Conservatives believe that society has made massive leaps forward in the past 120 years and want to preserve both the improvements and the structures that enabled those improvements. Technological innovation, investment, globalisation, and corporate capitalism have improved the lives of billions of people, and offer the best prospects for the future, but are routinely described by the left as the rich taking advantage of the poor. For example:
Snipped quote from Elections thread: “most [of] us don’t wake up in the AM wanting to smack Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg in the face.”
Two people who more or less created new modern industries deserve violence and property seizure because they were successful. If you’re going to caricaturise the right, I’m going to caricaturise the left. Believe me, right now in Britain there’s more than enough left-wing idiocy to ridicule.
To address the OP, what conservatives fear are misguided emotional campaigns that won’t achieve anything other than a lot of needless spending and may actually be counterproductive. Quick example: California High Speed Railway.
When it comes to the elite schools, I want the elite students in the elite schools. I don’t care what race, gender or religion they are. If that means MIT is 40% Asian and 40% Jewish, I’m fine with that. Same if it’s 40% Black and 40% Hispanic, or 60% female. If there are biases in the system that are excluding talented students, then by all means eliminate those. If there needs to be additional educational resources at an earlier age to provide more opportunities, then I’m also fine with that. But any changes should be about boosting people up, not trying to make the demographics of elite universities match the demographics of society.
This worries me a lot. It’s like a television show that disdains quality discussion because yelling gets better ratings. My specific issue is election reform and I very much suspect the Dems of being almost as ambivalent about it as Repubs because making elections better may lessen the levels of interest in them even while they’re better for the nation in general.
Progress actually derives from radical actions in the face of entrenched conservative resistance to change. “Conserving what progress has been made” is a lame excuse not to try anything new again.
An embryo is not a person. Until birth, a fetus is part of the woman’s body. And forcing a woman to be an incubator is enslavement.
But I’m not here to argue abortion. As a perceptive reader noted, I made “a rhetorical point of asking how you can justify not trusting a woman to make choices for her own body but you can trust her to help make choices for society.” It’s a logic problem.
Of course the nasty answer is that women don’t REALLY exercise control over our patriarchal society, any more than over their bodies. The illusion of control is a pacifier. Women are still property.
Progress generally derives from incremental changes, analysing the positives and negatives or a current situation or product, and endeavouring to retain the positives while surpassing the negatives. Sure breakthroughs occur, but they’re exceptional because they’re exceptional. And even then, breakthroughs usually take place as a result of an existing structure. I’ll hypothesise that political breakthroughs that happen through radicalism are more likely to fail than organised efforts, mainly because they lack momentum. The Arab Spring was a radical movement that started organically and experienced a huge surge. However, without any infrastructure to maintain the initial gains, the movement mostly petered out. Or if you’d like a US example, Occupy Wall Street was a radical, bang and it’s gone, firecracker event that made no progress.
Can you give examples of the radical actions behind some of the social progress of the past, say, 20 years? I’m not challenging you, I’d just like to get a clearer picture.
When a Party uses cynical means to attract voters, the party’s leaders and its constituents may, in reality, want opposite outcomes!
Thus many big donors rooting for the GOP are delighted with the right to gay marriage and the right to abortion. These rights attract droves of voters to the GOP.
Correct, though I think attracting voters is the main reason for “keeping the debate going.” The Republican Party does NOT want a resolution to the gun debate, or to issues like women’s rights or gay rights. Are there comparable issues where the Democratic Party acts cynically? I think (hope!) that, e.g. pushing for a wealth tax, is insincere rhetoric, though the motives are different.
This sounds like a political version of the Broken Window Fallacy. It would be akin to saying that Democrats want gun crime, climate change, poverty, sky-high medical bills to continue because such things draw people to the Democratic Party.
I don’t think modern conservatives in the US are the party of economic growth or infrastructure. They may give lip service to these ideas now and again, but its becoming blindingly obvious that the modern conservative movement is motivated by trying to maintain America as a white, christian patriarchy in the face of constant social change. Donald Trump ran on promoting a trade war to protect the jobs of rural white men for example.
I don’t think promoting economic growth is something either side has a monopoly on. They just have different attitudes on how to do it. From what I’ve seen, the right seems to feel that making life easier for the investor class (with supply side tax cuts, deregulation, cutting unions, etc) will lead to growth while the left tends to prefer public investments to increase human capital (public education, public health care, infrastructure) as well as demand based economics (increasing incomes for the working class so they can purchase items).
The modern left is becoming hostile to capitalism, but I think its more hostility to oligarchy or plutocracy. Even on the left like Bernie Sanders, most people are social democrats. Social democrats believe in capitalism, they just want regulation and redistribution to make capitalism less harsh and more equally beneficial.
What the real fight in DC is about is control over several trillion dollars per year. That’s what the donors are concerned with and therefore that’s what the discussion is about. But control of those dollars comes through luring voters - sincerely or insincerely - into supporting one candidate or another so that who gets those dollars is decided. You tell me which comes first, the dollars or the voters. Damn if I know.
I feel the modern conservative movement is an unofficial alliance between two separate interest groups.
The people running the modern conservative movement are big businessmen. They want things like tax cuts, deregulation, government contracts and subsidies, no unions, and no competition. Essentially, they want profits.
These people expect results. When they donate to politicians they want laws enacted not just empty promises. Politicians know they have to deliver to these guys if they want to stay in office.
The problem these guys face is that they’re few in number (aka the One Percent). The United States is still a democracy (although they’re working on that) so they need votes.
So they turned to the social value people. These are the people who want to turn the clock back to the fifties. Not the real fifties. The fifties they imagine existed based on childhood memories and television reruns. A time when white men ran things and everyone else appreciated them for doing so. Women and young people are supposed to know their place. Black people, Jews, and foreigners are supposed to be somewhere else. Gay people don’t exist.
The big business people turned to the social values people for the votes they needed. They feed their fears and promise to protect them from the imaginary threats they created. But unlike the big business people, politicians never actually do what they promise the social values people, except maybe throw them an occasional symbolic bone. But these people are supposed to stay scared and worried so they’ll keep voting as they’re told.
This is why you will see things like tax cuts and deregulation and corporate bailouts happen. But things like banning abortions or gay marriages or affirmative action somehow never actually happen even though successive waves of conservative politicians promise that they care deeply about these issues and will make them a top priority.
Well, most social issues (as well as all of these examples that you list - SSM, abortion, affirmative action - aren’t in the hands of conservative politicians, no matter how sincere or insincere they may be. They are in the hands of the courts. All these conservative politicians can promise is to appoint conservative judges. Which is why Trump’s promise of conservative Supreme Court judges was so overwhelmingly vital and energizing to his voters in 2016. Without that promise, he likely doesn’t win the presidency.
Ronald Reagan promised back in 1979 to appoint conservative judges who would overturn Roe. It’s forty years later and Republican Presidents have appointed nine Supreme Court justices since then yet Roe still stands. How does this not count as a broken promise?
Conservatives know that as long as they promise to keep fighting abortion, they have a secure block of pro-life voters. But in order to be able to promise to keep fighting, they can’t actually win the fight.
Republican presidents can’t control the brains of SCOTUS justices that they appoint. You can only pick a justice who might overturn Roe, but once they’re on the bench, they’re their own person.
I don’t think that’s true as long as the pro-choice side doesn’t pack up and go home. Abortions drives the pro-choice single issue voters continue to vote for pro-choice candidates.
Gun rights are at a historical high but pro gun folks continue to vote for pro-gun candidates as long as the gun control lobby continues to exist.
Abortion is not a position that most conservative politicians are supporting cynically in order to gin up votes. They are either doing it because they genuinely feel that abortion is a close cousin to murder or their political reality forces them to support pro-life positions.
I would say any social progress occurs in the face of entrenched resistance from conservatism. Same sex marriage took people loudly claiming their rights to wake conservatives up to its inherent fairness. Going back further than your 20 year period, the civil rights era took place when people stood up for their rights while dogs and hoses were turned loose on them.
Wrenching Spammers and I are probably just disagreeing about the *speed *of change which occurs. Conservatives appear to believe in slow, incremental change, which is always easy for the side not suffering from the effects of social injustice. I personally think that conservatives often have to be smacked upside the head to get off their collective asses and stop persecuting minorities. Inertia rules the right.
Just regarding this, I’d say that we’re heading for a divergence on gun rights. In some states, they’re as good as they’ve ever been. In other states (California comes prominently to mind) they’re about as bad as they’ve ever been.
Well, that’s not true at all. At times and places in the history of the USA private ownership and display of guns was severely restricted to outright banned. To say what Cali is doing is the worst ever simply ignores history.