I get the impression a good number of conservatives hate one another as well.
Hate or disdain or both.
The wealthy connected Rs are happy to have the rural rubes and working class whites voting R. But they sure won’t invite them to the country club. Except to mow the lawns.
Some of it is immersion in the right-wing information bubble, but I think most of it is personality. Conservatism doesn’t make people hateful, being hateful makes people conservative. Being MAGA doesn’t make a person terrible, being a terrible person makes a person MAGA.
Conservatives are the kids who throw a fit when it’s someone else’s birthday and the birthday kid gets all the presents. They think of life as a zero-sum game and if someone gets a nickel off the social safety net, that’s one nickel of “his tax money” that is being stolen from him. The existence of people who are not like him feel like a direct threat to the white protestant heterosexual males that have a God-given right to the US. Every promotion that a black person gets is really one stolen from a white. Every homosexual marriage makes his heterosexual marriage less exclusive. They’re also the kids who never cracked a book in school and think that googling to find crackpots that dispute global warming or covid make them know more than the experts in those fields. They’re the corporate execs that push climate denialism because their next quarterly profits are more important than the long term survival of the planet. They hate liberals because liberals challenge them to be better people, to treat others with respect, and to be good stewards of the planet. Since this is in conflict with their “me me me” mentality, they hate liberals for it.
I really don’t think all of this is true.
There are conservatives who just… don’t like change. They think everything works fine as it is, and if we kept things the same or regressed a little bit, they would improve. Some of this is due to memories of life being easier as children (when they didn’t have to adult themselves), some is due to the difficulty of keeping up with cultural and technological changes, and some to the need for a simplistic world view as described above. But there’s kind of an anti-progressive strain that isn’t necessarily hateful, though it correlates, because their past was more openly racist / sexist / homophobic.
There are also the conservatives who fall prey to the just world fallacy. They dislike the poor etc. because they feel somehow that the poor have earned their lot, as have the middle classes. They believe that hard work and good character are all you need for success. Again, a bit simplistic, but this combined with a culture that reviles Socialism and Communism, and you have people primed to vote conservative lest the left’s social programs come into force and make us… whatever they think will happen.
You have religious people, who align with the right more than the left both because the mainstream religions in America tend to be more authoritarian and hierarchical because of their historical roots.
Then you have the truly hateful people, who do find more of a home on the right than the left, and who are increasingly loud on the right at the moment. A lot of the other categories have fallen in line with them, and are being drawn to them, but I think it’s kind of ignorant to say that conservativism is nothing but hatred. It’s as two-dimensional as anything we’re accusing them of. Hatred is a tool of the right, and there are certainly people who are only in it for the emotions that come with a group that comes together to hate others, plus those who hate out of fear (of the other, of change, of whatever). But it’s not all there is on the right, at least historically, and there have been times and places when the right made useful contributions to the national discourse, and may again one day (though I hope the Republicans fragment, as for me that brand is tarnished forever).
Without calling out any particular Doper by name, I do want to point out that asking a group of liberals why conservatives hate liberals is of course going to get a different - and probably inaccurate - answer than what the conservatives themselves think or would say. Just like how asking a bunch of MAGA folks “why do liberals support ______?” will inevitably lead to answers like “They hate America,” “they support perversion,” “they are part of the globalist conspiracy,” “they want to dodge accountability,” etc.
I think they have hated the left for longer than we thought, but the veneer has been ripped away by recent administrations, and they are no longer pretending to be cooperative.
And the really vexing thing is, when he started he was worth in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars. He ran on the “drain the swamp” meme and instead has funneled a good bit of the public coffers into his own pockets and let his rich buddy destroy the rest.
But the fools would vote for him a fourth time if they were allowed to. That’s some mighty deep hate.
He was a white person apologizing for misdeeds against an group of black people. So this is exactly the sort of thing Velocity was talking about.
This is really the big one. On a gut level everyone understands that society follows certain status hierarchies. Whatever happens, you really don’t want to end up on the bottom. If you understand that there’s a comfortable margin between yourself and the lower rungs, then you’re fine with your place. If the lower rungs start moving up, you have 3 choices:
- Invest more effort to put yourself on a higher rung (unappealing, sounds too much like work)
- Get comfortable with being equal to people you looked down on (womanish liberal BS)
- Start kicking down as hard as you can (entertaining community activity)
Whether people admit to having or understanding social privilege, they feel it viscerally when they lose it. At that point it’s just a character test, either you can look in the mirror and respect who you are without the privilege, or you can’t. A lot of people can’t pass that test, not because they’re fundamentally defective people, but because reflecting candidly on your own independent self-worth is hard, and it’s even harder if you have any privilege that insulates you from the need to do so.
If you’re not sure that your bank of talents contains more than one coin, then you’ll fight to save that coin before scrounging in the sofa cushions for anything else.
all the other stuff about tradition and caution and vigilance is really different forms of privilege-guarding, which is most fundamentally an effort to avoid looking very hard at one’s own character. Which admittedly can be an extremely unpleasant chore.
Or, succinctly,
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
~ Lyndon Johnson
Replace race with ideology as needed.
That’s definitely a way of putting it, but my thesis is that it’s a little deeper than a simple sense of superiority, and more about the sense of security that they get from that superiority.
If it didn’t suck so bad to be in the lowest class, people wouldn’t fight so viciously to stay above it. And the suggestion that the lowest class doesn’t need to be that bad, or maybe there shouldn’t even be a lower class, really doesn’t land with someone who’s spent their life protecting the class that they do have.
That’s what “economic anxiety” is. It’s real anxiety and there’s a big economic component to it. But it’s not about having enough financial wealth, it’s about the social wealth of knowing that no matter how far you fall, you can’t really fall through to the bottom. DuBois called this the “psychological wage of whiteness” and I think it’s right on the nose.
Jesus taught that the poor and hungry hold a special place in God’s kingdom and mandated that his followers actively provide for them. He famously declared, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God”
And liberalism is against that?
That’s not the MAGA version of Christianity.
Catholics don’t recognize the validity of ordinations performed outside the Catholic Apostolic succession.
Protestants don’t recognize Papal authority
Baptists don’t recognize each other while standing in line at the liquor store on Saturday nights.
53 replies and only one of them is from someone who claims to be conservative, and that one disagrees with your premise that he as a conservative hates the left.
So you are left with speculation from non-conservatives who try to represent their colored view of conservatives as accurate, and will disregard any evidence or true feelings of conservatives as legitimate if it doesn’t match their liberal world view.
I respectfully submit that this is nothing more then mental maturation to reinforce an idea that conservatives are inherently evil without actually getting data from a wide range of conservatives to provide evidence that they as a whole or widely ‘hate’ the left so much.
I’m pretty middle of the road, but I know several conservatives. They don’t hate the left. What bothers them…and bothers me, is that I’m not allowed the benefit of having my concerns legitimized. As a white male, if I complain about anything about my place in society the response is either:
- ridiculed ('oh poor baby, your life is so hard)
- minimized (you think you have it bad, you should try…')
- denied (I don’t believe that your concerns are legitmate)
- vilified (you are an asshole for thinking this)
So if you actually do get someone who is conservative and answers your questions…what are you going to do? Are you going to jump on them and tell them they are wrong, and that their feelings are evil, incorrect, not worthy? Or are you going to validate that their feelings are true to them so you can understand the problem better?
Conservatives don’t answer here because they are tired of their true feelings being denied as legitimate concerns
I think they are legitimate, the problem is that many who should know better just willfully ignore that their concerns are used by the powerful in the US to justify very bad things.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia barely had a weekend of freedom with his family before ICE agents seized him again—this time threatening deportation to Uganda, a country he’s never even seen.
At a rally, Kilmar’s words cut through the fear: “God is with us, and God will never leave us. God will bring justice to all the injustice we are suffering.”
His ordeal is a window into the deeper moral crisis of our time.
How can a government inflict such cruelty, and how can so many cheer it on?
The researchers point out that malevolence and its opposite, benevolence, exist on a continuum—all of us have a bit of both.
But Trump supporters consistently lean hard toward the malevolent side.
No Wonder They Think Empathy Is Toxic
Empathy has become a byword among some on the Right.
Of course, that is mostly among the Right wing MAGA conservatives, but the big problem right now is that many on the right, that do know the dastardly things the ones in power are doing, look the other way because they just hear the part that “bad immigrants are the ones being deported”; now that is a concern among many immigrants and left leaning people too! And they agree with those specific deportations. The problem is when a good number of good conservatives continue to support what is happening, a good idea (that Obama employed too BTW) such as deporting “bad hombres” is being used in a twisted way nowadays: to also deport many good immigrants… and even their innocent American family members. And to kill the ones protesting the lack of due process and rendering of immigrants to countries with even less human rights.
So yeah, I can agree with you that a good number of conservatives are not inherently evil, but the support that continues for malevolent acts done by the current conservatives in power (this includes a demonstrated lack of properly investigating the abuses and corruption made by the current administration) does leave a humongous room that allows many liberals, moderates and smart people to criticize most of the right.
Can you provide an example or two to show that (1) this actually occurs, and (2) it is not justified.
I’d also encourage you to spend some time watching right wing prime time shows (Fox, etc.). The contempt for the left is their brand, nothing obscure about it.
Yes. They actually say (and perhaps believe) that the members of the Democratic Party desire to destroy America.
And fuelled by Rush Limbaugh before. Hate is the correct term. Ask the White House dog.
I’m sincerely curious as to what these concerns are.
Could you elaborate? Do you believe they’re related to your being a White male?
I’m a White male, raised in a lower middle-class family in West Virginia. I worked my way through college and into the comfortable middle class.
My concerns are mainly: I’m aging, I have health problems, and I’m probably going to die alone.
But none of these have anything to do with my status as a White male. And I’m perfectly OK with my place in society.
And over the course of my life, I honestly can’t think of anything that being a White male has cost me.