What "Conservative Values" aren't based on bigotry?

Excellent list- I just want to point out that the third point is that there’s value in doing things the way that they’ve been done, AND/OR there’s no point in changing things just for the sake of changing things. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.

Now any of those could be used as excuses to maintain or advance bigotry, but at their core, they’re not bigoted or even unreasonable. I suspect that if latter-day conservatives adhered more to this list, and less to whack-job Tea Party and alt-right lists, they’d be far more respected by today’s Left.

So I’m responsible whether I voted for him or not , even though my political beliefs predate his entry into politics? This thread is just another SDMB anti-Trump soggy cracker game. Y’all play without me.

I’m sorry your team embraced him, but that’s not my fault. Maybe you should take it up with your team.

[quote=“Airbeck, post:43, topic:837176”]

I’m sorry your team embraced him, but that’s not my fault. Maybe you should take it up with your team.[/ hoyQUOTE]

Team? That is a rather simple-minded view of political philosophies. I do not belong to a team. I vote for candidates who least imperfectly mirror my views.

I’m not without some genuine conservative philosophical underpinnings, mind if I have a go at it?

a) That you don’t destroy / overthrow / abolish the existing social system or its various institutions. Instead you verify that the thing that you wish to replace it will function and has the advantages or lack of disadvanges that makes it superior to the existing ways, and then, having done so, you phase it in with minimum disruption to the dependability and reliability of everyday life.

b) That there really do exist things that are of superior quality to other things – ideas, artistic expressions, moral codes, models of reality, whatever – whether we can firmly say which ones they are or not. And this is important. It is totally NOT true that oh anything is as good as any other thing, there’s no such thing as “quality” there’s just your notion and his notion and her notion, and all such notions are just byproducts of your location in culture and time etc.

c) Human behavior is best organized around a structure of general principles, where the general principles are applied to specific situations. This does not mean there’s no room or purpose for a new gut-level intuitive read on things from within a situation, but it does mean that what you do with the latter is adjust the general principles. Good ethical political and moral arguments begin with approaching a situation as an example of a general phenomenon, stripped of reference for exactly who is doing what, so that everyone is treated as equal and not accorded differential consideration based on identity-context.

d) Whatever the problems of the unalloyed free market of capitalism – and I do consider the observations of Marxist analysis to be a fair indictment of them – they aren’t going to be fixed by a redistributive system, which, far from being a radical new notion is as old as chieftains and tribes and contains its own worrisome problems. As such, the primary political voice of the last two and a half centuries to loudly proclaim itself the antithesis of conservatism – the marxism-inspired left – has no substantial solutions to offer, and a real address to their legitimate charges about the ills of capitalism will have to be found elsewhere.

I’m probably stating things too strongly. I’m just so disgusted by what the conservative movement has done to our country by getting behind Trump and enabling him 100% that when those that continue to identify with that side of the aisle want to side step anything to do with it it’s pretty aggravating. If everyone says its not my fault and its not my responsibility to do anything about it, then we will never be out of this nightmare. I’ll go ahead and drop it though, as I don’t want to prevent the conversation from moving forward in the thread.

AHunter3: Those respectable views you call “genuine conservative” have not defined conservatism for a generation or two, though. Would you agree that the word stands for something different now, even to most who claim the name?

Respectfully, this thread is dumb as all hell. Of all the conservatives on this board (granted, there aren’t many to begin with, but still…) I can think of a grand total of two, maybe three, that voted for Trump. So what’s the point of this thread? If you want answers, OP, go to a pro-Trump message board.

Fact is, the majority of conservatives here don’t equate conservative values with Trump and never will. What Trump does may coincide with conservative values or it may not, depending on what he does, but he doesn’t dictate them. Just because Trump does something doesn’t make it a conservative value.

To see how ridiculous this all is, imagine if Hillary had won. Hillary voted for the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq, even though she knew it was horseshit. If some conservative poster then started a thread asking why pre-emptive wars of aggression based on lies were a “liberal value”, what would you say? I imagine it would be something like “Just because Hillary endorsed something doesn’t make it a ‘liberal value’ by default”. And yeah, you may have opposed the war at the time, but you sure as hell weren’t distancing yourselves from her in 2016. And there were plenty of liberals stumping for her in 2008, too. Wouldn’t matter. You’d still object to that framing.

Same thing here.

Most of these definitions of “conservative” that aren’t based on bigotry would lead one to conclude that the Democrats are the conservative party in America.

He was elected. They can’t get him out of office. They did kick him off all the important committees effectively emasculating him. He is basically persona non grata amongst Repuglicsns and is a dead man walking in terms of party support come re-election time. He was pretty thoroughly and denounced.

Compare this to the consequences heaped upon Ilhan Omar for her anti-Semitic comments. There were none.

Similarly, we could play the game where we hold up a liberal value and somebody points to the time where somebody, somewhere, or in some circumstances associated behaved in a way that we can interpret as bigoted.

Liberals denied there was a crisis on the border and then they held up funding. This underfunded immigration policy exacerbated the humanitarian crises causing immigrants to suffer. Therefore liberals hate brown people and their immigration policy is founded on bigotry.

I think that’s stupid, btw. But that’s the game the OP is playing. It’s just an excuse to shout at the other guy.

Is it based on bigotry when you do it?

No.

No.

Now, is personal responsibility based on bigotry if it’s coming from someone who doesn’t listen to Rush Limbaugh and didn’t vote for Trump, or is it not based on bigotry if it’s coming from someone who doesn’t listen to Rush Limbaugh and didn’t vote for Trump?

Regards,
Shodan

You’re getting confused there - those who claim to believe in personal responsibility, yet do not accept that responsibility when it’s uncomfortable for them, are *not *expressing an actual principle and can be dismissed if they continue to claim it. That’s *especially *true for self-proclaimed conservatives only because we see such evasion from them so much more often. Got it now?

Personal responsibility is about taking responsibility for your own actions. Taking responsibility for the government is about the furthest thing from personal responsibility I can think of besides taking responsibility for the climate.

Tying up your identity with the nation state is decidedly anti-conservative. It can be right wing, but not conservative. Trump is definitely a right winger, but he’s not a conservative. Many of his followers tie up their identity with the state and so felt much relief after he was elected.

‘Conservatism’ is not a monolithic philosophy. There are social conservatives, economic conservatives, Hayekian conservatives, etc. Also, not all Republicans are conservative, and not all conservatives are Republican.

Hayekian conservatives (although Hayek himself was not a conservative) believe primarily that central planning is a bad idea. They believe that local knowledge is important, that emergent, evolved structures are generally better than command structures, that voluntary cooperation is better than mandates, and that central authorities do not have the knowledge required to make good decisions for distant people. Attempts to plan and control a society ultimately fail due to the unintended consequences of trying to control a complex adaptive system.

The conservative impulse is to say, “Don’t mess with what has evolved, as you probably don’t understand why it evolved this way, and your replacement for it is likely to be inferior or have unintended consequences that will bite us in the ass.” Evolutionary biologists are ‘conservative’ that way. They wouldn’t dream of forcing changes to the ecosystem to make it ‘better’. Hayekians extend that to human society as a general principle - with exceptions where absolutely necessary.

There is absolutely nothing bigoted about this. In fact, many conservatives believe that minorities have been greatly harmed by left-wing policies that had good intentions but terrible results in practice.

Another conservative principle is that power should be held closest to those affected by it. That means first the individual should have freedom and agency to act. If that’s not sufficient, local community is better than regional government, and regional government is better than federal government, which is better than world government.

Then there is the fundamental break between Locke and Rousseau, with Locke basically stating that people are born free, and have a right to live for themselves so long as they don’t hurt others. Rousseau, on the other hand, was a communitarian who believed that people are born into communities with responsibilities to the community, and the community has responsibilities to them. Think of it as, “Rugged Individualism” vs “It Takes a Village”.

Neither of those are at all bigoted positions, but I’d argue that individual rights are the best way to protect minorities, and the leftist project of gathering people into identity groups and treating people as group members rather than individuals is far more dangerous to minorities in the long run, as the people in the minority groups are only safe at the whim of the majority when individual rights, freedom of speech and association and other classically liberal values are shunted aside in favor of identity politics.

Nah, that’s just a straight con/pissing in your mouth and calling it whiskey. Then again I wouldn’t really call it a “conservative value”.

Probably not. When the word “bigotry” has come to mean “any political position I don’t like,” the OP is a tautology.

Anyone could play this ridiculous game. I could say that liberals are bigoted for proposing increased social spending because they have an underlying belief that inner city blacks are incapable of caring for themselves.

Seriously? Never heard of “Reaganomics”, have you? :wink:

I have, but again, I wouldn’t call it a “value” or principle. It’s a theory they espouse (or pretend to believe is totally factual, for real, you’ll see it really works any day now as long as you pay your taxes and they don’t) but it isn’t a moral item or axiom like, say, “free speech” or “sanctity of marriage” can be.

And even if it was a value, it isn’t a conservative value - my cite being the self-described non-partisan progressives who hold power in my country and trotted out supply-side bullshit in earnest and without a hint of shame. Like, straight up parroted Reagan speeches. Not as a joke. And expected us to lap it up. And they’re really not conservatives, they’re more like ultracorrupt libertarian plutocrats. Which, granted, does seem like they’re identical from a distance, seeing as they deliberately break public services to prove public services don’t work, want to shred any semblance of a safety net and keep introducing taxes on the poor while cutting taxes on the rich (and privatizing every actually money-making public scheme ; at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if they re-introduced tax farming). But, but, but they’re not conservatives or right wing. They’re progressives ! And they oppose fascists, so they can’t be right wing assholes !

We could easily flip this around - which modern Democratic principles aren’t based on racism or bigotry?

To me, it’s always been strange to hear people who claim to be opposed to racism spend enormous effort parsing out which races people belong to, then organizing them by those races. Then there’s the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’, where persons of color are given breaks that other people don’t get, ostensibly to allow them to compete.

Liberal fads like calling ‘ebonics’ a reasonable language that should not be graded against in school had the effect of making young black people less employable, as does the crazy idea that ‘reason’ and ‘excellence’ are tools of white oppression.

To me, racism is treating people differently based on superficial characteristics like skin color, and bigotry is the assumption that some people are better or more valid than others because of their sexuality, race, gender or their culture. I totally believe in Martin Luther King’s desire to live in a world where people are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin or other superficial characteristics.

But the people most focused on skin color and other such differences seem to be on the left these days. Elite universities are segregating their dorms not because of racist Republicans, but because left-wing students are demanding separation from other races. Harvard and other very liberal schools heavily discriminate against Asians. And anti-semitism seems to be the province of two political factions: the alt-right and the radical left.

Try individualism. The rights of individuals should be what matters. That’s the best defense against racism and bigotry. The best defense against ‘hate speech’ is not censorship, but more speech. Capitalism and markets are also anti-bigotry, because money abstracts away things like the nationality or race of the people making goods and services, allowing people to trade with each other in spite of racist tendencies. Politically, Israelis and Arabs are foes. Economically, they work with each other all the time.

Treat everyone equally, ensure all people have the same rights, help the less fortunate.

These are based on racism or bigotry? Really?