rolling explaining conservatism

DO SOMETHING!

The real collusion scandal, as we've said several times before, has EVERYTHING to do with the CLINTON CAMPAIGN, Fusion GPS, and Russia. There's CLEAR EVIDENCE of the CLINTON CAMPAIGN colluding with Russian intelligence, to spread disinformation, and smear the President.

I believe that individuals are happiest and most fulfilled when they form their own opinions, assume responsibility for their own actions, and spend the fruits of their own labor as they see fit. I believe that a collection of individuals making their own decisions within the confines of a clear and concise set of laws that they have determined for themselves will advance society much more effectively than will a collection of experts who are confident in their knowledge of what is best for everyone else. This is why I support conservatives, who favor a smaller, less powerful government.

that's from the Mercer memo after he bravely sold his shares in Breitbart to his daughters.

you can quibble with his assumptions, and the hypocrisy of his own actions with respect to his stated beliefs, but to me this seems to get to the core of what conservatives think that they believe, the story they tell themselves. their story always seem to leave out the absolutism that drives these goals. e.g. they want people to assume total financial responsibility for their own actions and the consequences of "bad luck" like cancer or getting laid off after your employer is bought out, so fuck any safety net

They also want people to take full financial responsibility for whether that they are trust fund babies rolling dough or the children of poverty and broke as a joke on the day they turn 18.

that they

hillary would have been worse

I have read the US Constitution and it makes me sooooo mad I want to spit.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/11/why_conservatives_are_more_susceptible_to_believing_in_lies.html

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/11/13/reps-jordan-and-gaetz-special-counsel-needed-as-questions-mount-on-clinton-comey-russian-dossier-and-more.html

They should be looking at the Democrats. They should be looking at Podesta and all of that dishonesty. They should be looking at a lot of things. And a lot of people are disappointed in the Justice Department, including me.

we should tax student loans as income, so we can cut rates on the *job creators* even more. after all, if your parents can't afford to pay for college, then you don't really deserve to go

Basically, it exists to allow viewers to start their days confident that someone in the world is dumber than they are.

For three hours they sort of present an endless parade of liberal hypocrisy and celebrity stupidity, pitted against very ostentatious displays of patriotism and country music singers.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/trumpcast/2017/11/justin_peters_on_fox_news_hosts_and_why_the_network_won_t_change_on_trumpcast.html

man you'd have to be a total loser to be spending several hours every day collecting examples so you can obsess about the hypocrisy and cultural/moral faults of the other side

Is that your attempt at a sick burn on qualmsley

it doesn't take that long, adam

roll over for the trump / koch / mercer / mcconnell / ryan tax cuts. prosperity trickles down

For Republicans, cutting taxes is not the means to a policy end. It is the policy. That's it. Cut taxes because cutting taxes is inherently good and right. It's not "Cut taxes to stimulate economic growth." The second half of that sentence gets tacked on to appeal to the Beltway media and certain mushy centrist intellectual types. The goal is not economic growth. The start and the end of the process for the right is cutting taxes.

http://www.ginandtacos.com/2017/11/28/postmodern-policymaking/

The threat of authoritarian socialism collapsed with the Soviet Union thirty years ago. The end of the Cold War led to a period of rapid democratization and increased respect for liberal rights around the world. Meanwhile, the soft-socialist liberal democracies undertook “neo-liberal” reforms, which have left strongly egalitarian countries, such as Denmark and Sweden, no less committed than the United States to open, lightly regulated markets.

Libertarian thought was thus released by History from its defensive anti-socialist mandate. But libertarianism just is classical liberalism ideologically fortified against socialism with a theory of rights that morally criminalizes redistribution. Giving up on it would have meant reverting to an updated version of classical liberalism that accepts the legitimacy of taxes and government transfers. That wasn’t in the cards because fortified libertarian rights theory had already taken on a life of its own as a positive ideal. People had built their identities around it, and they weren’t about to declare total victory in 1991, decamp from the bunker of neo-Lockean property rights theory, and stop bitching about the violence and theft embodied in city streets and Medicare.

Fervent advocates of “small government” never saw themselves as vessels for a counter-ideology engineered to hold the line against the socialist onslaught in defense of actually existing, liberal-democratic capitalism. That’s why the end of the Cold War seemed more like a victorious battle than the end of hostilities. The forces of liberal capitalist freedom had held their ground, but there was still a great deal of ground left to take. Libertopia was still a long way off. The welfare state remained ubiquitous, picking our pockets, too socialist to bear.

https://niskanencenter.org/blog/libertarian-democracy-skepticism-infected-american-right/

Okay, please excuse my ignorance but why is this so bad? Yes it gets rid of the individual mandate, but they are increasing the subsidies which should help prevent soaring costs. People who make more than 200k, have a tax increase, people who make 45-199 get a tax cut. Tax loop holes are decreased. Corporate taxes are cut. Corporations don't pay taxes anyway so who cares if they're cut? If we close the loop holes that allow them to get out of paying taxes maybe we might get some revenue ... Everyone complained about how expensive Obamacare was and how it would end everything. We are still here.

“I think that estimate makes a lot of sense. [. . .] I do believe the Treasury when they say that this is going to unleash a lot of economic growth, which will accrue more revenues,” Ryan told reporters.

1, Feed your ego, no matter what it costs
2, Republican good, Democrats bad
3, Do the polar opposite of Barack Obama

really the only conservative principle is 'i don't have to give a shit about you and you can't force me'... which is otm

That’s completely untrue. Conservatives want to preserve old heirarchies and traditions and are afraid of the instability that comes from social change. The Republican Party is something distinct from conservatism as an ideological tendency.

afraid of the instability that comes from social change

ok.. so then what is the argument for getting rid of traditions, if you're a part of a community who is well served by them? who's to say that hierarchies are unnatural or wrong if they keep occurring and people keep acquiescing to them? & overall, why change society? why not just worry about one's self? say i personally see no benefit (and in fact many potential losses) from changing society... therefore i won't, unless someone else attempts to force me to.

Why does ilx have a thread pretending to think it can explain conservatism

xp yeah. there is a long history of conservative charity, communitarianism, and even anticapitalism (see Strasser for an extreme example). not to mention ecology, which has paleoconservative roots too. even some paleos today contend that a social-democratic safety net was necessary to keep the patriarchal nuclear family together, and deregulation/privatization caused the "crisis of single mothers" we see today.

conservatives had a deep belief in collective structures like the church, historically speaking, and the individualist, right-libertarian splinter was an unusual development, though it is very influential by now obviously.

The Republican Party is something distinct from conservatism as an ideological tendency.

Yeah and the contemporary Democratic Party is distinct both from historical liberalism, and from its own past iterations.

But most people are not thinking about Edmund Burke (or whatever) or Andrew Jackson when we use these terms.

Right now there's a bunch of people whose politics are reflexively anti-tax and anti-government. Overwhelmingly, these people are reluctant (at best) to agree that society needs to change its treatment of people of color, women, and those of other sexual orientations.

They are also generally resistant to seeing a role for government in healing the sick, feeding the hungry, uplifting the downtrodden, or protecting the environment. Also they seem to like guns a lot. Plus flags and troops and cops.

That group of views is not necessarily logically bound together, but we keep seeing that people with a few of these views often seem to have them all.

If "conservative" is the wrong word for those people, I am eager to hear another term proposed. How about "heartless mousefuckerz?"

Why does ilx have a thread pretending to think it can explain conservatism

why do you have to bring animal collective into this

A peace bone got found in the GOP wing

I appreciate the explanation tb

But that's an explanation of why this chatter was removed from other threads

I'm kinda asking why ilx is pretending- pantomime, showtrial or whatever you call the performative aspect at play here- to either be able or to even want to describe anything other than strawman oppositional stances itt

This thread got me to read Ronald Dworkin!

who's pretending? tax cuts will save us all

A lot of this thread might be performative, strawmanning, or sarcastic, but some of us have a reasonable degree of experience with real conservatism and can use this as a repository of our collective knowledge. I used to argue for the war in Iraq FFS.

i live in texas, i grew up around whites, family reunions on my dad's side were with ranch-owning aggies. i know about conservatives.

Xp

So did hillary clinton

She’s won more elections than I have

Ye mad puffin otm. There is a principled conservatism that can be explained and even engaged/reasoned with; unfortunately unprincipled (selfish/heartless/amoral & immoral) conservatism, once a mere parasite, has outgrown and consumed its host, in the political class and the media, on both sides of the Atlantlic, and though it can be explained there is no reasoning with it.

I'm kinda asking why ilx is pretending- pantomime, showtrial or whatever you call the performative aspect at play here- to either be able or to even want to describe anything other than strawman oppositional stances itt

partly because the history of politics as a separate practice in Enlightenment polities and there offspring is precisely that - the functions of democratic governments have always been largely performative, the idea of free debate between inquiring rational minds who influence one another with the force of their oratory and reason has always been a flaky veneer over the mechanics of where and how political power operates.

so that

There is a principled conservatism that can be explained and even engaged/reasoned with

is only true to the extent that it is true of "principled liberalism" or whatever other flavour of ideology you want to apply it to, i.e. not much. the left and the right have got no monopoly on the absence of reason in the sphere of the clash of ideas.

really the only conservative principle is 'i don't have to give a shit about you and you can't force me'... which is otm

otm and maybe a bit showboaty but true in very broad strokes. there is no rational disproof of this belief, any more than you can rationally disprove any belief contrary to it. in the end, there's just some version of struggle between the belief systems.

with the opposite poles of the struggle being something like armed conflict vs blathering in circles on the internet/talk radio/in the pub/in yr head

i do, unfortunately, broadly agree with that; i still think I'd rather struggle with principled conservatism than with flat out psychopathic self interest.

 the left and the right have got no monopoly on the absence of reason in the sphere of the clash of ideas.

i think the failure of political debate is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the limits of reason. "Reason is the slave of the passions" and yes, largely speaking you cannot reason someone out of their cherished core beliefs. But this is never explicitly acknowledged and the failure of the other person (on either side) to change their mind in the face of apparently faultless logic and evidence leads to accusations of stupidity, the idea that the other side is beyond reason and beyond help. Once you've reached that conclusion, any further progress is impossible.

However this is still a counsel of at worst, despair, at best, centrism. Progress is only possible if there are shared values. Otherwise, *shrugs* revolution.

it's just Socrates vs. Callicles all the way down, only everyone thinks they're Socrates rather than Callicles

conservatism isn't the absence of caring - it's the presence of other virtues in addition to caring which, when looked at by someone who only takes caring as a virtue, appears to be anti-caring.

i think it's maybe more socrates v. euthyphro, and euthyphro would rather turn his father in for impiety than raise taxes

lol mordy defining by fiat all conservative values as 'virtues'.

+ the one person who said that conservatism is the absence of caring is a conservative who was celebrating that position.

xp mordy: i think jonathan haidt's moral foundations idea is misleading bc it suggests both that the values are the same regardless of which other values they exist alongside and in relation to (when the way values interact is crucial and defines them) and it also sounds like conservatives have other virtues and a greater, more refined sense of morality, when in practice those virtues often (primarily?) have a negative effect restricting other virtues. I think trying to quantify/establish morality like this is folly but w/e

virtue is in the eye of the beholder dumbnuts xxp