Okay.
Find 'em.
Where are they, this mythical “intelligent conservative contingent”?
Are they hanging out with the Heartland Institute, a group that denies climate change and was previously pushing to turn back the clock on tobacco?
Maybe they’re out with Ben Shapiro, who can’t remember a single “significant” republican in the last decade who was a birther, apparently missing the current president.
Ooh, have you checked the folks in the streets of Portland, wearing neo-nazi LARP gear and trying to start riots?
How about those lovely folks who chanted “send her back” at a Trump rally?
The high water mark to date is Bricker, who was smart but also a dishonest shitbag whose reaction to widespread voter suppression boiled down to “Yeah, well, you can’t stop us, so neener neener”. Smart, maybe, but a gigantic fucking asshole who very often argued entirely on self-interest.
The “smart” conservatives are the ones who know that what they’re doing is wrong and do it anyways because they really love their tax cuts and think they’re going to be able to ride out the rest of their lives without climate change biting them in the ass. Everyone else is, in one way or another, deeply fucking deluded.
I dunno, we were having a pretty reasonable discussion about minimum wage and the effects of its increase, albeit one fairly short in the tooth on solid evidence for many of the claims made. It isn’t exactly a liberal scoldfest in there, it’s mostly talking about what effect the minimum wage has. Yeah, I get pretty pissy about low-quality arguments and evidence, but in that case it is actually an issue of fighting ignorance, not some moral badgering.
Basically, do you have some examples of what you’re talking about? Because most of what I’ve seen is that on subjects where there is reasonable disagreement, reasonable disagreement is generally had.
The problem is that there is a (disturbingly growing) field of the overton window where there simply is no reasonable disagreement, and the right is on the wrong side of almost every one of those issues.
Nazis are bad.
Climate change is real and a serious problem.
Trade wars are not “easy to win”.
Concentration camps are bad.
Trump is an embarrassment on the world stage that it will take the USA decades to recover from.
Antifa is not a domestic terrorist group.
Tax cuts for the rich during an economic boom time are not sound economic policy.
Major tech industry players are not “in the tank” for the democrats.
A 10-year-old Somalian refugee growing up to become a congresswoman is an example of an immigration success story, not of failure.
<Insert whatever lunacy Alex Jones is screeching about today here.>
And yeah, if you wanna bring up that shit, you’re going to get your ignorance fought. And it’s going to sound partisan and shrill, because intentional ignorance and insane conspiracy-mongering are largely a partisan phenomenon at this point. Democrats are not going to look at major news reports that look bad for them and instinctively scream “FAKE NEWS”, while here on the board, we literally have people saying that the concentration camps at the border are just that.
What do you expect? I mean, honestly?