respected publications.
Centrist or moderate Republicans have lost a lot of seats in the Senate and in the House in my lifetime, and were not replaced by the same. Some were forced to switch parties to the Democrats, many left politics altogether because it was pointless. Conservative thinkers like George Will are being forced to abandon their party, not because the Democrats or the liberals or the progressives have won them over, but because the Republican party represents nothing intelligent or productive right now, and that is bad for everyone in the country. It’s bad for me. And, it presents a danger.
Republicans are terrible and corrupt when governing, but they still exist within a sphere where if they have control of the country, it is still moderately recognizeable when they’re done with it. If a Jill Stein or a Gary Johnson ever actually gets real power, it will be because one of the two major parties failed. I don’t want to Godwin this thread, but the rise of a different and much more radical party in Germany came about because of social democrats and communists obstructing each other. It took that party decades of losing elections and holding very few seats and lots of economic turmoil before voters on all sides began rejecting the established parties as being ineffective and incapable of compromise. That’s how you could see libertarians actually gain power in our lifetime and watch them re-write our tax code to favor the rich even more than we already do, and impose harsh tax increases on the poorest people who either pay very little or get something back under the current system, and such a change would break the banks of millions of families. See: The Flat Tax. *Undoubtedly *worse than a Republican government. Jill Stein of the green party might be closer to home for me, but even she is a nutter. She’d put Edward Snowden in her cabinet, she says. Why? Pardoning him is one thing. Saying that about Snowden is simply a stunt to gain attention. It’s not safe to have her in power. She’s right on plenty of issues, but seems to have a profound misunderstanding of science and is a kook when it comes to medicine and healthy practices. To say nothing of reparations for slavery would be extremely difficult to implement and has very little to do with the reality of the problems facing black Americans and the poor in general today, and instead of reparations, we should be doing things which help all the poor, not just poor blacks of slave ancestry. That would help not just those blacks, but all blacks, and other minorities and poor people. Plus it wouldn’t be ripe for abuse, and difficult to prove, such as slave lineage and percentages. What if I’m 95% white and I have a slave ancestor? Should I get reparations? Hell no. It would help black Americans more if we favored a policy that would undoubtedly help all of them that are in need of help, not just slave ancestors. Not all of them have slave ancestors. Many have families of more recent immigration than the slave days, some are black but not African. There are many different kinds of people with very dark skin, and they suffer in similar ways when confronted with racism.
The party platforms of third parties are not vetted, not tested, and often dangerous.
If one of the major national parties goes down in flames as a joke, what replaces it will not necessarily be better. It can *easily *be worse. I know that’s hard for people to believe, especially if you are like me and utterly DESPISE both current major parties, and especially given how far gone the Republican party has gotten.
The sad truth is, the fringes are not better. The current major parties are problematic because they’re becoming more fringe-like on the Republican side and too watered down to even be effective on the Democratic side, and because they both support monied interests only, or only about 95% of the time, take your pick.
I need there to be a viable Republican party (and a viable Democratic one) badly, and so does the nation. I need those parties to be more mainstream, more practical, and less partisan. It’s not happening anytime soon thanks to the negative feedback loop of the conservative media echo chamber.
Unless the major parties put intelligent people back in charge, particularly in the Republican camp, you could easily see things get worse than where we are. I’m not particularly a chicken little type, I’m very practical. But throughout history, when a major party fails, what replaces it is something that doesn’t always work out very well, because their politics may be on even shakier foundation than the discarded party, and the results have often been disastrous.
The GOP’s markedly visible drift to the right, where Nixon would be a flaming liberal today, and definitely a Democrat without question, Ronald Reagan would never survive a primary, and George H.W. Bush looks a lot like Barack Obama in terms of pragmatism and running a war, and Republicans proposed what is basically Obamacare as an alternative to Hillarycare in the 90s, only to be aggressively opposed to their own idea a decade later, and moderate Republicans switching to the Democratic party, are all indicators of where the GOP is going.
When Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are not nearly conservative enough, despite making it the party platform to oppose everything Obama did simply because he was an elected Democrat, from the very beginning, and they were subject to attacks by tea party Republicans and idiots like Ted Cruz for not taking a hard enough line on Obama and the Fed, and then *even Ted Cruz *wasn’t wacky enough for the current Republican party to support, and they had to go straight into full-blown white nationalism, misogyny, and xenophobia that Donald Trump represents, that tells you how far gone the GOP is.
I fully sympathize with any current conservative who looks at their party and goes, this isn’t conservatism that I recognize, what the hell is this?
To any such GOP’er: I get it. You’re not imagining things. I’ve been seeing the slide to the right my entire life. You thought you were a right-winger, when you didn’t realize you were center-right. Now you’re a traitor to your party, too soft, and a liberal, in today’s Republican party, and you’re now protesting where it is. You’re a little late to the party if this is the case, liberals have been saying this for decades, but you haven’t trusted our position on it because you believe it’s been motivated by our partisan nature and desire to simply defeat Republicans.
No, what the Republican party stands for has changed. What traditional Republicans stand for has not, and now they’re finding themselves outflanked on the right by the new Republicans, and now they’re an endangered species within their own party.
It can’t be easy to hold your nose and vote for Democrats. I’ve been doing it for a long while. But when your entire life system has told you that they’re the enemy, but it’s your only choice, because the GOP has gone too insane, it’s easy to feel like a dirty traitor.
But it’s not you who has abandoned the GOP or any intelligent conservative position. It’s the party that has taken more and more steps to the right and created an echo chamber in the media that only allows the most fanatical voices to get airtime. You think Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage represents the AVERAGE Republican voter? Not unless the average Republican voter rants about homosexuals and transgenders almost every single day. They don’t, I’ll give them that much credit at least, and thensome.
True of Dubya-ish or Romney-ish Republicans, the mainstream party men who, for all their flaws, are not raving ideologues. I don’t want to imagine a country after four years of Cruz or Huckabee, even if we stipulate that Trump somehow isn’t a Republican, despite the fact his positions are within Republican norms.
No, it will be because both of the major parties failed. The GOP is in a failure mode right now, but the DNC isn’t, so the DNC is picking up votes the GOP is losing. The only chance a third party has is if both major parties are so far gone neither of them can pick up votes from the other.
She actively courts anti-vaccination nutballs despite knowing better. She’s worse than naïve, and she’d be an active detriment to our country were she elected, for that reason and the reasons you mention.
(I broadly agree with what you’re saying, by the way; I just snip parts I don’t really feel I have much to add to.)
Party Out Of Power Syndrome: They don’t have experience in governing, which means negotiation and compromise, so they can drift off into la-la land and develop theory instead of policy. Large parts of the GOP are acting this way as well.
Could be worse, but I think the GOP will fracture into a more moderate Right party and a fringe Crazy Scared White People Party, much like the BNP in the UK. That, in turn, could allow the Democrats to drift Leftwards a bit, because they wouldn’t be the only big tent party in the country.
See, the default assumption is that we have two big tent parties, one more Right and one more Left. That was true, but these days the GOP has become so riddled with people who have no interest in governing that it’s no longer a big tent. It’s a few small tents with extremely strict entrance rules and dogmatic policy positions largely uninfluenced by reality. It’s also pretty much an ethnic party, mainly appealing to White people. The DNC is the only big tent left, so it’s very centrist, staking out positions the GOP used to have and, therefore, getting votes the GOP used to get.
This is wrong: They both support views their base wants. The GOP’s base is not really in tune with the majority of the country, but it exists, and the GOP panders to it. The DNC appeals to a broader segment of society, and it does have positions which benefit that majority.
It must be hard being a democrat these days.
IMHO you’re wrong.
that was interesting, I thought so when I read it earlier today. I think I found it via alternet.
I’ve actually heard proof of this on the Jay Sekulow live show. It was a few years ago and Jay, and a listener called in saying something like “Obama doesn’t actually want to outlaw Christianity”. Jay went ballistic calling the caller a liar, and as proof saying he must have lied (presumably to the call screener) in order for his call to get on the show. Then he cut the guy off and went on to the next caller. I was surprised to hear him admit on the air that only conservative callers were allowed, but I think he was just caught off guard.
I hardly ever miss an episode, their take on the media is truly uniquehttp://http://www.noagendashow.com/
In what way is it unique?
They boast how they are listener supported, no advertising.
They bill themselves as “Media Assassins” and indeed they have brought much enlightenment on how and what the media feeds us.
Their approach is very humorous and entertaining.
That’s just a few
a lot of podcast are listener supported.
[QUOTE=yesanything]
They bill themselves as “Media Assassins” and indeed they have brought much enlightenment on how and what the media feeds us.
[/quote]
They’ve got a tagline(nothing new there) and whether they bring “enlightenment” depends on whether or not you buy into 9-11 and anti-vac conspiracies…needless to say, they are hardly “unique” in promoting those agendas via podcasts.
[QUOTE=yesanything]
Their approach is very humorous and entertaining.
[/quote]
Matter of opinion, and not very unique, even if true.
This is a guy who is so bad at his job that he’s given away the game.
But I don’t think this is even a major revelation to any conservative who would happen to read this thread. They know this, like I said people are aware it’s largely political theater and staged performances, akin to pro wrestling. And in the same way, that in no way affects their enjoyment of it.
But that’s the average to smart people. It’s entirely possible really dumb listeners think it’s all real.