rolling explaining conservatism

i just don't think you would be able to find a conservative who says "i want to rationalize and perserve privilge"

Any kind of conservatism is rooted in the idea that traditional hierarchies, structures, and values (what liberals would call "privilege") are worth preserving, surely, though?

And, for that reason, I'm not sure that this could be conceived:

we could conceive a conservatism that might assert that everybody should start from birth without the benefit of inherited wealth, I think

I would probably be on board with that but it is socialism, more or less.

more on the liberty/equality thing...

I think for the most part they differ in degree because both liberals (#teamequality, for the purpose of the caricature) and conservatives (#teamliberty) are willing to accept trade-offs between the two: liberals are not up in arms that doctors are paid more than cashiers (and don't demand redistributive taxation to set that right); conservatives accept that they will be taxed to build roads, etc.

obviously the caricature only works to a point because liberals actually care about uh, liberty, some even care about equality to the extent that it furthers liberty. and i think conservatives care quite a bit about things like 'equality of opportunity' and 'a level playing field'. but i think there is a consistent ideology that we all inhabit that takes all of these things into account to varying degrees, rather than some insurmountable cleavage

Perlstein's book on Barry Goldwater is next on my reading list. I'll come back to this thread with any insights I glean.

― (Got A) Key In My Peehole (From Peeing Through a Keyhole) (Old Lunch), Tuesday, March 7, 2017 9:42 AM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i read this in January and i'm basically regurgitating Perlstein itt lol

Abortion is killing babies and it's horrible! But there's no deeper long-term ideology underlying that. Because if you've successfully railed against an unwanted baby being born, you now have to deal with that unwanted baby and the parent(s) who may not be able to care for that baby. When the next step after the successful reification of your platform is 'welp, sucks to be you', I'd argue that your ideology isn't exactly watertight.

This seems reasonably consistent to me: individuals and families need to be responsible for the consequences of their own choices.

insurmountable cleavage

I grew up around conservatism and still get doses of it when I visit my parents, with whom I share city space. A few months ago I wrote about Cubans and the GOP and why they're proud conservatives.

Thanks to an addiction to leaden polysyllabic words, William F. Buckley, Jr. normalized the detestation of the poor and disregard for complaints from minorities. As the sun set on Richard Nixon's felonocracy, George Will cracked the code for inserting Edmund Burke, Disraeli, Russell Kirk, Churchill, Hayek, and Oakesshott into columns that supported a contempt for busing, public schools, and healthy diets, and endorsements of abattoirs in Central America (later subjects include Allen Ginsburg, blue jeans, and the coarsening effect of Bill Clinton on civic life). In their children they inculcate their children in the conviction that federal laws against discrimination are the government's means of destroying the aspirations of straight white men.

In other posts I've confessed to never recognizing conservatism as a positive force; it can't be. By nature it must oppose. Since at least January 1981 and probably January 1968, what it opposes it must vaporize. The opposition is illegitimate. Busing doesn't work? Fine. Then leave Jim Crow in public schools intact. Oppose welfare? Good. How do we put these young mothers to work? Gays want to get married? Tough luck – lie about pursuing this lifestyle choice. Repeatedly the last forty years of political life have seen conservatives back away from the complexities of modern life mumbling the mantra What's mine is mine. Your bad luck is your business – and your fault, for obviously you deserved it.

"stand athwart history, yelling STOP"?

standing athwart history yelling "GO FUCK YOURSELVES"

i just don't think you would be able to find a conservative who says "i want to rationalize and perserve privilge"

As noted by Tombot towards the beginning of the thread, the acceptability of speaking aloud the tenets of conservative ideology has varied over time. The longer Trumpism continues, the more you're likely to encounter conservatives who are willing to cut through a couched and coded PC word fog and just speak their mind.

oh come on. can't think of a more perfect abdication of politics to say, 'it's not our fault the other side is just too stupid!' there's no value in being right and losing in politics

50% of the country is of below-average intelligence. fact! i'm not a politician. fact! i think the democrats have grown too stuck up to associate with people whose presence doesn't flatter them, and that Koch/ALEC nation has cultivated a network manipulating the less bright among us in order to keep their own tax rates low. how do you reach the less cognitively sharp, pry them out of the grip of Koch/ALEC nation? who knows?

do you reach the less cognitively sharp, pry them out of the grip of Koch/ALEC nation?

You could force them to appear in long-running sitcoms where they were forced by circumstances to get along with those of other backgrounds. There would be hugging and learning. Maybe bring them to gay dance clubs. Eventually their feet would start to move as the rhythm takes control.

OK flopson I was clearly thinking of a different angle on the degree vs kind question. I'll try to explain with other people's words

YMP: The argument goes: if you redistributed all the wealth in the world equally tomorrow, not only would you have millionaires and billionaires again within a year or so, it would probably be the _same_ millionaires and billionaires.
Alfred: Your bad luck is your business – and your fault, for obviously you deserved it.

These arguments, to me, represent a fundamental break from the underpinnings of a liberal political thought. A lot of conservatism relies on fortune favoring the righteous, and thus "prosperity theology" which btw is completely insane just saying; liberalism is based on an understanding that the world is a cruel joke played on the unsuspecting and the gullible. That's not a difference of degree, to me.

Obviously all this is my opiniong and does not represent the position of my stated affiliation and yes there's a g on opinion that I left there on purpose

I agree with YMP, La Cage aux Folles solves everything

Conservatism is a shuck. I used to be like flopson, reluctant to dismiss a so-called system of belief. But it's my life as a gay man working for a public institution that's at stake.

A lot of conservatism relies on fortune favoring the righteous, and thus "prosperity theology" which btw is completely insane just saying; liberalism is based on an understanding that the world is a cruel joke played on the unsuspecting and the gullible.

I'm not as well read on all this as some of you, but as well as fortune-favors-the-righteous conservativism isn't there also a cautious, pessimistic type of conservatism that emphasises how human knowledge is always imperfect and incomplete, that we are fallible therefore we should be wary of grand schemes to reshape society etc (still the same result of leaving existing hierarchies/privileges in place though?).

but this cautious version of conservatism is one whose appeal I feel I understand a little better (and understand why it would appeal to people who aren't all that privileged in the grand scheme of things, i.e. they are the ones who will likely be at the sharp end if the ambitious plans to reshape society end in failure, so better to preserve what little you already have?)

human knowledge is always imperfect and incomplete, that we are fallible therefore we should be wary of grand schemes to reshape society etc

the irony of this is that modern liberalism fits this bill far more than conservatism.

when used to explain away any suspiscion of the status quo it is reminiscent of bernard ingham's memorable version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor, no conspiracies just cock ups, the boris johnson face of conservatism

there is always more to lose than just your chains, this is truer now than ever imo

soref, yes - there will be some poverty inevitably, due to the problem of scarcity. This may be unfortunate, but government is the wrong instrument to redress it. First, that's not the government's job. (Voluntary private charity is preferable.) Second, government is made up of fallible people, who cannot be trusted not to turn even the most well-intentioned program into a sinecure for their neer-do-well cronies, etc. Using things like public schools, the military, federal highway funds, etc. for social engineering almost always backfires and ends up being neither good for the downtrodden or for the entity's original purpose. For example, all those people saying that the military's job is to kill people and break things, not hasten racial integration or trans acceptance.

The Constitution speaks of general welfare - not of making sure each individual is taken care of as well as they might like.

tempted to argue that modern conservatism is in fact radically anti-political in a sense derived from the tradition of absolute morality (cf. Kosselleck's "Critique and Crisis" which I never shut up about).

from what i can tell this is the core of the conservative worldview:

we live in a nasty, brutish and short world. civilization is tenuous and the walls are keeping the barbarians out. it would be lovely to take care of everyone but resources are tight and any misstep will plunge us into the abyss. we must look after ourselves and our families first and foremost because no one else give a fuck about them and we are the only guarantor of our own survivals. the government can sometimes be useful but much more often becomes a conduit for the wishes and needs of its lifetime employees and its dependents who would suck out all of our resources to fund their own survivals while returning nothing of value to our society - something we cannot afford. we are engaged in a fight to the death with those who ascribe to different gods and different ideologies who would surely destroy us if they had the chance and we must defend ourselves. the government's most paramount responsibility is to engage with war against these other civilizational threats. we must enforce the law when it comes to religious faith in order to maintain the rigid hierarchies that have kept us above water until this point - the father as head of the family, the church as head of civilization. we must ban abortion because killing fetuses is murder/leads to sexual decadence/decreases our population rates which undermine the foundations and safety of society. defend the gates, kill the libtards backstabbers waiting to throw them open to the enemy.

regardless of his intent or even level of cognizance, Trump DID manage to convince a lot of working class, Rust Belt Republicans on the issue of trade to stop voting directly against their own interests. certainly you could argue that was a coincidental byproduct of a larger message of isolationism/protectionism, but at least it suggests that not all conservatives are rigidly unshakable in their beliefs (insert "Bernie Would've Won!" memes here).

xp the ingham line is imo it is another iteration of conservatism as managerialist anti-politics: major reform is an essentially naive and dangerous notion, we're all fallible so let's not be too ambitious, the best bet is to just try not to make too much of a pigs ear of things, have a pat on the head, back to work

a conservative assured me more than once a few weeks ago that conservatives think liberals are dumb and liberals think conservatives are evil. bc liberals think they can help everyone and aren't bright enough to appreciate the threats bearing down on them, and liberals don't understand why dad won't let them spend their last dollar helping the poor. i reassured him that i don't think he's evil, just stupid and self-serving, and that i'm quite aware of the threats bearing down on us. just i'm aware of the real ones like cataclysmic climate change and not interested in the fake ones like the imminent sharia takeover of american society.

like it can be useful to understand conservatives how they understand themselves but ultimately there is an incompatible worldview going on. there's only so far you can agree. esp since a lot of conservative tenants of belief are not consistent. if life is so tenuous - something with which i agree - why the fuck should i let the market speculate with our commodity futures??

Shorter version:

https://rlv.zcache.com/god_guns_guts_pro_gun_troops_bumper_sticker-re1274e1dada344d7a1d7567dd38ff282_v9wht_8byvr_324.jpg

Mordy, I think that's pretty good, and can maybe be summed up in a kind of obsession with security (or "immunity," if you want to get fancy and include concomitant obsessions with purity, etc.) -- I've long thought attitudes toward risk define the modern political landscape (modern taken in the long view, not just right now) but I haven't read enough on that topic to flesh it out.

In the simplest terms, I've described conservativsm as occupying a 'control/selfishness' quadrant opposite a more liberal 'justice/selflessness' quadrant. I've also defined it as a resistance towards honestly acknowledging the injustice of one's own privilege, so I don't think it's even necessarily so much about consciously working to maintain privilege through injustice as it is about refusing to confront the cognitive dissonance that allows a person to be okay with perpetuating injustice.

iirc Galbraith was saying way back in the 1950s that there's an illogical tension between orthodox economics reliance on the notion of imminent scarcity and the real economic situation of western democracies?

the irony of this is that modern liberalism fits this bill far more than conservatism.

thinking about where all the endless leftist/social-justice person debates about who has the right to comment on certain issues etc fit with this - the idea that (for example) if you are white you will never really understand the lived experience of racism and therefore are not qualified to comment on it, it's not your place to disagree with someone who does have that lived experience, that overarching meta-narratives are problematic because they don't take difference into account- that seems to fit quite well with an anti-hubris, cautious conservatism? but then the flipside is that particular viewpoints are effectively infallible and beyond question if they are based on lived experience? which doesn't fit in with the "human knowledge is always incomplete" bit?

in a lot of these twitter arguments about lived experience and subjectivity etc the ppl on the non-social justice-y side are usually Dawkins-esque, "I can understand the entire universe with my infallible logic" types, which seems a very un-conservative worldview?

I'm trying to map the steps from this worldview that is

individualistic
liberty-centric

to racism and kneejerk anti-multicultural feeling. Other aspects of the worldview tend to be:

traditionalist
focused on dire threats

Partly, the mythology is of a melting pot in which previous generations of immigrants assimilated into a culture of common values. These prior waves did not expect America to conform to them, they conformed to it. More recent immigrants are the bad kind - they won't assimilate and they expect us to change to accommodate them. To a conservative this is not a strengthening kind of immigration, but a contributor to the sense of dire peril.

Some adherents round this out with takimag-style "race realism," which flatters tribal identification while conveniently excusing inequality. They'll turn to Bell Curve justifications for achievement disparities, and construct a fictional historical pastopia in which minorities "knew their place."

not interested in the fake ones like the imminent sharia takeover of american society.

traitor

If this were France I may feel differently.

A general needs to know where best to allocate his resources ya know

XP to soref - i think that refusing to consider new information / allow lived experience to adjust prior expectation is a conservative approach. favoring the status quo or being resistant to change seems to me to line up pretty consistently with the conservative mentality in practice at least if not in theory and the unviersial logic approach is just an attempt to rationalize the morality by making it seem empirical/objective

there's a lot of slippage and mutual causation between different explanatory frameworks here, perhaps including:

1) individual psychology (does it buttress a lifestyle/identity/ego)
2) intellectual coherence (does it tell a convincing story about the world, my life)
3) moral/ethical/religious convictions (is it "good," right, etc.)

I think one can be a conservative due to any of these individually, but obviously they all overlap and mutually reinforce. I'd hesitate to give one priority (and there are others I am missing, I'm sure)

thinking about where all the endless leftist/social-justice person debates about who has the right to comment on certain issues etc fit with this - the idea that (for example) if you are white you will never really understand the lived experience of racism and therefore are not qualified to comment on it, it's not your place to disagree with someone who does have that lived experience, that overarching meta-narratives are problematic because they don't take difference into account- that seems to fit quite well with an anti-hubris, cautious conservatism? but then the flipside is that particular viewpoints are effectively infallible and beyond question if they are based on lived experience? which doesn't fit in with the "human knowledge is always incomplete" bit?

Yeah, as I think art is noting, this sort of leftism is still based in wanting to remake society (adjusting curricula, asking for trigger warnings, modifying language, creating sexual harassment regulations, ...) based on human knowledge, the knowledge and testimony of oppressed peoples. A cautious conservative would be wary of making these kinds of newfangled changes and throwing out centuries of wisdom, etc.

Efficiency of production is of paramount importance, efficiency of accrual is out of investigative bounds, efficiency of public expenditure is of paramount importance, efficiency of private expenditure is none of anybody's business.

there is no universalism but the universalism of capital

the collective identity of a people cannot be established on the basis of "humanity" at large but only through a specific set of ethnic/religious/cultural symbols which integrate belonging and solidarity.

and to abandon that symbolism is to surrender your individual/collective identity to a vast administrative state

this sort of leftism is still based in wanting to remake society

Yeah this returns my mind to darraghmac's post: conservatives do believe that liberals want to reshape society. In this regard, they are pretty much right.

(I know I, personally, would like to remake society so that it could be kinder, fairer, more egalitarian, more inclusive, more compassionate. Government is not a perfect instrument for achieving that, but it is often the only entity that's even trying.)

A cautious conservative would be wary of making these kinds of newfangled changes and throwing out centuries of wisdom, etc.

Yeah, given that racism, sexism, and class inequality are baked into society, those whose preference is to "conserve" long-held societal structures will inevitably find themselves on the side of preserving the bad bits as well as the good ones. The cautiousness of the "cautious conservative" will always lead him to preserve oppression.

This may be because he likes the privilege he has, and doesn't want the new order to take any away. But he might also argue from skepticism: The cure may be worse than the disease (fallibility of human actors, unintended consequences).

Inaction also has unintended consequences.

there is no universalism but the universalism of capital

I think this is basically why I always have a hard time with the way right-wing economics gets framed as "economic liberty/freedom" (even by liberals, often). The idea that unrestricted capitalism provides freedom is only one, very specific conception of "liberty" (and seems to overlook that private ownership of property requires state recognition and enforcement).

aight serious-ish question. what's the benefit of understanding conservatives?

understanding is its own reward

to convert them or make them powerless

understanding is its own reward

― Mordy

well if you insist on believing that you'll never understand conservatism.