What's the worst thing conservatives have to fear?

Politics & Elections
#1

Generally, you don’t see conservatives arguing that conservative dominance of the political system would be good for liberals. But I’ve seen some - not many, but some - liberals argue that total liberal dominance would be good, not only for liberals, but also for conservatives. They argue that conservatives would get universal healthcare, a stronger social net, etc.

So - suppose for a moment that the number of conservatives in America remained the same, but liberals somehow owned all 100 Senate seats, all 435 House seats, the presidency, got all 9 justices on the Supreme Court, every federal judge was liberal, every state legislature and governorship was liberal, etc. (to avoid fighting the hypothetical, we won’t dissect how such an impossible situation could arise, let’s just assume it was that way.)

What’s the worst thing conservatives would face under such a scenario?

Abortion doesn’t affect pro-lifers, in the sense that it’s unlikely a pro-lifer would ever be forced to abort against their will, but it is perfectly possible that a pro-choicer could be denied an abortion if pro-life legislation passed.

Same-sex marriage doesn’t affect traditional-marriage supporters - nobody will ban heterosexual marriages, but gays may very well see gay marriage banned if it were the other way around.

Income taxes and many other taxes might increase steeply, but it’s not like conservatives are rich and liberals are poor. Plenty of conservatives are poor and plenty of liberals are rich. So such tax hikes would hardly affect one side more than the other.

Guns may be taken away, but there are Westernized democracies that fare pretty well with little to no gun ownership allowed (i.e., Japan and South Korea.)

#2

Conservatism has a long and sometimes proud history of being a coherent and principled political philosophy. It has lost a great deal of its focus. A lot of the actions defended under and after Trump pretty much go against what conservatives have long espoused. So what it would mean depends on what it means now. Are Conservatives now for or against free trade or the freedom of a property owner to make personal decisions (about concealed guns on their property)?

That said, the idea of one side or the other gaining such long lasting dominance is pretty hard to believe, and not just a little arrogant. The loss of influence would be the worst thing, not the change in health care or taxes or social institutions.

#3

Yeah, rather than try to pinpoint any specific concrete political accomplishment that conservatives fear (because their take on individual issues changes over time), one of the mose enduring fears of conservatives seems to be kind of like this:

The orderly world where things make sense is fragile. Like God made it for us that way and then left it in wise leaders’ hands to babysit and take care of, but bad people who don’t understand the need to keep everything proper and preserve order keep on making things dissolve. They make it okay to do things that aren’t supposed to be okay. They diverge from the way things should be. And that means very soon there is no consensus about what’s good and what’s evil. Because yeesh it’s not like we’re equipped to be able to assess that for ourselves! It’s like if you stopped keeping the cereal in the cereal aisle and the vegetables in the produce aisle and started stocking things any old place, well what would happen is that there would no longer be a produce aisle, all the order would go to pieces and we’d never get it back!

I’m mocking the attitude, of course, but if you scrape at the surface of the world-view of a lot of conservatives, you find something very much akin to this. Orthodoxy for the sake of orthodoxy, the fear that righteous order needs to be preserved or we’ll lose it forever and have chaos.

#4

There are quite a few examples of pretty disastrous left-wing economic agendas that conservatives fear.

#5

A person who is of the “undeserving” class might get something they don’t deserve.

#6

Are you asking what’s the worst they would probably face, what’s the worst they could conceivably face under an incompetent Democratic implementation, or what’s the worst they’ve convinced themselves they’ll face.

I think the worst they actually face is pretty much nothing. I don’t see the US doing anything that all of western Europe isn’t already doing, and those countries are generally doing fine. Theoretically those same policies could also result in a Greece or something if poorly implemented. But conservatives think Democrats in power would ultimately lead to Venezuela. Take your pick.

#7

I agree with AHunter3. The underlying fear of conservatives is the loss of order. There’s a well-known correlation between conservatism and authoritarianism, and between conservatism and fear of “defilement” or loss of purity, shamefulness. Another correlation is extreme discomfort with ambiguity (ties into authoritarianism there). Things SHOULD be black and white, either right or wrong. And every right-minded person knows which is which.

This transcends any political waves of the moment.

I think this is one reason why it is so hard to understand conservative feelings, if you don’t share them. Another is the odd bedfellows they have. Libertarians are not conservatives; they don’t want anyone to be the boss of them and they don’t give a crap about purity. They are purely motivated by short-sighted selfishness, as far as I can tell.

True conservatives are not. They want the world to make sense, and loss of order, chaos, ambiguity, are deep fears. Unfortunate, because the world becomes more chaotic every day.

#8

The incompetence of an overly-left government.

To be clear, I’m generally pretty liberal, but even I wouldn’t want liberals to be so dominant that they effectively have a total lock on politics. I would at least want enough conservatives to form a coalition with moderates such that they could prevent excess.

#9

These two, mainly. The latter is, as you said, Venezuela fear. The former might be churches getting taxed, guns taken away, but not at all like Venezuela.

#10

The evangelical and fundamentalist Christians within the conservative movement seem to often mention that they believe that the United States holds a particular status as God’s chosen nation, and that they believe that it holds this status because it was founded on, and has adhered to, Christian principles.

Based on many comments I’ve read from these types of conservatives, who have fought against much of what the OP describes because they feel it represents a turning away from God and Christian morals, I would suspect that they would feel that the OP’s scenario would represent the nation rejecting God, which would undoubtedly doom the nation as it becomes a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.

#11

Never mind.

#12

It’s ironic, but I consider myself a liberal and have a somewhat similar world view. At least I have had this world view since the 1/6/21 rebellion. Here’s the changes I would make.

The orderly world where things make sense is fragile. Like liberal activists, ordinary Democratic voters, and Democratic politicians made it for us that way and kept it in wise leaders’ hands (when they were the leaders) to babysit and take care of, but bad people AKA Republicans who don’t understand the need to keep everything proper and preserve order keep on making things dissolve. They make it okay to do things that aren’t supposed to be okay. They diverge from the way things should be. And that means very soon there is no consensus about what’s good and what’s evil. Because yeesh it’s not like we’re equipped to be able to assess that for ourselves! It’s like if you stopped keeping the cereal in the cereal aisle and the vegetables in the produce aisle and started stocking things any old place, well what would happen is that there would no longer be a produce aisle, all the order would go to pieces and we’d never get it back!

We came very close to that actually happening. If the insurrectionists had been a little luckier (from their point of view) we could easily already be living in a dictatorship under Trump. ETA: To use the analogy of AD&D alignments, I used to think of Republicans as lawful evil. Now I think of them as chaotic evil.

ETA: To make a long story short, what they fear is an outside force imposing order on the chaos they want to create.

#13

One thing that I don’t think has been mentioned, at least not with enough emphasis, is the possibility that the entire system collapses because this new thing we’re trying actually fails to work at all, and society will crumble. The modern world is a very fragile beast, and if we try to tinker with it too much, we risk upsetting an important balance that we’re unaware of. Even if liberal economic thinking is well-founded and takes into account everything that’s necessary to understand about the economy, if it differs from what’s worked in the past, it’s possible that it will be a catastrophic failure like those that have been seen many times in command economies. It’s not just modern-day Venezuela or Russia and China in the 20th Century, but if you look back all the way to the Near East Bronze Age collapse, the main problem there was that the economies had become centrally-controlled, and it was difficult for people to survive when there were shocks in the supply chain and governing chain of command.

Not only might changing the structure of the economy cause a problem with being able to maintain the right balance, if we give things to people who don’t deserve them, people will just generally not want to work as much, and society will be less productive, and thus everyone will be worse off. It’s one thing to claim that people will be all better off, but that assumes people will be just as productive as they would be without the changes liberals propose that would redistribute wealth.

Lastly, when the government takes a larger portion of the amount employers set aside for their workers, the employer can’t employ as many people without draining more of their resources, which stifles the growth of their business and thus the growth of the economy. If people were allowed to keep more of their wages, wages wouldn’t need to be as high, and more people could be employed at the wage levels that result in the same take-home pay.

That’s not to say that I necessarily agree with any of these points of view at any particular time, but I grant that they are perfectly acceptable points of view and are reasonable fears to have when it comes to tinkering with the economy. When it comes to tinkering with non-economic aspects of society, well, there’s a reason I’m a left-learning libertarian and not a straight-up moderate; I can’t provide any justifications for things that don’t affect economic output. I believe that any such prohibitions were initially enacted as economic benefits for the society, but they became ingrained as religious principles and people forgot the real reason behind their existence.

#14

The present version of the Republican/conservative “team” seems to be most strongly motivated by liberal tears, so the lack of liberal tears would probably be very distressing to them.

#15

that’s like if ISIL or AL qaeda had to live under a government controlled by Shia Muslims and jews, or if members of the KKK had to live in a society run by black people.

even if their lives got materially better, it would be bad eventually. they’d resort to terrorism to reclaim ‘their’ society.

#16

I don’t think it’s Venezuela they fear – it’s Zimbabwe. In their heart of hearts, they assume that if marginalized peoples are ever able to truly take the reigns of power, they will come after their oppressors. That they will be, at a minimum, dispossessed, driven from their homes and forced into subservience. At worst, they’ll be subject to pogroms and concentration camps.

It may sound ridiculous, but a sizable segment of the right thinks this way. And they are so convinced this will happen because it’s exactly what they would do if they were in their place.

#17

DeBlasio is a pretty crappy, very liberal mayor. If all positions of power were taken over by people like him, he would manage the country right into the ground.

If you really mean, what happens if Democrats hold all the levers of power, well, one party rule inevitably leads to massive corruption, so that would be a problem.

If you really, really mean what happens if people who are as liberal as the Democrats hold all the levers of power, then you probably have Canada or the UK, maybe Germany? Not too bad, although maybe Nazi-style hate speech would be “canceled”, which seems to be the biggest conservative fear these days.

#18

That was pretty much illustrated in the pandemic. The liberals were, by and large, the ones trying to create and maintain a system of order and protocol for people to follow. The conservatives were by and large the ones trying to disrupt it and make things more chaotic.

#19

Digging deeper into the OP scenario, underneath all of the specifics about ideologies and policies, I think the thread title contains the answer.

Many conservatives are deeply driven by fear. Fear of the other, the unknown, change, and ironically both chaos and conversely too much order (imposed by “the government”). It really doesn’t matter what the specific topic is, if it elicits a fear response (which are frankly a knee-jerk baseline), then it must be opposed.

Generally, people who do not identify as conservative actually do not go through life so afraid.

So, maybe FDR was right? We have nothing to fear but fear itself.

#20

President Omar. (even though it’ll never happen)
Worse than a President Harris because of the terrifying hijab.