Didn’t this get moved to GD?
As I get older my opinions get more conservative in nature. But I am still a pinko commie. I hope that for the rest of my life I continue to believe that the good of the many outweighs the good of the few.
Age has taught me that a worryingly large proportion of the ‘masses’ are ‘leechers’. In other words they are people who gladly take advantage of liberal policies and in turn contribute nothing positive and plenty of things negative to society.
Age has also taught me that certain liberal/communist ideas are naive and probably never workable.
So right now I exist in the mindset that if society is going to survive it is going to have to keep chipping away at the understanding of human nature and how it influences things as a whole. Or… It should wait it out. It should wait until social evolution [which is happening much much much quicker than biological evolution] provides the answer.
My father came from a very conservative Republican family, and they were all nice, upstanding people who readily tolerated different points of view. That’s not very newsworthy, though, so the cameras tend to focus on the nut jobs. I consider people like my father’s family the true face of conservatism/Republicans.
But they simply aren’t; conservative movements are not and never has been dominated by people who qualify as nice, upstanding or tolerant. Not now, not a hundred years ago, not a thousand years ago, not ever.
The problem is that’s not true. People like his family are not in control of the party of today and in fact are actively pushed out. So they might be the true face of conservatism, they are not the true face of the Republican party any longer.
I’m so glad we are in the Pit, you are a fucking idiot.
First off ‘conservative movements’ are basically a new thing.
For most of history conservatism was just people who wanted to maintain the status quo. The reason you have a conservative ‘movement’ today is because they lost the thread of the status quo between the 30s and the 60s.
Otherwise you’re making some broad generalization about every person who was happy with the way things were and were unhappy with the way things were changing.
I can’t deny that age and conservatism have a very definite corrolation.
This fact makes me realize the sad fact that if I ever have kids, I may be considered a moderately conservative person by them. And that will make them respect me a little less.
my own parents show signs of being more conservative than I. My maternal grandparents are middle class company-boss/owner types who like to think they’re upper class. My paternal grandparents are/were about as working class as you can get. My step-paternal grandparents are working-class but also quite racist. My step-maternal grandparents are also racist (the female more so in my experience than the male)
I guess my point is that as time happens people get more enlightened.
No, they aren’t. They’ve existed ever since a bunch of tribespeople wanted to do something and the shaman and older elite said “no”, and the people did it anyway. Society didn’t just start changing in the 1960s like many people seem to want to believe.
Umm no, that’s Progressive movements. Your doublespeak is doubleplusungood. In your scenario the Shaman or older elite would be the conservative element.
Conservative movements are about preserving the status quo. What you describe is the opposite of the status quo.
I said 30s-60s. I was referring to Roosevelt and hte New Deal and all that.
If having a better, and cheaper healthcare system that covers everyone is socialism then bring on the socialism. If it’s “evil” to you then you have strange ideas about evil.
That reminds me of one of the “Lighter Side of…” series in Mad magazine back in the late 1960s. In one, a group of teenagers are shocked to read recent research showing their own children will probably consider them to be just as “square” as they consider their own parents. They can’t believe it! How could that even be possible? Of course, we know it came true.
I once started a thread asking if people grew more or less conservative as they grew older. My experience has been they grow more conservative, as I have, but I think the consensus was the opposite.
The worst people I know have no political beliefs at all.
I think nearly any set of beliefs can be coherent and lead to good people.
My mother is extremely conservative and, honestly, she swallows most of the really silly stuff. But she’s also very smart and kind and generous. She was horrified by how high my husband’s medical bills were and she was a big supporter of us getting him on disability and Medicare, etc. At the same time, if you ask her if there’s anything wrong with health care, she’ll say no, and she’ll say that people on disability are layabouts. Same thing with gays. She knows and is friends with gay people, but she votes against them. She makes exceptions for people she knows without changing her attitude in general. It’s weird to me.
I don’t think anyone grows more conservative really. We get older and less adventurous sure, but our ideas cement into the status quo as a generation, and that is considered ‘conservative’.
Most of you will still be fighting for gay rights in your 80s not realizing the struggle is long over to your children.
In the American revolution they were the Loyalists and Torys, then they were the slavery apologists, then the Jim Crow apologists, then the folks who didn’t want to get into WWII, then the people opposing Civil Rights reform, then the folks who watched 50,000 American’s die in a stupid war, then they were apologists for Nixon, then they got us into another stupid war, and now they want to block healthcare reform. Nice bunch there.
Here’s some current support for the idea that the Republicans are reaping what they’ve sown. This video is a town hall meeting being led by Bob Inglis, a conservative Republican from South Carolina.
He tries to make the point, gently, that people like Glenn Beck trade in fear, and that they would benefit from turning the t.v. off, and the crowd goes apeshit.