Kaylasdad99, a sincere question about conservatives and MAGA

In My Humble Opinion
21

Thank you for the humbling reality check vis a vis how noteworthy I am around here. That OP suggests that I have failed to make my inclinations clear over the past twenty-five years. Allow me an attempt at clarification:

I am a progressive, and a registered Democrat. I am STILL more conservative than today’s generic Republican. I won’t say that no Republican can put forward an idea that will make the country and the world better, but I will say that I’ve seen precious few of them. I believe there is value in the notions of incrementalism, and in the concept of Chesterton’s Fence (a quick google of the term should be instructive, although there doesn’t seem to be a wikipedia article on the term).

I’m not fighting for a label; I’m fighting for the language. The Republican Party basically ceded any right to the adjective “conservative” (and by extension, the noun) back in 1994, when they endorsed Newt Gingrich’s radical Contract On America. They have become even more radical in the intervening years.

Again, not a Republican, just a prescriptivist. I know which one I use as a snarl word.

No idea, beyond what I said in my own post: they’re craven assholes.

Not only “No,” but “Ew, no.”

See above allusion to craven assholes.

I reject the “line” thesis. You’re welcome to join me, if you’re really not happy about it.

22

Ok. What would you call someone who says “I believe in low taxes, limited regulation, capitalism, and a strong national defence. Donald Trump is anathema to all those things, a cancer on the American people, and I reject him.”

23

Um…no. Conservatives get to decide what conservatism means.

I know Baptists who claim Mormons aren’t really Christians. So, the claim is that since there is one of them who says so, them Mormons are not really Christians?

This isn’t a game of semantics. Reliance on prescriptivism is well and good when navel gazing but at least in this case, the distinction is not a useful one.

Also a conservative. It’s a bigger umbrella than you think.

And this statement is almost a perfect example of “No True Scotsman”

24

I’ve been saying for years that the Republicans aren’t a Conservative Party.

And so what happens to true conservatives? For me, I became a Democrat.

But that was long before Trump came along. The GOP has been the party of “big government” and “reckless spending” since Reagan.

I registered Republican when I was 18, and voted for Dole later that year (‘96), but never supported W Bush, and was well read enough in college to realize the Republican lie.

The party has only become more intransigent since. There is simply no room in the Republican Party for a traditional conservative.

Small government? The Republicans are responsible for creating the Department of Homeland Security, the TSA, and the Space Force.

Fiscal responsibility? The Republicans always blow up the deficit, have dogmatic opposition to taxes of any kind, and are always pumping up the defense budget to absurd levels (about a trillion dollars a year, last I checked)

Personal freedom? Puh-leaze. The Republicans want to legislate who you can cohabitate with, who you can love, what you believe, what you and your doctor discuss, and how you raise your children.

States Rights? They want to nationalize marriage laws, drug laws, and women’s reproduction care.

Science and Fact based? It is to laugh. The GOP gave us Reagan: all hat and no cattle. When he proved too coherent, they dropped the bar with W. And when even he proved palatable, they scraped the barrel with Trump. They mock intellectuals, deny science, and promote magical thinking.

Pro business? The vast majority of businesses aren’t mega corporations, but smaller operations utterly unaffected by Republican tax cuts focused on corporate income tax or capital gains. Businesses benefit from a thriving middle class, which is better able to provide demand for goods and services. The Republicans have explicitly been supply side economists for decades.

Pro military? The Republicans have hidden so much graft and corruption in that inflated military budget, but regularly fall short in supporting the people who actually serve. Plus, it has been the Republicans who have deployed the military recklessly, or for unjust ends. A war with no end in sight, or an impossible mission like nation building, is a massive insult to those in uniform.

If you are conservative, you aren’t a Republican. If you call yourself a conservative, and you are a Republican, then you either don’t know what a conservative is, or you don’t know (or care) how the Republican Party actually behaves.

And so, conservatives are on the outside of MAGA looking in. We have a comfortable seat at the Democrats table.

25

“I reject him” is a public statement. How goes their private vote?

26

You contradict yourself here. If coservative equals MAGA then such a person is not a conservative. If it doesn’t then conservatism doesn’t equal MAGA.

27

Well, if it’s Adam Kinzinger, I assume for Harris, since he spoke in favor of her at the fucking DNC.

28

Or the term “conservative” doesn’t mean jack anymore, and you should go find another term.

29

OK, I’m done.

30

I am talking about the person in your own example.

31

No, I’m not contradicting anything.

Conservative means what conservative people decide it means. That often means there are groups of people who believe contradictory things who are in the same boat.

I don’t insist that a label relating to people remain fixed. Even what the word ‘conservative’ means has changed over the decades (take a look at the Republican plank from 1956 compared to 1996 or 2024).

If you want to insist that only your definition is correct and proper, feel free to do so, but don’t be surprised if the vast majority of people don’t go along with that. Prescriptivism has its obvious limits, and saying “well, he’s not really a conservative” is not useful. It’s almost certainly counterproductive in this particular instance.

ETA: Even Reagan raised taxes. Does that mean he was never really a conservative? No True Scotsman is a terrible way to judge these things.

32

A Democrat. And to take a more global view, Democratic party policy would be thought of as very conservative in nature for many, many other countries.

33

Exactly. Words have meanings and among the vast majority of native English speakers Joe Biden is a conservative and Donald Trump is not, whether either of them likes it, or not. Hopefully we’ll see what that nice Kamala lady is over the next four years or so. :wink:

34

Moving to In My Humble Opinion from Politics & Elections at @kaylasdad99 request. Seems reasonable.

35

Arguing about policy is a misunderstanding. Here is the problem with the thread.

Just as some of you are lapsed Republicans, I am a lapsed descriptivist. Converts are said to be more fervent in their cause; perhaps that what makes me need to be scraped off the ceiling when I see a declaration of this sort.

People decide language. Always. Language is what people say or write in the various levels of discourse. There is or can be no other definition of language. Conservatives do not decide what conservatism means, just as liberals do not get to decide what liberalism means. As Irishman said in the OP, the American people have decided that the language of American politics sorts the political parties into liberal and conservative. Democrats are liberal and vice versa; Republicans are conservatives and vice versa.

Language as used by the people pays little attention except when pressed to caring about the exceptions or the undetermineds or whatever some funky little third party might be. The People are a huge amorphous mass of words over time that create new meanings or shift old ones.

This is not the way language works. If it were, how could you explain that conservatives drove “socialist” into a slur that could no longer be adopted as a descriptor? Or how they almost succeeded in doing the same to “liberal”, so those on the left had a temporary flirtation with “progressive” before coming back to “liberal” and in the process making “progressive” almost an unusable slur?

Perhaps in 10 years or 20 or 30, the terms that “liberal” and “conservative” denote will have shifted again. I’m perhaps delusionally hopeful that “conservative” will become an unusable slur that nobody would willing to be identified by. I’m also delusionally hopeful that the present aging crop of prescriptivists will die out and the language will no longer be sullied by its wrongness.

tl;dr This thread is about language, not politics. People as a mass create language. Idiocentric definitions just get in the way of understanding rather than promote it.

36

Since nobody seems to have picked up on this, I’ll take a crack at it.

In the US, there’s no real protection against “entryism” as you know it, because the parties do not have meaningful authority to include or exclude their membership. Anyone who wants to run in an election calling himself or herself a Republican or Democrat, he or she is free to do so, regardless of their actual relationship with the party, or lack thereof. And, upon winning, such a person is now a Republican or Democrat sitting in the legislature.

If enough people of a particular ideological flavor get themselves elected that they become an influential minority, then the majority membership of the party must decide whether the party will adjust itself to accommodate them or resist their influence. It’s critical to understand, this is not the same as in the UK, where party leadership determines its slate of positions and strategies and uses various disciplinary measures to keep members in line, up to and including ejecting the member from the conference and prohibiting them from standing for re-election as a party member. That simply does not and cannot happen in the US. The party does not take action as a body. Alliances and factions within the party jockey for position, and that’s it.

In a very real sense, US political parties exist only to (a) aid in candidate branding and (b) coordinate fundraising efforts. They’re just a completely different animal compared to the UK.

Edit to add, since I forgot to come back around to what you were actually asking: This is how Trump took over the party. Individual Trump-loyal candidates kept getting elected, while traditional Republicans were displaced, and the party was helpless to do anything about it. Really, it’s that simple.

37

Yes, this is @kaylasdad99’s approach, I believe. His definition of a conservative is someone who is an incrementalist, resistant to radical change. The MAGAs and the rest of the current Republican party want to make radical changes, which is why he calls them radicals (or reactionaries?), not conservatives.

His point is, even a liberal such as he (him?) wants to make smaller changes to the current national and political environment. People who call themselves conservatives want to tear it all down, which is not something a dictionary-definition conservative would do.

38

Yup. I expect (demand) that anyone who wants me to call them a conservative behave conservatively.

I also demand that comics* be comical, but that’s a different conversation.

*I include graphic novels under that rubric. Sorry, Mr. Spiegelman.

39

That doesn’t really work for politics, since political groups lie. A lot. It’s common for political groups to label themselves something they are not for propaganda purposes. Conservatives are a political grouping, and so it’s basically inevitable that they’ll define themselves in some way that sounds good, while acting entirely differently (and worse). Accuracy won’t even be a secondary concern. That’s how politics works.

40

Yep. Case in point: The National Socialist German Workers’ Party.