I don’t disagree, but I don’t think that’s because of liberals bullying them or anything. It’s more that, with a larger nerd community, there is no longer a place for these people to feel special. Now you can be a nerd and yet too socially awkward for other nerds.
Before, you could go after those who felt powerless to join the other powerless to become more powerful. But now, the hard right had caught on and give them a feeling of power. They changed tactics because they started feeling a need to recruit. Or, more accurately, the rest of the right looked the other way or even helped them out, when, before, they tried to filter these people out.
They’re tapping into the oppression these people feel as misfits (which no longer is required to be a nerd) and creating a space for them. But in a much less harmless way.
I just don’t think this correlates with what the OP is talking about, and especially not in the time period he is talking about.
What’s lost is that the increasing acceptance of nerds just means that there will be a new set of misfits. Because there will always be misfits. Even if they aren’t the same people as before.
(And, yes, I think the nerds from before and these guys are necessarily the same people. But they are people who before felt welcome under the nerd umbrella, but feel much less so now.)
I think there is a tendency in some marginalized folks to cope with their marginalization by deriding whatever the “cool kids” do. If you can’t join the club, then you can get your kicks by hating the club.
It has not been my experience that “nerds” are more socially conservative. Perhaps the OP is thinking of people who are socially inhibited due to low self-confidence and/or awkwardness? Because I can imagine how the latter might turn conservative far more than I can do the former.
The above should be “don’t think.” I don’t think the nerds from before who felt ostracized before are necessarily the nerds that feel that way now, even among their nerdy peers. But they very much may be people who would have been lumped in with the previous nerds, but feel ostracized even from nerddom now that the group is larger.
The smaller the group, the more you necessarily must put up with differences in beliefs, jut to have a group. At least until the group becomes so large that there aren’t enough people who think the same way.
My point is based on how small schools tend to have everyone in the class being friends, while people focus on differences more and more as the schools get bigger. Nerddom is so big now that we wind up subdividing. And one of those subdivisions is just socially awkward people who wanted to feel like they belonged. Those are the ones most easily persuaded by hard/alt-right recruiting tactics.
I don’t find the OP convincing in the least.
I’ve known plenty of conservatives that partied hardy, drank and enjoyed the heavy metal music or had what are being described as liberal vices.
I never thought of nerds as being particularly conservative. I may even consider them the opposite. The insider vs outsider argument makes a little sense.
If nerdism leads to conservationism it might that nerdish pursuits like science and computers requires a good understanding of rules. To have success in those areas as a rebel, thinking outside the box and breaking all the rules means you’ve found exceptions to the conventional rules and now have a slightly better, probably more complicated rule to be thrilled about.
I have known conservatives in traditional nerd professions that expect human beings to conform 100% to rather arbitrary rules and were immune to any compromise.
I don’t find that to be the case at all. Sure ‘nerds’ do sometimes have a problem with excluding people who need to be excluded, which is well discussed in the “Five Geek Social Fallacies” article: Five Geek Social Fallacies – Plausibly Deniable . But ‘nerddom’ as a whole has been extremely hostile to anyone who isn’t a straight white male. Female fans at science fiction conventions were routinely treated as nothing more than grope targets; Isaac Asimov, while a great author, was also known for groping any females that came near him, and multiple people have tales of being kicked out of cons for raising any complaint about it. And it wasn’t just back in the 60s or 70s, articles like this come out even now: Don't Look Away: Fighting Sexual Harassment in the Scifi/Fantasy Community .
There are similar tales of other non-SWM groups getting bad treatment from ‘nerds’ as a whole, but I feel like the treatment of women is the most telling one because a common nerd complaint is ‘why don’t women like me/my hobbies’. Well, when you look at the traditional treatment of women in nerdy pursuits, and how much resistance there is to organizations that try to fix it, it’s not a surprise. I don’t encounter this stuff a lot in person because I tend to pick groups that don’t do it, but to pretend that it’s not there when you have things like Gamergate and PewDiePie in the news is not facing reality.
I wonder if what is going on here is that liberals tend to apply a “one drop rule” to conservatism. So, if a person takes a non-liberal position on this or that key issue, you might view him as conservative, regardless of his positions on anything else. So some of the posters in this thread recall the jocks who bullied them as being into partying, underage drinking, hooking up, etc.–but they were homophobic or whatever, ergo they were social conservatives. Whereas to me, being socially conservative has always meant taking a consistent, principled position of believing in traditional morality, so I don’t think of people who are OK with underage drinking or premarital sex as social conservatives.
Yes, as a child I felt socially inhibited due to low-self confidence and awkwardness, and also I had interests like science fiction and computers, and because of the combination of those two factors, I considered myself a nerd. Maybe that is a nonstandard definition of nerd.
Convincing of what? All I’m saying is that as a kid, I glommed onto this kind of Puritanical code of personal morality, and from there, began to identify with broader ideas of social conservatism.
That surprises me a bit. I’d have thought a psychiatrist would need a higher than average degree of social skills to effectively communicate with a patient. Perhaps the therapeutic setting and professional training make for a sufficiently different experience from ordinary social interactions.
I put “conservative” in quotation marks for a reason. There’s nothing inherently conservative or liberal about minor transgressions like this, but the fact is that the place I grew up was very conservative socially.
Socially conservative people in my area were very willing to overlook certain kinds of minor trespasses (depending of course on who was doing the trespassing). There was nothing liberal about the popular folks, either socially or politically.
This is a basic fact about conservatism in most of the country, that they’re usually willing to overlook what they see as harmless trespasses by “good” kids. So the football team can get away with bullying, underage drinking, messing around with girls, pulling pranks, up to a limit, ‘cause boys will be boys. That’s a fundamental part of traditional conservatism in America.
If you don’t mind my asking, are you from one of the smaller, self-isolating sects of Christianity (Jehova’s Witnesses, for example?) Because the above frankly says to me a Sheldon Cooper level of social naivety. Cowering over hearing The Beastie Boys and being called dude? Dude!
I don’t really see or see any reason for an expectation for nerds to be either primarily liberal or primarily conservative–there are large numbers on both sides, and often conflict between them. Ever heard of Gamergate, or Sad Puppies, just for two recent examples?
Professional interactions certainly are different from personal ones. However, at the time in one’s medical education when one decides in which field to apply for residency, one has typically been exposed only to inpatient psychiatry, in which one mainly deals with patients with psychosis, mania, and severe depression, who aren’t really capable of having normal social interactions because of their conditions at the time. And sure enough, I’m dissatisfied with my current outpatient job and plan on going back to hospital work.
I wasn’t going to bring this up, because I didn’t want this thread to become tendentious and veer into GD territory, but when I posted my previous post I was thinking of this idea that liberals tend to see hypocrisy as a fundamental feature of conservatism. I wonder, in what sense were the people you’re describing socially conservative? You describe them as violating several of what I’ve always seen as the tenets of social conservatism. Did they refer to themselves as social conservatives? Sure, thinks like hazing, pranks, and a “boys will be boys” mentality have been around for centuries, but just because you see liberalism as opposed to those things, doesn’t mean people who overlook such things are conservatives. To me, “conservative” doesn’t just mean “person who doesn’t happen to be interested in the liberal program,” it means, like I said, a person who explicitly takes a principled stance. And the social conservatives I’ve known, especially in my formative years, have definitely been against the things you’ve cited.
But maybe answering Darren Garrison’s question would help clarify where I’m coming from:
What’s interesting is that I wasn’t even raised in a religious immediate family. My parents both were, but they had rebelled. My maternal grandparents had gone to a big Presbyterian church downtown, but when my mother was still young, I guess they grew tired of driving 6 kids downtown every Sunday, and started going to a local, independent church which I believe would have been considered fundamentalist. My paternal grandfather had been in seminary for the Church of the Brethren when he died, when my father was only 5 years old, whereupon my grandmother took her 2 young boys, moved back in with her mother, and started going to the same church my mother’s family went to. But it was the sixties, and my parents rebelled, and after my father graduated from college, basically ran off together and tried to be hippies living in Vermont for a couple of years before getting married and settling down. So, my religious influence came from my extended family, especially my paternal grandmother and my uncle, my father’s brother, since my maternal grandparents retired to Florida when I was 9. When my parents started having us kids, my mother started wanting to take us to church on Easter and Christmas, which my father went along with, and my grandparents or uncle and aunt would say grace at holiday dinners, and their conversations featured mentions of God or the Bible, but that was about it.
And so my grandmother and uncle were my two main influences toward what I’m calling social conservatism, and while they were nice people, not constantly preaching fire and brimstone, they were very pious, and definitely did NOT overlook bullying, underage drinking, messing around with girls, pulling pranks, or have a “boys will be boys” mentality. They definitely thought that underage drinking and drugs and 4-letter words were wrong no matter who was doing them; that premarital sex was wrong whether it was boys or girls having it. And later on, when I started attending an evangelical church of my own volition, and making friends who considered themselves conservatives, they were the same way. They definitely did NOT have the mentality that “hey, the football team are the good ol’ boys, so let’s give 'em a slap on the back send 'em off to their parties with a wink and a nudge, and just make sure they don’t get in TOO much trouble.”
But perhaps it would also be useful for me to describe the broader demographic context. I grew up in an inner-ring suburb in the Northeast megalolopis, which was majority Jewish, and most of those either Reform or nonobservant. We just didn’t have good ol’ boys where I grew up, or, if we did, I didn’t encounter them. My family were lower-middle-class WASPs, but the social mainstream at my school, most of the cool kids, were the sons and daughters of Jewish doctors, lawyers, and accountants. Sure, some of them played sports, and some of them voted Republican, but in general, they had the social and cultural practices and affiliations common among the Northeastern, urban, white-collar class. There simply weren’t kids who drove their pickup trucks down to the honky-tonk on Saturday night, did shots of Jack, took Daisy Duke for a roll in the hay, but then got up and went to church on Sunday morning. The only people I knew who went to church were people like my grandmother and uncle, people who really lived it. What you might consider a red-state mentality wasn’t something I was acquainted with, and to the extent I was aware of its existence at all, it seemed like this exotic phenomenon, a legend from a faraway land.
No, I don’t think anyone else ever felt that nerdiness led to social conservatism.
I’m not psychic or anything so I can’t be certain of that, but I’m pretty much a lifelong geek, most of my friends over the years have been geeky types, and I spend too much time on the Internet, and I’ve never heard anyone else express such a thought. Even people I’ve known who were both geeky and conservative never claimed the former led them to the latter.
In my experience, nerdiness/geekiness doesn’t have much to do with politics, and neither does youthful interest in “sex, drugs, and rock & roll”. Nor is the latter the exclusive domain of the “cool kids” – especially not rock music, which was what I and most of my geeky friends listened to back in the '90s. It’s my recollection that most white teens at the time listened to some variety of rock music, even in the rather conservative Southern military town where I grew up. I particularly loved Pearl Jam, but believe me, that didn’t make me popular. (I suspect Pearl Jam actually came to be seen as less cool at my school than elsewhere because I liked them.)
The type of social conservative who believed rock was the Devil’s music also tended to believe that fantasy novels were the Devil’s reading material and Dungeons & Dragons (I’m sorry, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) was the Devil’s game. If anything I’d say nerdiness led my peers away from that sort of extreme social conservatism, because social conservatives were the people who wanted to take away their favorite forms of entertainment. That said, it’s certainly possible to be a nerd and hold other socially conservative views such as opposing abortion or same-sex marriage.
It sounds to me like you have never had a very good understanding of what liberals actually believe, and just swallowed some of the more extreme conservative claims about liberals supporting everything that’s immoral. Most liberals are not in favor of fighting, yelling, underage drinking and smoking, etc.
You skipped over the first thing I said: “There’s nothing inherently conservative or liberal about minor transgressions like this.”
In fact, I never said that hypocrisy was a fundamental characteristic of conservatism. And I never said that a lack of hypocrisy was a fundamental characteristic of liberalism. In fact, I said, that these things we are talking about are inherently neither liberal nor conservative.
You’re basically redefining conservatism in an idiosyncratic way. There is nothing about the history of conservatism in America that makes this a reasonable definition.
So, you take this idiosyncratic definition, and then you’re stretching it out into a discussion of conservatism and liberalism that has no connection to your definition of conservatism.
If that’s definition is really what you’re interested in, you need to remove the words “conservatism” and “liberalism” from your posts and fill them in with “principled” and “unprincipled.” Because otherwise you’re fundamentally misleading all the participants in this thread regarding what this conversation is about.
And just to echo what some others have said, these characteristics of the OP’s “conservatism” are not things I recognize as mainstream conservatism in America. They sound much more like Jehovah’s Witnesses or other hardcore sects, who are very different from mainstream social conservatives on a day-to-day basis, although they might now be allied with them politically.
Well, I think I have a pretty good understanding of what liberals actually believe now, considering I’ve been lurking on the SDMB for 15 years. I didn’t when I was a kid and a teenager, and I’m aware my views were idiosyncratic. I’m aware on a conscious level that the world isn’t the way I thought it was when I was a kid, but I think the way I thought and felt about various issues in childhood still colors my views somehow today. For example, when I hear the word “conservative” or “liberal” my mind immediate goes to the social issues, because those were so important to me early on.
Rather than “nerdiness,” perhaps it would have been more accurate to use “feeling like a social outcast” in the title of the OP. Because I was looking for an alternative to the social mainstream, the same type of alternative that people who are put off by the jocks might find in Dungeons and Dragons or something.
Well, like I said, I’m aware my views started out as idiosyncratic. Maybe the train of thought I described as a numbered list in the OP wasn’t quite accurate. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I identified my quiet, shy, reserved, timid nature as “good,” and as I grew up, being that way seemed to me to coincide more or less with values that people tended to call “conservative,” so I said to myself “hey, I guess I’m conservative.” But I was still young enough that I still saw the world in a black-and-white way, and so I learned there was this thing called “liberalism” that was the opposite of conservatism, so, since conservatism was good, liberalism must be bad, and liberals must be people who oppose everything I think is good and promote what I think is bad.
I mean, I even remember hearing about Rush Limbaugh for the first time in high school, and trying to listen to him, figuring “hey, this guy’s supposed to be conservative, and I’ve figured out that I’m conservative, so I’ll like him, right?” But I didn’t! I found his show boring. He was talking about boring grown-up issues like foreign policy, taxes, and electoral politics, whereas I wanted to hear about “family values” type stuff. I even remember watching Michael Moore’s short-lived TV show, TV Nation, and liking it! I viewed the CEO types Moore criticized as big mean bullies, so they were like the “bad” kids to me, and I wasn’t put off by the show since it didn’t seem to be promoting a left-wing social or cultural stance, or if it did, I was too naive to pick up on that fact.
But anyway, if you disagree with my conception of what social conservatism is, what is your definition? Why do you consider the people you grew up around social conservatives?
I think your main point of confusion might be that you have not yet realized that the terminology you and everyone around you are using to refer to various attitudes and groups of people, isn’t at all viable or reliable in any way. Especially not if you hoped to be able to use it uniformally to understand the entire personality and behavioral traits of a given individual or group.
When I was a kid, I also felt left out rather constantly, and wanted to feel included. I also focused on trying to figure out what group I did belong in.
As chance had it, I was either snubbed, abused, or simply ignored by almost everyone, which didn’t help me sort things out much. Being a child of the television era, I subconsciously believed that I was learning accurate information about how people socialize from that monstrosity, and that led to a series of experiences somewhat like yours. Only in my case, I initially counted on the Authorities to be as commonly shown in the films and daytime shows I saw, where they would make mistakes, but ultimately side with Truth, Justice, and The American Way.
My experiences in the event, showed me (due again to chance) that authorities could not be counted on to uphold ANY of the standards they pretended were important to them, especially not when the victims were smaller and younger than their peers (I started school two years before everyone else in all my classes).
Then came the late 1960’s, and I again was fooled by the television monster, into thinking that the new “personal freedom” movements and groups were where I belonged, because now THEY were promoted as being kind, generous, and fighting for real truth. But after a few years on THAT side of thing, I noodled through that they were, as a group and as individuals, just as likely to be playing a part for selfish gain, and just as likely to do the opposite of everything they claimed to believe in as the authorities had been.
It’s ironic that you mention disliking Heinlein for being too LIBERAL. I myself read tons of Science Fiction early on, and Heinlein was among my favorites at first, because he did seem to be a free-thinker. Amusingly enough, I eventually came to realize that Heinlein was a hard line right wing fanatic in lots of ways, a lot like Rush Limbaugh, in that just like Limbaugh, he thought it was the height of sophistication to screw around with any vaguely attractive female in sight, but had no patience with anyone who didn’t support a strong hard-line military approach to the world at large.
The main thing I’m getting to here, is that because the terms liberal and conservative in particular have come to be used entirely differently by BOTH groups who think they represent those terms, and because that means that there are at least FOUR completely different definitions of each one, that clinging to either term as a way to predict someone else’s views and behaviors is a huge mistake.
It’s much more useful to recognize that people fall into common BEHAVIOR groups, and are much more predictable and understandable if you IGNORE their political affiliations, and just observe their basic attitudes and behaviors. There’s no FUNCTIONAL difference, for example, between a hard right wing person who thinks they should be able to tell everyone else how to behave, and a hard LEFT wing person who thinks they should be allowed to tell everyone else how to behave. They both believe in authoritarianism.
More than anything else, I have found that there are people who DO have a personal sense of honor, and who insist on holding themselves and their friends to the same standards that they want people they don’t like held to, and there are people who make rules that they use like tools in a toolbox, which they only pull out when there’s someone ELSE’S nail to be hit, or a screw to be turned, but leave in the box when they are dealing with their own loose screws and bent nails.
I don’t see that anything you’ve said in this thread demonstrates awareness of actual liberal beliefs. You just keep repeating your childhood ideas about how liberals are bad people with no principles.
To the extent that I’ve referred to those ideas, I’ve used the past tense, indicating I have long since learned those things are not true. I would rather not make this thread about me defining liberalism. I’m more interested in trying to figure out why, since when I was growing up I found a sense of refuge from feeling like a social outcast in traditional morality and conservative religiosity, that seems to be such a rare experience for people who felt like social outcasts, because to me it felt like a natural progression.
This thread has been about what you think of liberals starting with the OP. The extent to which you’ve referred to your ideas about “liberal” = “bad” is at considerable length in nearly every post you’ve made in this thread, and unless I skimmed over something important, you have never said that you no longer believe liberals are all a bunch of wicked hedonists. You have, however, provided a present-tense definition of “conservative” that excludes liberals from having actual principles.
To be brutally honest here, I think it’s because most young people aren’t as naive and clueless as you were. Even the nerdy conservatives I’ve known weren’t clutching their pearls over the music of Pearl Jam. (I mean, seriously, Pearl Jam?) Your description of yourself as a college freshman sounds like my younger sister during this really narrow-minded, black-and-white morality phase she went through when she was about 10 years old, although even she wouldn’t have been shocked by gratuitous use of the word “dude”.
People who are social outcasts–if they are lucky–find other outcasts with the same unpopular interests, or different unpopular interests that make them aware of and sympathetic to the outcast status in others. Filkers find filkers. Furries find furries. Floyd the Barber fan fiction writers find Floyd the Barber fan fiction writers. Being nerdish/an outcast means finding a sanse of belonging amongst other people that share that particular kink. It just happens that your particular kink is being judgy about anyone who deviates from the small subset of behaviors that your upbringing has somewhat arbitrary told you are “morally acceptable.” You are taking your very particular case and assuming that the specific details are definitive and universal, but your basic premise is entirely wrong.
I no longer believe liberals are all a bunch of wicked hedonists. Happy now?
No, I haven’t. I think you misunderstood my use of the word “principled,” which I was using in defining conservatives as people who believe in conservative principles. I said nothing about liberals not having principles, and I’m well aware that liberals believe in various principles like equality, nondiscrimination, and other things that are important to them. What I was saying was that I don’t see anyone who isn’t liberal as therefore conservative, that I think of a conservative as someone who actively takes an explicitly “pro” stance on key issues that are important to conservatives. This was in response to Acsenray’s identification of people from his youth who were into premarital sex, underage drinking, and minor vandalism, as social conservatives. Again, I was and am in no way implying anything about liberals not having principles.
Well, to the extent that that’s true, I would like to figure out why that is.