Conservatives in the US have (mostly) decided who gets to be included in their little club. There are a few old timers who don’t like the new crowd. So what? They are outnumbered by the people who disagree with them and those who don’t care to fight about it.
Saying “these new a-holes don’t speak for me” and citing accuracy and a dictionary definition does nothing.
If the Nazis (after taking over the party) ever considered themselves socialists and advertised themselves as such, that’s news to me. They certainly tried to get some association though, calling themselves “national socialists” (nationalsozialist in German) to draw a distinction. And apparently that’s enough to fool people a century later.
I don’t think too highly of “well, the dictionary says this word means …” as if that’s some kind of invincible argument.
They chose the name for PR purposes only. “Socialist,” of course, did not and does not have the stigma it has in our enlightened country. The whole moniker was chosen to suggest a “we fight for the working man” vibe.
Hitler, of course, despised socialists and communists and the idea that any aspect of the Reich would have any socialist feature would have been laughable to him. Socialists and communists were among the first groups rounded up for the camps.
MAGA and conservative and Republican are essentially synonyms. The Republican and conservative voters have driven that point over and over again for the last decade at least. Non-MAGA had been successfully purged.
Anyone self-identifying as conservative or Republican has to know that MAGA is the defining characteristic of that political movement. And they also have to know that the conservative movement has been building to MAGA for the past four or five decades (at least). Anyone who claims to have been a conservative over the past five decades has been building this foundation for decades.
Certainly since 1994, with Newt Gingrich and the “Contract with America.”
It’s telling that, if you look at the previous three GOP presidents, prior to Trump (Reagan and the two Bushes), and you look at their policies and approaches, all three would likely be labeled RINOs by Trump’s GOP, and marginalized, if not completely driven out of office.
I think it started when Reagan pulled the Dixiecrats in. Those old Southern Democrats pretty much moved to the Republicans under Reagan. Then by Newt, they were taking over.
Think about it Bob Dole was on the Right and a Conservative in the 80s but by 1996 he was a Moderate Republican and he wasn’t the one that changed.
I was Green Republican or Rockefeller Republican and by 2000 I couldn’t lie to myself that my party was on the one I had joined as an 18 year old. John McCain was one of the last senior Republicans I still had a lot of Respect for and in 2000 he still wasn’t willing to Kowtow to the moral majority but even he gave in by 2008.
It’s not that straightforward. There was a wing in the Party that took the “socialism” part seriously: the Sturmabteilung (“SA”), led by Ernst Röhm. They were Hitler’s original street fighters and had a strong streak of “common man” and workers sympathies; for instance, they sometimes intervened in strikes by attacking the strikebreakers. After Hitler and the Nazis were in power, Röhm called for a “second revolution”, opposed to the major industrialists in German. He also thought that the SA should replace the Reichswehr, creating a “people’s army”.
Once Hitler was in power, he didn’t need the SA, which was under Röhm’s personal control and numbered over a million. That was one of the factors that led to the Night of the Long Knives, where Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich purged the SA and killed Röhm and his cadre.
First, an explanation. I broke this topic off to stop the hijack and continue the conversation in a productive way.
I chose P&E because to topic related to American politics, and because I did not want a Pit thread on @kaylasdad99. I wanted a conversation to explain my confusion. I’m okay with the move to IMHO.
Thank you for the clarification. My apologies if I can’t keep straight who is who and their politics.
A quick search on “Chesterton’s Fence” found the following:
Seems a reasonable principle.
As someone with my own language beef, I sympathize. You are correct on the history. Gingrich’s first step progressed to the Tea Party, and their obstinence layed the groundwork for Trump and the MAGA extremists. These have a large fascist core in the name of liberty, with a strong element of “tear down the system” and a heavy dose of “Jewish Space Laser” level nuttery.
Certainly from a definitional standpoint, the Republican Party bears little resemblance to the word “conservative”.
It sounds like you would also say that the Democratic Party is not particularly “liberal”, let alone “progressive”. Would that be a fair assumption?
So your objection is language. My apologies for assigning you a role in the Republican Party position shift.
Unfortunately, I think the line thesis is a direct consequence of our two-party system. As long a we basically have two camps in which to divide, that division will be as a line.
It doesn’t matter that Libertarians believe in small government in fiscal, social, and business issues and maximizing liberty. They are lumped in the camp that advertises as small government and fiscal restraint. It doesn’t matter that that camp would restrict social liberty, or that they don’t actually provide fiscal restraint, what matters is the perception and how they map on the line.
Call that line left-right instead of liberal-conservative, that is the axis drawn.
The second effect is that names/labels become separated from the words that make it up. I mean, I’m making this post on a “telephone”. Politically, the single axis division has two camps, the more “liberal” side versus the more “conservative” side. Those labels were assigned infinity ago. Slow creep of beliefs shifting under those labels mean the political labels cover different ground than they used to.
Just like the Republican Party, the “Party of Lincoln”, has flipped to being the ones that carry Confederate flags. The Democratic Party, the party of Jim Crow is the party against discrimination and racism. Things change.
I’ll support stressing the shift from conservatism to batshittery fascism as the political philosophy of the Republicans. I can stress “conservative” less as a rehabilitive measure to leave room for actual conservatives.
However, for that rehabilitation to occur, true conservatives must do a better job of distinguishing themselves, and that especially includes vocally distancing themselves from the MAGA. Even if that means sinking the Republican Party and supporting the party that they find politically unpalatable.
As long as conservatives let MAGA own the Republican Party and yet continue to vote republican, they can’t say the Republican Party isn’t conservative.
There is no conservative party in the US. There are Democrats and Republicans. It makes sense to argue that MAGA are Republicans, because they vote for and support that party.
But “conservative” is not a term defined by a single political party, or even a single country. It’s not about “dictionary definitions,” but how the term is actually used.
Letting MAGA decide who is and isn’t conservative only helps them win. You’ve ceded control of language to the fascists.
A huge part of defying MAGA is to not let them set the narrative. It’s why we fight back on CRT (Critical Race Theory) and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). It is a political act to refuse to let them be in control.
And it is a political act to let them define our terms. We want the term conservative to mean the anti-MAGA people, and the only way to have that happen is to use it that way.
Fortunately, there are a small but vocal group of people who self-identify as conservatives but are anti-MAGA, so we can point to them.
Does the term ‘Deplorables’ seem ironically accurate here? There are deplorable conservatives (MAGA) and non-Deplorable conservatives who are folks currently without a party. Hillary wasn’t (as Trump claimed) calling all of his supporters “deplorable”–she was simply asking those who weren’t deplorable to recognize the Democratic Party as more in line with their overall views, which eight years later, many of them seem to be doing. Even more ironically, many of them voted for Trump in 2016 because they bought into the BS he was selling about her “deplorable” remark, and now they are conceding that she was right in her assessment at the time.
It is that small but vocal group of people who self-identify as conservatives but are anti-MAGA that handed the name over to them on a silver platter. The MAGA and their ilk offered votes, money and power to the “true” conservatives, and the “true” conservatives took it, hook, line and sinker.
How has that usually worked out history wise, btw?
The Democratic party does not enforce a single view. There are progressives, there are liberals, there are conservatives, but those not fitting into the view of a minority don’t get primaried, mostly. There is some recognition that different states may require different views.
Republicans used to be like this. When Goldwater got nominated in 1964 the Rockefeller wing was not excluded from the party. The idea is that you can argue but unify.
I think the Democrats in the House versus the Republicans in the House show this clearly. And some say that the big difference is that Democrats, and moderate Republicans (traditional conservatives included) want to govern, while MAGA wants to destroy any part of government that can help anybody.
I always start the change with Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy. The move worked. Every Southern state went for Nixon in 1972. They went back to Democratic in 1976 but after that even Clinton and Obama could win no more than half the states and in most Republican-won elections they were a solid block.
In 1968 an observer could still say that each party had a liberal, centrist, and conservative wing. That’s what people think of when they talk about cross-party legislation. They forget that the Southern Democrat Senators pulled the most epic filibuster to stop the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Southern conservatives started fleeing the party, destroying the party’s right wing. Many of them went over to the Republicans, although that took many years to fully enact as the Democratic association was so deeply ensconced in the South. Meanwhile, Nixon turned on the left-wing in his party, so-called Rockefeller Republicans. In a few years they were an extinct species.
Today, every Democrat in Congress is to the left of every Republican in Congress. (I can’t find one of those nifty charts displaying the voting records with red and blue across a line, but my failing memory says this is true.)
Centrist politicians are therefore also an endangered species, if not fully extinct. @Larry_Borgia’s politician who “believe[s] in low taxes, limited regulation, capitalism, and a strong national defence" is imaginary as a party position and probably any individual politician’s position. No party can be said to have a true “centrist” wing. Some policies may be centrist but parties aren’t.
These terms are also lost, I believe. Companies are already announcing they are terminating their DEI programs. CRT was twisted to mean “anything on race that wasn’t traditional American white superiority”. Protest all you want, but there is no turning back that clock. The fight to protect the progress made on DEI and racial issues will go on and survive because a huge percentage of Americans want that progress. But the fight will be fought with different terms.
I am often surprised by the use of the No True Scotsman falacy in this board and this is as good a place to state my POV on the matter as any. My argument goes as follows: No True Scotman is a fallacy because it conflates two unrelated categories (being a Scotsman and something else which usually is related to moral judgements or personal choices: say, for the sake of the argument No True scotsman would wear a green coat). But if the categories are related there is no fallacy. For instance, one can perfectly state that “No True Vegan Would Eat Barbecued Spare Ribs”. If you invoque the No True Scotsman fallacy as an argument against that statement you are in error because the statement is evidently true by definition.
Now the question asked by the OP seems to me to be “can a believer in the MAGA ideology claim to be a conservative”, and I believe that if being a conservative is a moral choice, like deciding to be a vegan is, being MAGA is another moral choice, like deciding whether to bite into that spare rib or not. And those choices are not logically independent from each other. In fact, they flatly contradict each other. If A, then not-B, and vice versa.
And no, I don’t believe a MAGA person can call themselves conservative. It is obviously evident that they are not. They are vegans in name only (VINOs?) eating meat.
So the question to ask would be for me: why are the decent conservatives, the ones with a moral and rational base for their judgements, not abandoning the Republican Party in droves.
This is another thing that often leaves puzzled in this board: Many people claim “I am a Republican” or “I am a Democrat” as if it were some immutable part of their personality. It is not. If the Republican or the Democratic Parties change and you don’t, you are not a Republican or a Democrat in the sense defined by the party anymore. Of course you can argue that it is them who have changed, not you, and that you are still a “true” Scotsman Republican or Democrat. But that seems futile to me, and negating reality. Choose a new label if you need one, and turn your back on MAGA.
But the election in november is still a toss up, according to the polls. So where have all the former Democrats gone, the ones replaced by “decent” Republicans and Independents?
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by this. The South was solidly Democratic. When they turned, they turned by the tens of millions. That wave simply outnumbered any other switch.