Conservative politics and assumption
- Thread starter Askthepizzaguy
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I get that. What they actually want, to a great extent, is to get rid of the globalist elites who have pursued a campaign of deindustrialization and the stagnation or decline of the former industrial heartlands and rural areas of the US and UK, while roundly dismissing them as ignorant, bigoted, and generally not worth being listened to. Trump and Brexit are ways to actually change the way things are going by taking a big leap in the dark instead, and a lot of people are now willing to do that.
Many Trump supporters actually don't believe much of what he says, but they love the way he makes fools of the entire globalist establishment and they like the pivot to nationalism he represents. I think a lot would gladly have an incompetent president who isn't a product of the current political system, even if he makes things objectively worse, rather than a competent one who does a good job of continuing a profoundly unsatisfying status quo.
Old Hippy
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No, immigration can be argued for or against quite easily, its the fact that racist overtones are used that is the problem, not wether to have more, less or no immigration
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
None of that is conservativism, though, as traditionally understood. It's a mismatched bundle. What you're telling me, here, is that the Republicans are ideological mercenaries, and that the mercenary trade is a good one, and I would agree, but anyone who takes conservatives politics should not have a lot of faith in the ability of mercenaries to represent them.
I don't claim that conservatives are necessarily stupid, and I wouldn't even agree with Mill that stupid people are generally conservative. What I claim is that organised political conservativism is stupid. If progressivism manages to dominate public discourse as thoroughly as you say, that only seems to lend weight to my claim.
Also, I'd struggle to swallow the claim that the left are given an easy ride, given the mauling Corbyn got, and from within his own party, for suggesting that a social democratic party offer social democratic parties. People ignore the far left because the far left are harmless paper-selling nerds; they worry about the far-right because the far-right go around murdering people.
If that's so, why did it take until the 1970s to realise itself? Conservatives used to have lots of perfectly intelligent things to say, to each other and the world at large. Very generally mistaken and quite often absurd when removed from a very particular set of assumptions, but, well, that's politics for you. It's only quite recently that conservatives abandoned reflective thought as a menace to common sense.
Are you contending that consevatives are not capable of holding their own in an intellectual setting?
And yet, through all this, I am the liberal snob.
I think so, yes. The major conservative political parties, the kinds that win elections, are terrible at being conservative parties. They're pro-business parties who occasionally indulge the bigotries of their uglier supporters. The left has had a world to lose, and seems to have been dead set on losing it.
Why exactly were these posts made? You both clearly aren't arguing about anything anymore. Is it just an inability to make any concession whatsoever to the other side without showing as much contempt as possible? I do think that meets several definitions of fanaticism.
The thing about sweeping assertions like mine is that they can be refuted with a single counterexample. Is there any particular criticism of immigration, which was actually made at some point in history, that couldn't be seen to have racist undertones?
I'm only saying that your claim, however true, isn't as relevant as you think.
I'm not talking about political parties; after all, it's clearly possible for populist and anti-intellectual politicians to win elections. In the intellectual/social sphere, progressivism dominates completely, and this will slowly but surely shift political discourse in their direction. Until the bubble bursts, as it is doing now.
Could the definition of conservatism have shifted during that time? What's your definition of it, and can you give examples of the "perfectly intelligent things" that conservatives used to say?
No, I'm saying that ordinary people are not capable of holding their own in an intellectual setting, that grassroots movements tend to consist of ordinary people, and that modern-day conservatism is grassroots and far removed from the world that intellectuals inhabit these days.
Well, since you apparently don't consider people who haven't written a master's thesis as worthy to hold opinions...
I assume that political parties want to win, so why are lefties so consistently bad at it? A couple lost elections could be chalked up to incompetence, but dozens seem more like a trend. One that is perhaps evidence that leftist politics aren't so self-evidently appealing as you seem to think.
Speak for yourself
Mouthwash said:
Or perhaps bourgeoisie elections are pointless to follow, ''leftist'' parties constantly attack the left as soon as they sniff even a whiff of power, and the bourgeoisie tends to immediately attack anything that's red out of instinct.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Maybe get back to me when you've decided which battle you're fighting?
Nerds love molotovs.Speak for yourself
Lexicus
Deity
Traitorfish said:
Schroedinger's Intellectual?
The problem here being that self-identification doesn't match up well with an 'objective' definition. But that's not really a solvable problem, I don't think. Because words and meanings do in fact evolve over time. So you've got a million different groups all saying that they are the true conservatives, and the others aren't. And at that point the word essentially ceases to have any useful meaning at all. So once we walk away from what we see people self identify as, there's not a lot of use it discussing it at all.
Intellectuals would win any argument, but the ordinary people are more likely to be right, at least about their own local situation. That clear it up?
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Well, that has nothing to do with my claim that twenty-first century conservativism is an intellectual vacuum, unless you're claiming that conservativism has always been intellectually vacuous, and they just used to be better at disguising it.
I suppose Cutlas might agree with you on that, but me, I'm a generous soul.
It's possible for people to be mistaken, though. Conservatives, in particular, are very good at that. And a lot of what is now propounded is "conservativism" is not conservative in any sense except being anti-liberal, which isn't what "conservative" means and, anyway, doesn't always turn out to be true. After all, if there's any one group in society who should defer to their predecessors on the proper definition of a word, it's conservatives.
It sounds odd, now, but conservativism used to represent that part of public life that took things like faith and beauty and morality most seriously. Their perceptions were often skewed and they didn't always seem terribly concerned about making these things accessible to those outside of the ruling class, but they at least took them seriously. Modern "conservatives", in contrast, seem to worship the vulgar and the profane: money, property, violence. They talk about society in terms of competition and profit and mindless acquisitiveness, the sort of thing that made nineteenth century conservatives ill, and think that a light dusting of racism and homophobia places them in the tradition of the ancients. They're not even a parody of themselves, because parodies are supposed to be recognisable.
I'm questioning the relevance of the argument. Doesn't that have something to do with it?
The conservatism I'm thinking of probably was, but again, I don't know if we're talking about the same one. I've asked you to provide examples of these intellectual conservatives from ages past.
It was still acceptable for leftists to make gay jokes in the 90's. Conservatives have seen one of the fastest ethical transformations in human history take place before their eyes. I don't blame them for being contrarian.
I'd say it still is. You can't be a progressive today and not believe, as John Cheese said, that "we're perpetually working ourselves into a sort of social neutrality, in which it will one day be considered insane to judge or make fun of any person for any reason." This goal is simply nihilism, where nothing can be defined as better than anything else. That's what conservatives perceive to be happening.
So has it occurred to you that you're selectively reading the ideas of elites, and these days commoners tend to express their opinions more often? You are a philosopher, you know.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Relevance to what?
Bolingbroke, Burke, Disraeli. Half the academia of the English-speaking world until 1950, and most of the brighter clergy. This stuff doesn't really need citing because it shouldn't be obscure. That it is, that conservatives have no comprehension of their intellectual heritage, that they're more likely to have read Rand than Burke, really does show how absurd their claims to be "conservative" have become.
To put it in crudely Marxist terms, conservativism used to be aristocratic, and when it encompassed a broad sweep of society, it was a traditional society of hierarchy and deference that was able to imagine itself a coherent social organism, buttressed by traditions and institutions passed down from their ancestors. Contemporary conservativism, in contrast, is thoroughly bourgeois, and now takes for granted that society is a great cannibalistic heap of acquisitive individuals, the only form of hierarchy that emanating from the state, and the only bonds people have in common a shared hostility those who look or act or think differently than they do.
To some extent, this is to be expected, because the world of the aristocracy is long gone. But conservativism, rather than trying to preserve what little of the old traditions they can seems to have embraced the ugliest and most vulgar aspects of capitalism, and imagine that because they do so draped in the flag, their ancestors would approve.
Maybe not. But you'd hope there'd be something underneath the contrariness. Very often, there is not. It's a politics of reaction, not principle.
I don't understand what this has to do with the sentence you quoted.
In the sense that only elites spent great volumes agonising about God and beauty and the tradition, perhaps, but these are things which still concerned the "commoners", even if they tended to express them in less ornate terms and were quicker to grasp familiar certainties, but they still took these things seriously. They still believe in the idea of a traditional, ordered society directed to something more than the accumulation of money. That's something that modern conservatives, or at least their elected representatives, now seem to regard as a quaint joke.
To anything, really. Why should I care that conservatism isn't intellectual if it is already defined as not being rooted in intellectual concerns, and that intellectuals aren't qualified to talk about things that aren't?
I think that might have do with the how the battle lines were drawn: rural, religious farmers or businessmen, already inclined to be libertarian, have been left completely behind by the shift of values of the media and upper classes. Their opposition to homosexuality and abortion, and their fetishization of work ethic (which was the social norm a generation ago) is now treated as a problem that needs to be overcome, rather than the core of a decent society. The values taught at home and church are now regarded by higher society as despicable.
You're still trying to interpret it intellectually.
I don't think modern American conservatism is a real movement (really, how can people still be confused about this during the candidacy of Donald Trump?). They're more like a large, incohesive alliance of voters that would despise each other if they didn't have Obama to focus on.
If someone says that homosexuality is an abomination and that it is human nature to earn mediums of exchange through sweat and toil, they are stating an objective moral standard by which people ought to live. You may not agree with what they view as good (or even find it contemptible) but saying that nobody should ever be judged, that there should be no such thing as a public value, is simply a rejection of morality entirely. Or at the very least, it is a valuing of the human ego over everything else.
Modernity has overturned many values, but that doesn't mean they won't be replaced.
Shouldn't the definition of conservatism shift, though? Not all societies are the same. From what I know Russia's communists are their equivalent of conservatives, which makes a great deal of sense for people whose main experience outside of absolute monarchy was communism.
