I don’t know if this is conservatism anymore. My Grandfather was conservative, and he was an engineer. He would have loathed the amount of misinformation and straight up lies being flung around these days. As much as his views were disagreeable, he never tried to manipulate or lie to anybody and always wanted to get to the truth of things. This is something else.
It’s still the end result, and while your grandfather might’ve been an engineer and accepted some science as an individual, his political ideology is what has contributed to the slow creep of increasing ignorance because his conservative views are what prompt him to vote for conservative politicians who obstruct attempts to improve society for all of us. Conservativism degrades a society’s ability to access the truth.
There actually is no reasonable form of conservativism. You’re either looking for ways to improve and integrate new understanding about the world based on the best information available to you at the time, or you’re trying to preserve ideas simply because they existed beforehand.
It would be like if someone brought a newer, safer design to your grandfather and he rejected it simply in the interest of preserving the old design because its old. He couldn’t function as an engineer if he applied his conservative thinking to his work, so I don’t see how people expect that philosophy to work in politics either. There is no effective scientist who, upon recieving new information, rejects it because it doesn’t fit with what they already believe, they try to adapt their model to fit the new facts.
We accept conservativism as some kind of immutable facet of politics, but we don’t actually need to. Making itself seem intrinsic is how the ideology survives, but really all it is is the remnant ideology leftover ftom the death of monarchy, it was injected into our politics early on in order to protect an aristocratic class, allowing it to continue on in a new form (corporate oligarchy).
Very well said.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that conservatism is an inherently reactionary and counter-revolutionary ideology: it is primarily concerned with protecting the powerful by entrenching privilege and maintaining the structural oppression of the underclasses.
Sounds like your grandpa might have been conservative as in slow to change.
Nowadays, conservative in politics means deepthroating fascism.
Conservatism has always been authoritarian. The notion of “slow to change” has only ever been a fig leaf to obfuscate that fact.
I don’t know if this is conservatism anymore.
It’s a return to what conservatism always was.
