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.Yeah, that's probably the only way to view it from the Ivory Tower. But it's still a false and actively harmful notion. Donald Trump/Brexit voters aren't acting this way because some demagogic leaders magicked them and made them forget why lies are bad; they simply see an opportunity to get what they actually want. Again the insistence on seeing elections as a personality contest.
Literally anything said to argue against immigration can be viewed as having a racist undertone.
If I made a comparable statement about progressivism, I'd be a neo-Nazi.
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.While it's fair to say that strategic incompetence has been the Democrat's worst enemy in the US, I think you underestimate just how well the Republicans are also doing based on what they have been campaigning on. Racism, religious extremism, imperialism, and crony capitalism have been major good sellers in the political marketplace here.
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.Trifles. I've met many incredibly smart conservative people in my life, and I think most of those are closeted (at least, they don't seem to advertise as much). It's progressivism which dominates any discourse today. Everything is judged by how well it conforms to things like 'gay rights' or 'helping the poor' as if conservatives don't believe in things like rights or helping, and so naturally will make concessions. The extremists on the right get labeled as nutters; the extremists on the left are simply radicals, with whom one might disagree but respectfully.
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.I don't think conservatism can be anything else, really. It is, by definition, a preservation of things as they are (in contrast to progression). But if you're for progression, you must have something you want to progress, which lends itself naturally to argument. It's built in to the viewpoints, I'd say.
Are you contending that consevatives are not capable of holding their own in an intellectual setting?People who can hold their own in an intellectual setting, than.
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.So it's simply the incompetence of all the progressive parties in the English-speaking world for half a century running which explains why people vote for the right. You cracked it, buddy.
Speaking of false and actively harmful notions: Literally everything these right-wing populists believe is also in that category.
You would also be either deliberately lying, or delusional.
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
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.
People ignore the far left because the far left are harmless paper-selling nerds
Mouthwash said: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.
Maybe get back to me when you've decided which battle you're fighting?Well, since you apparently don't consider people who haven't written a master's thesis as worthy to hold opinions...
[...]
ordinary people are not capable of holding their own in an intellectual setting
Nerds love molotovs.Speak for yourself
Traitorfish said:Maybe get back to me when you've decided which battle you're fighting?
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.
Maybe get back to me when you've decided which battle you're fighting?
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.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?
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.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.
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.
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.
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.
Relevance to what?I'm questioning the relevance of the argument. Doesn't that have something to do with it?
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.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.
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.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 don't understand what this has to do with the sentence you quoted.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.
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.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.
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.
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.